In Their Own Words -- Dr. Lee Meserve Part 3

Dr. Lee Meserve has just about seen it all. With 37 years at Bowling Green, he's seen more athletic events than almost anyone. As the Faculty Athletics Representative at BGSU, he represents the department in a variety of ways. This is his third blog post on his memories of BG athletics.

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To the Present Day

In the fall of 1994, Shelley Appelbaum returned to BGSU as Associate Athletics Director and Senior Woman Administrator. Shelley was a “townie” who had taken my anatomy and physiology course as part of her undergraduate degree program. During those years, she had also worked summers at Forrest Creason Golf Course on campus, where I saw her on a regular basis. We kept in touch through her careers as BG Junior High Girls Basketball Coach and on to Director of Student-Athlete Academics at the University of Toledo. She contacted me upon return to BGSU and asked “Have you ever thought of running for the Faculty Senate Intercollegiate Athletics Committee?” Long story short, I became a member, and then Chair of that committee, and then, when my predecessor Marv Kumler decided to retire, Dr. Sidney Ribeau appointed me Faculty Athletics Representative (FAR), beginning summer, 1997. Thus began what has turned into a 13-year quest to attend every home contest of every BGSU sport that is staged when we are in Bowling Green (usually accompanied by my wife Marge). We have missed a few because of overlapping contest schedules, but not many for other reasons, and we’ve traveled to a few away ones, as well. It has been my feeling that as FAR, if I expected the student-athletes to perform well in the classroom (and I did, and they do), it behooved me to come out and watch them perform in their sports venues.

An early new sport for us as spectators was soccer. When I was in graduate school at Rutgers University (before I was married, so that was a while ago) I was shanghaied by a group of the other students in the lab where I worked to attend a pro soccer match in Yankee Stadium (the old one). Knowing virtually nothing about the game, I thought that watching it, even in person, was a lot like watching paint dry, but less exciting! About the time I began the elevated level of interaction with BGSU athletics, women’s soccer was added to the roster of sports. A number of the members of the team were also students in my Anat and Phys course (are you detecting that connection?), so we were motivated to go watch them, as well as the men’s team, play this game. I still knew virtually nothing about the game, but that year my Christmas gifts from Marge included a book by Mia Hamm (always start with the best), and Soccer for Dummies. I finally got a grasp on off side (they still need a blue line on the pitch!), and defensive plays. We’ve had the excitement of seeing two of Andy Richards’ squads win MAC championships. Although men’s soccer has been through a bit of a rough patch, Eric Nichols has them going in the right direction. I can honestly say that we have set through a more diverse sets of meteorological conditions as soccer fans than for any other sport! Marge appreciates soccer because the clock starts at the beginning of the match, and when it runs out the match is over (usually). She likes a finite sport!

A second sport that we sort of adopted is softball. We broke our streak of making spring break trips about eight years in a row this past March because the team had no trip during the break itself. We made up for that toward the end of the season by traveling an away weekend with them to Ball State and Miami. Since it was not their most successful of away swings, they may not ask us to do that again! :-) There have been a number of softballers who have been my academic advisees. A couple who stand out are third baseman Lynsey Ebel (now Lynsey Ebel, D.O.) and current centerfielder Lindsay Arney, who will be attending pharmacy school after the coming academic year, her senior year. On behalf of the Department of Athletics, the softball program paid the ultimate complement to Marge and I at homecoming 2008 by naming their facility the Meserve Softball Field. The hair on my arms still stands up every time I think of that.

Running, jumping, throwing heavy things! Since my high school in southern Maine was a relatively small one, we didn’t have football, so our ‘big’ sport was track and field. We also had cross country. Since the body in which I find myself trapped has never done any running (!), I didn’t take part in either, but I always enjoyed watching members of those teams aspire “to boldly go (you’re splitting an infinitive, Captain Kirk!!) where no one has gone before.” It’s been my pleasure to see Stephanie Heldt set an indoor record for the high jump, and just this year see Sabrina Forstein set a new mark in the indoor pole vault. Being a spectator at cross country in Maine worked like this: You stood at the start line yelling and hollering until the gun was fired. The runners ran off into the woods for ten to fifteen minutes while you stood by the finish line. Then the runners came out of the woods to cross the finish line and throw up! It’s really a pleasure to watch cross country from the top of Mount Jerome where you can see nearly all of the entire race without moving. Additionally, the runners come close to you as they run over the Mount.

Not to slight the golf teams, tennis, and swimming. We love to watch them too and get out to their sites as often as possible. We even attend the swimming biathlon at the beginning of their season every year. I thought ‘biathlon’ consisted of cross country skiing and shooting, and wondered how that would be adapted for life in the pool. I learned that in the swimming lexicon it consists of swimming and running (the latter part of which might as well involve cross country skis, according to the swimmers!).

