UTDPD Blotter

January 13

• UTD research assistant reported his wallet was taken without his consent from his office at 2:19 p.m. at ECS North.

January 24

• At 9:49 p.m., an affiliated person reported seeing a dark blue Hyundai Elantra hit a silver Honda CR-V in the parking lot near building 58.

January 26

• A UTD student was scammed out of $3,500 via email at 8:12 p.m. in building 55.

January 28

• At 4:16 p.m. in Callier Richardson, an unaffiliated person was arrested for violating a criminal trespass warning.

Comets look to turn passion into execution in final stretch of men's basketball season

Limiting turnovers, utilizing new aggressive defense will be key to success at home this week

The Comets’ results have been mixed this season: close losses and inconsistent defense have cost the team opportunities to improve its standing in the ASC conference. Nonetheless, their talent has kept the Comets in contention, and they know what it will take to finish the season with a different narrative.

“We've had some really good moments. I think [our team] is committed, they're passionate about wanting to be a real factor in our league. But some things have been tough for us,” Butterfield said. “We have tried to adopt a new style of defense this year with more aggressiveness. There are times when it’s been good, but we've been inconsistent to say the least. The other thing that has really hurt us this year is turnovers. In our losses, we have given up a lot of points to our opponents based on bad turnovers -- that's been a consistent theme when we've come up short.”

SGA meeting: 02/01

Student Government announces esports lounge Q&A, plastic ban while preparing for Homecoming

FATIMAH AZEEM Opinion Editor

Esports Lounge Interest Forum:

Homecoming Elections

UTD Men’s Basketball is entering a make-or-break stretch of the semester, coming off of several days of no practice due to inclement weather. I sat down with Head Coach Terry Butterfield to talk about this home sprint.

Currently 8-5 in conference play, the Comets sit in fourth place in the ASC. While this would qualify them for a berth into the ASC playoffs, it would make their route back to the NCAA DIII Championships, which they most recently attended in 2020, much more difficult. Undeniably talented, the team has at times struggled to find consistency this semester. But with five games left to play in the season – almost all of them at home – Butterfield reports that now is of his goals for what he wanted students to gain from the esports experience.

“I want the program to be a really fun place for everyone involved. I’m of the philosophy that if people enjoy what they’re doing and enjoy being involved, everything kind of comes naturally afterwards,” Boehm said. “If the students are happy being there and having a good time, the winning and all the other cool stuff that comes along will just naturally come.”

That’s not to say that hard work and dedication is not part of being in the program, but Boehm said that he’s excited to work with the program in multiple facets, and he aims to increase the number of community events as well (pending COVID-19 restrictions). From community tournaments to local intercollegiate LANs, Boehm said that he was excited to see the kind of events that the team could put together for the community at large.

“You could probably find a place on campus that would work really well to hold a tournament or even a conference. It’d be really cool to get into that kind of stuff where you have guest speakers come and some tournaments and other things going on altogether,” Boehm said. “The

→ POET CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 someone cope with difficult emotions. The creative writing community at UTD serves as an avenue for self-expression and understanding. In an interview, Ally Duong, a junior literature the team’s chance to rewrite this season’s narrative and gather some momentum going into the conference championships.

“This stretch right here will basically define who we are. It's going to be a monster of a schedule. We are going to play Sunday, Monday, Thursday, Saturday, Tuesday, Thursday – we're basically playing a pro-like schedule, so we’re not going to be able to practice the way we want to practice.” Butterfield said. “And as I addressed my team the other day, we’ve got to play with urgency – at the end of two weeks, we could be in a very good place going into the conference tournament, or we could be in not such a good place going into the conference tournament. So, everything is basically up in the air.” community is kind of the backbone of the program in a way where they’re your biggest fans. You might get a lot of recruits as students come and go, people who watch you play and are your biggest fans may want to try out and stuff like that.”

Improving community engagement goes further than just holding events and giveaways. The esports room is currently locked for use mostly by the members of the team, as well as select other content creators and staff. A priority for Boehm is not only to hold more events but eventually to also have a more public space for gamers to gather.

“One thing I’d love to try is to get more of the public engaged … we have this esports space but it’s pretty much just for the team,” Boehm said. “It’d be really cool to expand and end up opening a public gaming space on campus. We’re also planning on working on a broadcast studio for students.”

This broadcast studio is an expansion of the existing broadcast team in the program. Previously, if production was not done remotely, it’d be done in the small office of the head coach with shoutcasters yelling into the Blue Snowball microphone connected to the office PC. But with plans to convert a nearby conference room into a dedicated broadcast space with professional equipment, Boehm hopes that major, spoke very highly about the poetry classes and workshops she has taken on campus and shared her thoughts about Benaim’s performance in relation to what she has learned as a creative writing student. “It’s just so cool that someone can be a poet professionally!” said that will be a permanent solution.”

Leaving that framework for connection through OIT means that, in case of a future outage, residents will have less of a wait before a temporary fix in in place. The path is already paved.

Moving forward, however, a second circuit would prevent that disconnection in the first place, with interruptions solved quickly by reverting to a different pathway to campus entirely. Dourty has advocated since last February’s freeze for the installation of that kind of backup network for campus wifi, which would kick in automatically.

