Author: hawspax

By PAXSON HAWS

After talking to a girl for over six months, Sammy Najib, a management info systems junior, realized this girl had decided to ghost him. Their communication had been consistent. They talked every day and had hours-long Facetime calls every night but when she hadn’t opened Najib’s Snapchat in five days, he knew it was over.

Despite suddenly being cut off, Najib was not hurt. Najib said being ghosted is something that has happened several times to him and stems from simply losing interest in a person.

“You get really involved in the conversation and then it just dies,” Najib said. “It’s just the conversation dies. You have to keep putting effort in to make a conversation. At that point, it’s not worth it anymore.”

Ghosting is ending a relationship by suddenly cutting off all contact with a person with an emphasis on electronic communication, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. While ghosting is not a new concept, the increase of technology and how it has simplified communication prompted Merriam-Webster to add the word ghosting to the dictionary in February 2017.

According to a survey from 2015 by the Pew Research Center, 15 percent of American adults have tried online dating. Online dating of those between the ages of 18 to 24 is up to 27 percent compared to 10 percent in 2013.

“It’s so much easier with social media and cell phone communication to simply avoid dealing with the end of a relationship than it was when you would run into a person you had been dating at parties or other gatherings of friends,” psychologist Diane Barth, who runs a private practice in New York, said. “But ending a relationship has always been hard and even in the days of just telephones for communications, people would stop calling and just disappear from your life without letting you know why.”

A study conducted by Gili Freedman and published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships on Jan. 12, 2018, focuses on how theories of relationships relate to ghosting. According to Freedman’s website, she is an assistant professor in the psychology department at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and focuses on interpersonal processes.

Part of the survey asked 554 participants about their knowledge on ghosting. A little less than half were familiar with the term. Of those that were familiar with the term, 95 percent believed not responding to phone calls and text messages were behaviors associated with ghosting.

Participants were familiarized with ghosting and were asked to agree on which scenarios they believed it was acceptable to ghost a romantic partner. Some of the scenarios included were for a short-term relationship, a long-term relationship, before or after physical intimacy, and whether they have been or have ghosted someone. One hundred and forty participants said they had been ghosted while 120 said they had ghosted.

While Najib could easily tell he was being ghosted, Zain Anabtawi, a management info systems junior, did not realize he ghosted someone until years later when the girl called him out and told his sister.

Anabtawi started talking to the girl again during his senior year of high school. He didn’t think anything between them was serious, which is why he didn’t talk to her when he went out of town.

That’s when he started talking to, and soon started dating, another girl, Avery. The first girl was in college in Waco, Texas while Anabtawi went to high school in Grand Prairie. She had her own life and did her own thing so Anabtawi thought nothing of it. Two years later, she called him out.

“She reached out to me two months after me and Avery broke up, basically just checking up on me,” Anabtawi said. “She was like ‘Do you remember when you ghosted me’ or whatever. She brought it up and it was super awkward. I just really don’t remember it like that.”

Anabtawi has been on the other end of ghosting as well. He sent a direct message to a girl on Twitter after he moved to Norman and they started talking. This girl worked a lot and soon quit responding. Anabtawi thought nothing of it because he knows people just lose interest after a while.

“I feel like I’m at that point in my life where I’m not going to waste my time being hurt over someone who has moved on,” Anabtawi said. “So you just move on too.”

Alexandria Prothero, an international relations junior at Lindenwood University, used online dating apps several times before meeting her current boyfriend. She meet a boy named Jordan on the app Whisper, which is an app where people can share thoughts, advice and chat directly. Prothero was honest with Jordan about having an open relationship but he still bought her a ring despite the fact they had not met in person.

She was close with Jordan and his family until she learned he was seeing other people and kept it a secret. Prothero wanted to be taken seriously and she wasn’t going to get that with Jordan. She cut off his family and soon after told him she was in love with a different boy, her current boyfriend, and was moving to Seattle.

“I blocked him because I didn’t want him to respond,” Prothero said. “Every time something like that happened, he’d try to sweet talk himself back in just so I’d be some sort of security for him and it was just draining and mentally exhausting. I never got my closure.”

Jordan was blocked from a variety of different social media platforms and because they never saw each other in person, social media, texting and calling was their only form of communication. It made it easy to cut off contact.

“Social media makes it easier to ghost people,” Barth said. “You can just block someone or unfriend someone and that’s the end of the contact.

While just over nine percent of those who took part in Freedman’s study said they would consider ghosting someone, Trevor Bryant, an international business junior, said ghosting seems pretty common.