To wrap this up, I’ve been blessed to work with a great bunch of coaches over the past 13 years who really respect and support the ‘student’ portion of the student-athlete couplet. Without their concern for and attention to the academic sector of it all, our women’s sports would not have received the MAC Faculty Athletics Representatives Academic Award for Women this past year, and 420 student-athletes would not have completed spring semester 2010 with an overall accumulative grade point average of 3.07! Keep up the good work coaches, and I really would like to work with you another 13 years (more realistically, we’ll try for seven more to get to a total of 20).

My stock line is that Marge and I don’t have any kids of our own, so we borrow other people’s and then we give them back! Many of them have been BGSU graduate students, more have been BGSU undergraduates, and a goodly number have been student-athletes. And many of them retain a connection when we give them back. For example, we have attended many student-athlete weddings, last summer one between a gymnast and a football player. We had the pleasure of seeing Stephanie Swiger, volleyball, at the NCAA National Convention in Nashville when she was part of the National Student Athlete Advisory Committee (NAT SAAC), and then of writing a letter of reference for her successful application to law school. Of all the medical school aspirants I’ve advised, the only one to honor me by asking me to bestow the hood emblematic of the MD degree at graduation (from the MCO in Toledo) was another volleyballer, Marin (Ferlic) Wayner. If you’ve been following this entire string, you recall Ton Shehab (football). We hear annually (many years, several times) from Tom and Jos and their family. Thanks to you all. You have been and continue to ne, the greatest family in the world.

And finally a shout out to my dear friend Janna Blais. Janna and I spent over ten good yeas together before she moved on to bigger things. As long as there’s email, we’ll remain in contact as a mutual support team. And to my life partner of 42 years this fall, Marge, for accepting and participating in this life.

So that’s it up to now. There may be more blogs, but not soon. Hope that these three have not cured anyone’s insomnia! Keep rolling along!!

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P.S. So, you’re probably wondering how I could have been here for the past decade and omit basketball!!! Chalk it up to trying to get a research poster ready to go and getting ready to get on the big bird to San Diego for the Annual Endocrine Society meeting where the research was presented. Believe it or not, about an hour out of Detroit headed west, I sat bolt upright in my seat on the plane and said to myself “Oh crud, I didn’t include anything on basketball!” Of course I remember basketball. I chatted with Curt Miller when he came on his job interview and could sense the passion and the vision. And it took only a year for him and his staff to begin realizing that vision. Six-peating as MAC regular season champions and making it to the Sweet Sixteen are hichlights, and Marge and I were able to attend four of the NCAA ‘dance’ games. What a thrill. And it makes us all proud that Curt has maintained the staff that he began with, plus a couple of additions, for the entire sweet, sweet run. Keep it rolling women’s b-ballers! And the men’s team has made some steps in the right direction under Coach Orr (who I also chatted with at interview time), a trend that we expect to continue during the year to Close the Doors on the House that Roars and begin a new set of roaring traditions at the Stroh.

In Their Own Words -- Dr. Lee Meserve Part 2

Dr. Lee Meserve has just about seen it all. With 37 years at Bowling Green, he's seen more athletic events than almost anyone. As the Faculty Athletics Representative at BGSU, he represents the department in a variety of ways. This is his second blog post on his memories of BG athletics.

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Rolling Along

An additional athletics program that Marge and I began to support early on was women’s gymnastics. In the early years, Sue Simpson, wife of then gymnastics coach Dr. Charles Simpson, was a secretary in the Department of Biological Sciences, resulting in chats about the sport with which I had always been fascinated when the Olympics rolled around. Then, Cheryl Vasil (now Cheryl Christiansen, and a member of the BGSU Athletics Hall of Fame) appeared as a student in my anatomy and physiology course. She identified herself as a student-athlete, specifically a gymnast, and I mentioned that my wife and I were interested in the sport and might attend a meet. This all began in 1979. We have missed few home meets since then, and have attended every MAC Championship Meet since 1983. Additionally, when it became possible to designate a portion of the Falcon Club membership to a program, gymnastics got ours with the rationale that the higher profile sports would have many donors, but a “smaller” program could use all the support it could get. This support has morphed into Marge and I being donors to the program at the Champions Circle level. Over the years we have had the pleasure of watching many talented gymnasts including the additional two who are members of the BGSU Hall of Fame (Julie Bender-Cleary and Mary Beth (Friel) Bylsma) as well as Marny Oestrang, the only BGSU female student-athlete to win an NCAA National Championship, which she did in 1999 in floor exercise. We continue to enjoy following current and former gymnasts, having just attended a reception for Jessica Guyer (BGSU ‘06) to celebrate her graduation from Wright State Medical School and her acceptance into the residency program in anesthesiology at the University of North Carolina.