Apogee’s new plan is to contract with another fiber provider for their second path to campus, making it independent of another Zayo outage, and vice versa.

One thing the Comets have going for them: four of those final five games are slated to be at home. Butterfield says that makes a huge difference.

“We were literally on the road the entire month of January, except for one game. So, being at home, being able to just stay in the rhythm of your day, sleeping in your own bed, not being in a hotel, not being in a bus, I think that's a huge deal,” he said. “And we talk all the time to our guys about the importance of getting a job done at home: you must defend your home court, bring a whole different dynamic knowing you're at home.”

Games being played at home presents

To accommodate UTD's large gaming community, the Student Affairs Office and the Student Union are tentatively planning to expand and renovate the Pub into an Esports Lounge. Student Affairs is hosting an open forum on Feb. 9 and Feb. 10 at 3 p.m. and 12 p.m.respectively to gauge student interest and solicit feedback for this Lounge. The forums will be located in the SSA Auditorium, with virtual attendence options taking place over Microsoft Teams. Vice President of Student Affairs Gene Fitch said his office is particularly interested in getting feedback on dining options for the gaming facility.

Homecoming Events

Homecoming will take place on campus from Feb. 9 - 12, and will include a Flag Parade, Chalk Art contest, Lawrence concert, basketball games and the annual Homecoming parade among other events. Comets can find a full list of events and their times on the 2022 Homecoming website.

SG will host Homecoming court elections and a vote to amend SG’s governing documents from Monday, Feb. 7 to Friday, Feb. 11. For the latter election, Students will get to vote for or against changing SG’s GPA requirement from a 3.000 to requiring ”academic good standing” with the University, which is currently a 2.00 for undergraduate students and 3.00 for graduate. SG will email students the election forms at the beginning of Homecoming week.

Green Initiative Plastic Proposal team’s content creation capabilities will be improved.

The Green Initiative Committee’s Single-Use Plastic Ban proposal passed through the Academic Senate and Staff Council on Jan. 19. As the proposal’s name suggests, the Ban aims to eliminate non-essential, non-compostable singleuse plastics such as plastic straws and plastic bags from campus. A PlasticFreeTask Force – whose members and affiliated departments will be determined over the next month – will strive to carry out the Ban’s goal.

“Not only can you have a nice ‘it’s always there’ kind of space for your broadcast students, you can obviously use it for other content creation projects, too. Not only are you streaming matches, but you might be able to do whatever kind of shows

Duong. “And [Benaim] answered a lot of awesome questions that showed that it’s not just some unattainable thing. While I was listening to her speak and read her poetry, I began making a map in my head to other themes I’ve seen in my classes, other poets’ works and sometimes even myself when

“Students wouldn’t feel a disruption if one of those two paths were to go down,” he said. “Now, in the odd chance that both of those paths would go down, we would still be able to provide sort of that final failover connectivity, as we did both in this instance and the instance back in February of last year.”

Apogee had begun work on such a network during Summer 2021, but complications with that you want,” Boehm said. Coming into the program, Boehm was overwhelmed by the amount that students handled for the general operations of the team. With longtime coaches and support from student workers and volunteers, UTD esports already had an infrastructure in place for setting up

[her poem] was really relatable and struck home.”

At a university that is very STEM-focused, Benaim’s poetry night emphasized the importance of taking some time to emotionally refresh yourself through creative activities. The creative writing community at UTD is often the original partner company set them back to square one at the start of the fall semester. The current timeline for the implementation of that secondary failsafe is tentative.

“The latest I heard from Apogee is they have reached somewhat of an agreement with the outside internet provider—or the fiber provider, I should say,” Grief said. “Once we get all the approvals, then it's usually about scrims, planning events and heading to competitions. At previous programs, Boehm had to do much of this work himself, and he said that he was excited to work with what UTD now had to offer.

“It’s kind of cool coming into this program where there’s already such a rich history and an [extremely] pas- overlooked, but extremely valuable to those who participate.

“I will say, I look forward to [attending] other poetry events… especially because we go to a STEM school that is so very draining,” said Meghana Sankar, a psychology junior. “It’s nice to go to something so intimate

30 to 45 days [to implement].”

UTD’s contract with Apogee will soon be up for renewal. While Housing, OIT and Apogee have worked together well over the past few years in resolving issues like this most recent outage, Grief said that it is too early to determine whether that contract will be renewed.

“A lot of evaluation has to go into it, and there are a lot of people involved in that,” he sionate group of students,” Boehm said. “It’s been awesome so far, just being able to work with these students who are some of the most passionate I’ve ever seen, which obviously will help make my life easier and then just makes everything more exciting because there’s so much going on.” and emotional, and let yourself feel things and not worry about an assignment that’s due at midnight. I think poetry reminds you that, yes everything you study at school is important, but it’s also important to feel things and have experiences. It reminds you that you’re human.” said. “So right now, our service provider will begin evaluating heavily within the next few months… we want to make sure that they're providing what we're asking them to provide our students.”

After all, as Apogee’s residential services page states: “While lost connectivity may have once been a survivable annoyance, a class lecture dropped midstream is a failure of your mission.”