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FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM

Meridian High Spring Athletics Season Kicks Off

by Ryan McCafferty

Falls Church News-Press

Sports do not rest for very long at Meridian High School, as with the end of the winter season has immediately come the beginning of the spring one. The Mustangs’ softball, soccer, tennis, baseball, and lacrosse teams all saw their 2022 campaigns open this week, and the results were mixed.

The softball team saw their season open at home on Monday against John Lewis, a game they won by a decisive score of 13-0, but the script was flipped the next day as they traveled to Leesburg and lost 13-1 to Heritage. The boys’ varsity soccer team opened with a bang by beating Tuscarora 3-2 in overtime in front of the home crowd, while the JV team provided a solid prelude by winning their matchup 1-0. The girls’ team had to wait until Wednesday in which they traveled to Tuscarora, and came up short in a 2-3 loss.

The tennis teams played on Tuesday and Friday, with the boys’ team struggling in both matchups, first a 9-0 home defeat at the hands of Yorktown followed by dropping a 7-2 decision at Lightridge. The girls’ team also fell to Yorktown 8-1, but was able to emerge victorious over Lightridge by a score of 6-3. Varsity baseball opened up on Tuesday as well, losing 6-3 to Heritage in Leesburg, while the JV team dropped both decisions this week, falling to Heritage 10-4 on Tuesday and then losing 5-2 to Washington-Liberty on Friday, another away game.

Finally, lacrosse played on Tuesday and Thursday, with the varsity boys’ team falling 11-5 at home to Heritage in their opener and then losing again at Sidwell Friends by a score of 8-6. The boys’ JV team had some better luck, beating Heritage 10-0 in their only matchup of the week on Tuesday, and both girls’ teams dominated in their lone performances hosting Sidwell Friends on Thursday, with the varsity team winning 21-6 and the JV team achieving a 9-3 victory.

Next week figures to be another full slate of action, which will be highlighted by the varsity boys’ soccer team’s trip to Tennessee on Thursday to compete in the Smoky Mountain Cup. The tournament will feature some of the nation’s most highly touted programs.

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LOCAL

MARCH 24 - 30, 2022 | PAGE 5

VARSITY GIRLS SOCCER at Tuscarora opened with a 3-2 loss at Tuscarora last week. (Photo:

Suzanne Hladky)

It was partly the pandemic and partly aging membership that ended one of our most influential women’s groups.

The Organized Women Voters of Arlington County since 1923 had educated, lobbied and socialized with the local accomplished and energetic. I learned details this Women’s History Month as I was served tea by Jane Renfro, in her eighth decade in the Tara-Leeway Heights home where many organizational strategies were planned by her mother Sue and sister Nancy.

Many like-minded Arlington groups formed during the postWorld War I prosperity (after women gained the vote in 1919), among them the similarly named League of Women Voters and the Neighbors Club (both still going).

The nonpartisan Organized Women Voters were not the sort who marched on the Capitol, Renfro said. But through regular luncheons with prominent speakers, the group over the decades weighed in on some of Virginia’s major transitions, including school desegregation and civil rights.

That is borne out in the hundreds of pages of meticulously organized files that Renfro and her late sister in 2019 gave the library’s Center for Local History.

OWV did not endorse candidates (except to promote females). The lunches (often at the Alpine restaurant) offered “an opportunity to keep up with civics” on taxes, energy and the agenda of the county board, Renfro said. “We made no

Our Man in Arlington distinction between By Charlie Clark liberals and conservatives, though members had their own perspectives. There were no extremes, but as an age group, we tended to the conservative side.” Stalwarts on the rolls included former county board chair Leone Buchholz, Salvation Army director Nadine Clift, WETA founder Elizabeth Campbell, congressional wife Jane Broyhill, Del. Mary Marshall, county board member wives Lois Urbanski and Vera Casto, and county board members Mary Margaret Whipple and Ellen Bozman. Arlington treasurer (now retired) Frank O’Leary and Del. Patrick Hope were “practically auxiliary members,” Renfro said. Four members chaired the county board. Detailed “biographies” of OWV applicants (actually resumes) show lots of World War II contributions and church and PTA activism. The form asked them to specify their race. During the national battle over the 1957 Civil Rights bill, Arlington’s OWV expressed opposition to Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater’s amendment removing the word “sex” from the groups listed to be protected by the new commission that included blacks, the aged, American Indians and the handicapped. The group pushed for continued use of trials by jury in discrimination cases. “Though a member of the weaker sex, I strongly support the masculine sex in its drive for `trial by jury,’ ” Sue Renfro wrote to Republican Rep. Frank Chelf. During the 1960 battle over Virginia desegregation, the OWV balanced respect for state law with skepticism toward segregationists’ plans for private-school tuition grants, seeing a threat to Arlington public education funding.

Now in her eighth decade in the house she grew up in, Renfro attended Woodlawn Elementary and Kenmore Jr. High. The nurse practitioner in recent years published three “science fantasy” novels with rigorous research on genetics.

Back in the 1950s, Arlington was “a nice residential area, a local community,” Renfro recalls. “But somewhere along the line, it changed focus… to become what someone on the board called `Manhattan on the Potomac.”’ Citing debacles such as the unsuccessful Artisphere in Rosslyn and the so-called million-dollar bus stop, Renfro is not a fan of such “progress” toward the “upscale.”

John “Til” Hazel Jr., the lawyerdeveloper known best for shaping Fairfax County land policy, died March 15 at 91.

Perhaps lost amid the 1960s-90s debates over his advocacy of rapid growth and the aborted plan for a Disney theme park in Gainesville— was that Hazel was raised in Arlington. The son of a surgeon biked or hitched to McLean during the Depression to work his family’s farm, the Washington Post noted.

In the late ‘70s Hazel was instrumental in setting up George Mason University Law School in Arlington (where a hall bears his name). That’s also his name on the auditorium of Virginia Hospital Center.