Another program that we began to support in the mid ‘80s was volleyball. This began nearly by accident one evening when I went home from work to find that Marge had had a really crummy day in her medical technology position. In an effort to take her mind off her less than satisfactory day, I mentioned that I had seen a volleyball match advertised that evening, and that we had never been to one of those, although Coach Van De Walle had brought recruits interested in the biological sciences by my office to chat about our major. As appears to be the trend with us, we went to that first match and have missed few home contests since. We started attending in the era of Linda (Popovich) Nicastro, another member of the BGSU Hall of Fame. She was the setter and spark plug for the volleyball team from 1986-90. Linda was also an excellent student, this combination being rewarded by her receipt of the NCAA’s most prestigious post-graduate scholarship, the Walter Byers Scholarship, proceeds of which Linda used to attend law school. The award was made to Linda in 1990, the second year of existence of the award. In the ‘small world’ category, this spring I completed a six-year term as member (four of which I was chair) of the Walter Byers Selection Committee.

These four sports, football, hockey, gymnastics, and volleyball, pretty much made up our athletics world through the 80s. Little did we know that our deeper immersion was on the horizon as we entered the 90s.

Dr. Meserve's First Post

In Their Own Words -- Dr. Lee Meserve

Dr. Lee Meserve has just about seen it all. With 37 years at Bowling Green, he's seen more athletic events than almost anyone. As the Faculty Athletics Representative at BGSU, he represents the department in a variety of ways. This is the first of what will likely be many posts on this blog about his memories of BG athletics.
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As the spring of 2010 marks the end of my 37th year at BGSU, the beginning really seems like ancient history (I’ve been here for over a third of the institution’s existence!). But my knowledge (I use the term loosely) of BGSU athletics began even before that. My first year out of graduate school (1972-73) I was hired as a Visiting Assistant Professor At Vassar College in Poughkeepsie NY. After moving into our apartment there, my wife Marge and I were watching the ‘72 Olympics on TV and watched a rather odd looking young man accept the gold medal for the 800 meter run and stand wearing a ball cap through the national anthem. We heard the name Dave Wottle, and the name of his institution, Bowling Green State University for the first time. Who would have guessed that the following fall, September, 1973, Marge and I would be Bowling Green residents and I would be setting out on a journey as a faculty member in the Biological Sciences Department, and that I would become a close colleague of Sid Sink, one of Dave’s fellow BGSU runners 24 years later, when I became Faculty Athletics Representative (FAR).

That first year at BGSU was a bit sparse with regard to athletics interactions; I spent much time trying to figure out how to be a tenure track assistant professor. Nonetheless, having grown up in New England (Maine to be specific), I was excited to learn that BGSU had a renowned ice hockey team. We bought tickets to three games that first year. The following year, we became Falcon Club members, and bought season tickets for hockey which we have held every year since than. Those two pieces of plank in the ice arena have really become accustomed to Meserve behinds over that period of time! I also had the ‘pleasure’ of getting hit in the head with a puck lobbed (not a wicked slap shot) over the glass. It hit flat rather than on edge so it didn’t even break the skin; however, I did feel like I was about to grow an antler! During those years we had the excitement of watching Roger Archer, Mike Liut, Al Sarachman, US Olympians Doug Ross and Bob Dobek (1976) and ‘Miracle on Ice’ guys Ken Morrow and Mark Wells (1980), the three Newtons (Tom, Bruce, Willie), and of course the national champion 1984 team, and two Hobey Baaker Award winners (George ‘The Beagle’ McFee and Brian Holzinger) and many many more all skating on the BGSU Ice Arena surface. I am pleased to see that the institution has taken steps to restore the Ice Arena physical plant and to bring back the excitement and status of BGSU hockey. Of course at the same time the Ice Arena was the site of development of Scott Hamilton, whose father Ernie was my colleague in biology. Marge and I always attended the ice shows that Scott hosted that featured the best figure skaters in North America.

The second set of season tickets we bought, beginning about our second year here, was for football. This began with the era of Denny Stolz and has continued through the additional five coaches to present day. About this time I began to become aware that each semester there was a cohort of student-athletes in my anatomy and physiology course. I also noted that they either did as well as the average non-athlete in the course, or in many cases, better than the average. It appeared that their discipline in the athletic venue in most cases carried over to the academic side. I decided to begin lobbying for elimination of the phrase “dumb jock.” because I was convinced that any varsity athletes who fit that descriptor were few and far between. I extract an example from the football squad, one Tom Shehab. Tom came to us as a Biology/Pre-Med major with 15 advance placement credits, essentially an entire semester of work completed before setting foot on campus. He played football and competed his degree in seven semesters, also doing research with one of my colleagues in Biological Sciences at the same time. He graduated with no grade less than A, and waas admitted to all three medical schools in the state of Michigan (his home state). He went on to complete medical school, residencies and fellowships, and is currently a member of a gastroenterology practice in Ypsilanti, MI. “Dumb jock”? I think not. I have had the pleasure (wearing my pre-health professions advisor hat) to recommend several dozen athletes for admission to the various post-graduate health professions schools.