“I think it’s just like a thing where millennials don’t like confrontation sometimes,” Bryant said. “So they don’t want to be like that. They don’t want to say that to someone. It’s just easier to not reply.”

 

By PAXSON HAWS

Article: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jimderogatis/parents-told-police-r-kelly-is-keeping-women-in-a-cult

First story: https://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment/sun-times-archive-r-kelly-accused-of-sex-with-teenage-girls/

For almost 18 years, Jim DeRogatis has been covering the sexual abuse young African American women has been enduring from rapper R. Kelly. DeRogatis started covering these scandals after he reviewed Kelly’s album, TP-2.com, for the Chicago Sun-Times in 2000.

In his review, DeRogatis said “the shift from church to bedroom are so jarring they can give you whiplash.” Two weeks after this review was published, DeRogatis received an anonymous fax saying Kelly’s issue was young girls.

This fax had very specific details with names, dates and court cases. It led DeRogatis to a Polish sex crime unit who was investigating Kelly and a law suit filed on Dec. 24, 1994 that was never reported on. The sex crime unit said they couldn’t talk to him. The law suit filed said Kelly would return to the high school he attended and have sex with 14-15-year-old girls from the choir. One girl he had a relationship with tried to commit suicide before Kelly made her sign a non-disclosure agreement and paid her off.

There had always been the rumor that Kelly married singer Aaliyah when she was 15 and the marriage license lied about her age. DeRogatis and the Chicago Sun-Time were successful in finding the annulment paperwork for this marriage. This occurred after the 1994 court case proving Aaliyah was not the first girl.

DeRogatis talked with other women mentioned in Aaliyah’s lawsuit and the 1994 lawsuit. When DeRogatis reported on all of this in 2000, he said crafting the nut graph took longer than any sentence he has ever written. It took himself, multiple editors and the lawyer to produce this graph.

No one did anything after this was published. Kelly denied everything and threatened to sue but never did. In the 18 years DeRogatis has been reporting on Kelly, not a single word has been challenged by a law suit or corrected in the paper.

A year later, DeRogatis received a call at home to check his mail box. Inside was an unmarked envelope with a 26 minute and 39 second video of Kelly having sex with the girl from the anonymous fax who was never confirmed. They gave the tape to the police and reported on it the same day Kelly sang at the 2002 Winter Olympics closing ceremony in Salt Lake City, Utah.

 

In June 2002, Kelly was indicted for 21 counts of child pornography instead of statutory rape. The girl in the tape and her family did not participate in the case and were living overseas from the day the Sun-Times reported the tape.

Every six to eight weeks for 6 years, the judge convened the prosecution and defense and went into closed chambers. All files from those six years were sealed and remain sealed despite a lawsuit from the Sun-Times. The trial lasted five weeks with 75 called witnesses and two dozen presented witnesses.

DeRogatis was compelled to testify despite the special witness law that protects reporters. He took the fifth amendment to protect his sources. DeRogatis emphasized how prevalent rape culture was in this case and the jury did not convict because they did not hear from the girl in the video.

DeRogatis says he did not pick this story, it picked him. For a decade after the trail, victims of Kelly and their families came to him with their stories.

To get sources to talk with him and go on the record, he rang doorbells and made phone calls. Overtime, he proved he cared and believed victims because he talked with them, got facts correct and would rather he be held in contempt of court than reveal his sources.

In November 2016, the parents of a girl from outside Atlanta, Georgia came to him because their daughter started a relationship with Kelly and they hadn’t heard from her in months. This was the start of DeRogatis’ reporting for his piece published with BuzzFeed News in July 2017.

Another pair of parents came to him and told DeRogatis about the ‘cult’ Kelly had. DeRogatis has spoken with other women who broke away from the ‘cult’ and personal assistants who saw first-hand what the six women in the ‘cult’ went through.

This story took nine months of reporting and three different news organizations before BuzzFeed published it. He started out reporting with MTV News before they dropped out after three months. He spent another three months with the Chicago Reader and then three months at another paper before going to BuzzFeed. DeRogatis’ story was published only four days after the last paper pulled out.

Now, DeRogatis is working on writing his 11^th book, which will be about R. Kelly and his thirty years of abuse. The two sets of parents that came to him in 2016 have still not spoken with their daughters.

DeRogatis is from New Jersey and studied journalism at New York University. He started his career at the Jersey Journal as a reporter. He started at the Chicago Sun-Times in 1991 as a pop music critique. Today, he is a contributor at BuzzFeed News and an assistant professor at Columbia College Chicago.

DeRogatis’ advice for journalist is to make sure people know how to find you and to always answer phone calls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

By PAXSON HAWS

When Lindsey Gray-Walton, University of Oklahoma volleyball head coach, and her husband arrived in Norman this year, they knew exactly what the program was missing – something the team needed if it were going to succeed.

Under the previous coach, the volleyball team finished the 2017 season with a 7-22 record. Currently, the team has a 13-10 record with five games remaining. Gray-Walton said the team members was very “cutting” in their communication with one another when she and her husband first arrived.

“I think that’s one big thing that was struggling here at Oklahoma is the kids just wanted to be loved and that was one of the biggest things we pushed when we got here,” Kyle Walton, volunteer assistant coach, said.

Gray-Walton was announced as OU’s volleyball head coach on Dec. 24. Gray-Walton announced her coaching staff on Jan. 22, which included two assistant coaches and a volunteer coach. Among this staff is Gray-Walton’s husband, Kyle, who served as the head coach at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky from 2014-17.  

This season is not the first time Gray-Walton and her husband have coached together. The couple coached together at the University of Kentucky from 2012-14 where Lindsey served as an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator while Walton was a volunteer coach. But this will be the first season where the couple is in a coaching position that gives them the power to make decisions.

Though Walton served as a head coach before moving to Oklahoma with his wife, he wanted to be with his wife as she created her own program for the first time.

“Lindsey and I wanted to coach together,” Walton said. “We wanted to do it together and see what we were capable of.”

While hiring a family member may seem questionable, Alyssa Enneking, senior outside hitter says it helps keep an “open relationship” and gives the team a personal connection to the coaching staff.

The university has a policy in place to prevent two family members related through blood or marriage working in the same department. The policy is in place to ensure one family member is not in a position to make suggestions about the others employment, salary, etc. OU’s Board of Regents knows there could be value in having two members of the same family in one department, so there is a way around this policy.

The appropriate vice president can recommend a waiver be signed. This waiver would include designating an objective individual to make employment and salary recommendations for the family member on the waiver. Once the Board of Regents approves the waiver, the family member can be hired.

This waiver has been used several times throughout campus, especially with the current coaching staffs in the athletic department. Patty Gasso and her son JT coach the softball team. Lon Kruger, men’s basketball coach, has his son Kevin on staff as does Sherri Coale, the women’s basketball coach, who also hired her son Colton. Women’s gymnastics has K.J. Kindler and her husband, Lou Ball.

******

Taking over a program is a large undertaking. Gray-Walton had to create a relationship with each student-athlete, create a work dynamic with a new coaching staff and coach the team on her  “philosophies.” Walton’s previous experience in doing this played a part in her decision to bring him on.

“Those first 15 months are a grind and you need someone who’s lived that life before,” Gray-Walton said. “It just so happened that he had.”

With a 5-year-old girl, Berkley, and one on the way, Gray-Walton says the mixture of their family life and professional life makes life easier overall.

“Before it was like I’m here on this day and you’re here on that day and what are we going to do with her,” Gray-Walton said. “Now, it’s like we’re both in the same place. Either we can have a family member come in if we need someone to watch our daughter. We all know where we’re going to be.”

Before taking the job at Oklahoma, Gray-Walton and her husband spent the past three season coaching at different schools. Walton said he has different “philosophies on certain skills and how things should be taught” but he has learned a lot from his wife, especially in terms of communicating with the players.

“I think the time away helped up both establish what we believe in and what we need to do at the highest level,” Gray-Walton said. “Now we’re kind of combining those powers.”

One reason Gray-Walton and her husband work so well together is the constant discussions they have. Walton said he and his wife do not always agree on everything when coaching which helps create discussion. Gray-Walton says they balance each other out because she can become serious quickly and he is able to keep her laughing.

******

With both Gray-Walton and her husband having very similar schedules now, it’s not uncommon to see their daughter watching and helping out at practices. Berkley can be found passing volleyballs to her father during drills and watching the team practice from the sidelines.

“Having Berkley around helps us understand that it’s bigger than just us,” Enneking said. “We do it for more than just us. We’ll look over and see Berkley just looking at us with stars in her eyes. She really admires us. It really puts into perspective what we do here and it’s not just volleyball.”

The couple believes the team has a better connection than previous years. They also agree that there is a family feeling within the team and with Sooner Nation.

“The inclusion of family, for sure, is felt my everyone in our program,” Gray-Walton said. “Ultimately, you got to be able to laugh at yourself. Families are weird. They’re kind of funky at times so we just try to have a really good time.”

Walton says to create these relationships, he has to be able to relate to the girls so he calls himself a “players coach.” This means he watches some of the TV shows and listens to some of the same music as members of the team to help create conversations.

“They’re kind of like our fun aunt and uncle off the court,” Enneking said. “They are some of the coolest people ever. We love being a part of their family.”

Enneking and her team had been bonding with Gray-Walton and her family for several months when they learned their volleyball family would be growing by one.

In October, Gray-Walton purchased a pair of baby-sized Nike shoes with blue and pink laces and presented them to Keyton Kinley, a sophomore on the team who has small feet and struggles to find the correct shoe size.

The team laughed at the joke before realizing the shoes weren’t for Kinley. Gray-Walton was letting the team know she was expecting another child.

Enneking said she liked being included in the announce. It made the team truly feel like they were a part of Gray-Walton’s family.

By Paxson Haws

The coach who never intended to be one watched as her team narrowly missed becoming back-to-back-to-back national champions.

Oklahoma gymnasts had finished their rotation and were ahead by .175 last April in St. Louis, Missouri. In the final rotation, a UCLA athlete scored a perfect 10 bringing The Bruins from fourth to national champions with a final score of 198.0750. Oklahoma finished 0.0375 behind.

“It was a tough moment. It was a learning moment for our whole team,” said coach K.J. Kindler. “They certainly did everything they could. Just like the overwhelming feeling of ‘Wow we did it,’ we had that same feeling in reverse. That overwhelming feeling of ‘We thought we had it. We thought we did it.

Kindler, an eight-time regional coach of the year and three-time national champion, did not consider coaching until graduating from Iowa State in 1992. Despite her love for the sport, Kindler envisioned a career in the arts or journalism. When Iowa State University coach Mark Sharples suddenly resigned when Kindler graduated, an opportunity arose. Amy Pyle was promoted to head coach and offered Kindler a position as an assistant.

26 years later, she is considered one of the best college women’s gymnastic coaches in the nation.

“I 100 percent trusted her, believed in her,” Pyle said. “Wanted to give her that space to grow and obviously, she grew into an amazing young woman and, you know, is the No. 1 coach in the NCAA.”

***

Kindler has been coaching, either at Iowa State or OU, for 27 years but her athletic career did not start on that beam.

It started on the dance floor.

Kindler’s parents put her into dance and baton at age 4. There was tumbling directly after Kindler’s dance class and she would always watch. Her dance teacher suggested switching classes and Kindlers gymnastics career began.

Kindler gained her love and understanding of gymnastics from training at Hamlin University, 30 minutes from her hometown, with her club coach.

“My coach in Minnesota that I grew up with really instilled in me that love for the sport. I was what you would call a gym rat. I was always in there, always wanted to hang around after practice, never left on time, got there early and would have been perfectly happy sleeping there,” Kindler said.

K.J. was not the only Kindler who participated in gymnastics. Her two sisters and brother did, too, though her brother only recreationally. K.J.’s children, nieces and nephews have all tried gymnastics.

“We were together a lot because we were at the gym all the time together,” said Lori, K.J.’s sister.

Lori competed in club, college and now owns her own gym, Flips Gymnastics, in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. Lori and K.J. never competed against each other during club but did meet up when K.J. was an assistant coach.

Moving to Connecticut during high school and joining a new club didn’t slow Kindler down any. Instead, she joined a club that helped her improve her technique. But it was her performances at camp in Wisconsin that would vault her to collegiate mats.

Kindler joined the Iowa State women’s gymnastics team as a walk-on in 1988. To make ends meet, Kindler coached young girls at a nearby club, something she continued through her time in Ames.

“I didn’t really think about being a coach. I was just trying to be the best gymnast I could be,” Kindler said.

Kindler was a three time MVP, 1992 Big Eight all-around runner up, three-time NCAA regional qualifier and the first individual regional qualifier in Iowa State history.

Mike Sharples, head coach from 1985-1992, remembers her individual appearance at regionals. She was put into rotation with another team and performed without her teammates there.

“She handled the pressure well and being the only one to go out there and compete as an individual. It’s harder than being there with your teammates. But she did a good job and and represented Iowa State extremely well,” Sharples, who works as a financial planner at MKS Wealth Management in Durham, NC, said.

Kindler’s performance as a athlete is similar to her coaching style. As an athlete, she was determined, creative and had a positive attitude. These are attributes are important when performing and coaching, especially when the event is the balance beam, which Kindler coaches. Kindler carried her performance characteristics into her coaching career. These characteristics came across in her floor exercises, which she choreographed herself.

“I mean, that is a God-given talent. You don’t learn to be a choreographer so to speak. You just have that artistic ability and it’s really rare,” Pyle said.

***

Sharples’ resignation in the winter of 1992 led to assistant coach Amy Pyle’s promotion. A recent graduate, Kindler was faced with making a career decision. She considered working journalism or doing something in the arts. Instead, Kindler was offered an assistant coaching position. Looking to make ends meet and a believer in timing, Kindler took the opportunity.

“If that hadn’t happened at that time for me, I’m not positive I would have gone into coaching,” Kindler said. “I always loved to do it and was always super passionate about it but there was no plan. The plan just fell into place.”

Kindler stayed as an assistant until being hired as Iowa State’s head coach in 2001. As head coach, Kindler coached six All-Americans, 12 Big 12 champions and took Iowa State to its first Super Six appearance in 2006.

“In Iowa, she was head coach plus they had a gym on the side and coached a lot of young girls in Iowa. But that wasn’t where she really enjoyed what she was doing. She enjoyed coaching them and some of those girls ended up being on the Iowa State team with her. So she enjoyed that a great deal but she was really driven, the thing she wanted to do was have some national championships,” Tom Kindler, K.J.’s father, said.

Still, when OU Athletic Director Joe Castiglione called, Kindler didn’t exactly come running to Norman, Oklahoma.

“You could say the cards were stacked against him,” K.J. said.

Kindler had been at ISU for 18 years and was seven months pregnant with her first child when Castiglione called. A move would mean she would be almost 12 hours from her family instead of 3 and a half hours.

“One, She had experience in building a program. I watched what she had done at Iowa State. Two, I evaluated the success that she was having recruiting elite gymnasts. And three, we ultimately believed that she was the strong leader we needed to building a championship program,” Joe Castiglione, OU’s athletic director, said.

Kindler would inherit the program from Steve Nunno, who coached Shannon Miller in the 1992 Olympics. Nunno coached four NCAA All-Americans and brought the school its first regional championship in 2006. OU’s program had made six NCAA Championship appearances before Kindler.

“For a program like Oklahoma, I thought ‘Gosh, I could make a really big difference and that’s what I wanted to do so I went for it,” Kindler said.

***

When Kindler arrived in Norman, Oklahoma, she recalls being “shell-shocked.” Facilities were out of date and changes needed to be made. But coming off a Super Six appearance at Iowa State, Kindler had one thing on her mind: the national championship.

“Back then, the idea that this could become the center of the gymnastic universe, at least collegiately, had a certain amount of appeal. And certainly, it has become that,” Castiglione said.

Taking Oklahoma to the level Kindler aspired to reach would not be easy and she knew it.

“It took a lot of hard work. It takes a change in culture. A change in how we approach the sport, our responsibilities, our preparation for our season. There’s just so many things that had to change,” Kindler said.

Kindler’s changes to the program were immediately noticeable. The 2007 season ended with an 8th-place finish at the national championship, the highest place OU’s had received at that point. Kindler’s team has made an NCAA appearance every year since.

In 2014, Kindler’s goal became a reality. She coached the Sooners to their first NCAA national championship with a record-breaking score of 198.175. Kindler coached Taylor Spears to an individual national championship on the balance beam. Spears was OU’s first individual nation champion in 26 years along with two other teammates on floor exercise. Kindler won a championship again in 2016. And 2017.

“It’s so overwhelming. You work for it. You plan for it. You train for it. But when it actually happens, it’s mesmerizing. An out of body experience,” Kindler said.

Through it all, Kindler attributes OU’s success to her staff and athletes. Both assistant coaches also came to OU in 2006. Lou Ball, Kindler’s husband, coaches vault. Tom Haley coaches floor and the two team to co-coach bars. Kindler is primary coach for beam.

“I have an amazing staff and we have been together for 13 years. And I think that continuity is super important to the success of this program. Lou is super clam. Tom is very creative and adds humor to every situation and helps the team relax. I’m more of the intensity of the program. The person who keeps the ship running right. We all add something that so important to the dynamic of the program,” Kindler said.

Former coaches credit OU’s success to Kindler ability both as a coach and as an athlete.

She’s demanding, creative, competitive and compassionate.

“She just has a drive for excellence, an eye for excellence,” Sharples said.

She’s elegant, driven and focused.

“She’s improved the quality of NCAA gymnastics. People,” Pyle said, “are chasing Oklahoma now.”

Gymnasts are chasing Oklahoma because of Kindler.

“She’s a rare package. We’re grateful that she’s our head coach,” Castiglione said.