Lone Star Musher

SEE YOU IN NOME: Chappel with an honorary “Iditarider” at the start of the race.

Jeffrey Schultz/Alaska Stock

Eleven days, 1,100 miles, 16 dogs, one tired Texan. That’s the box score from Randy Chappel’s first Iditarod race.

A Fort Worth investment manager a year ago, Chappel, ’89, MBA ’94, ended an improbable journey in March by placing 29th in a field of 64 at the annual sled dog race across Alaska, just six months after he began serious training. He is the first Texas resident ever to participate in the Iditarod.

Inspired by a dogsled ride while vacationing in Alberta, Canada, four years ago, Chappel helped underwrite musher Aliy Zirkle for two years before deciding last year that he wanted to compete. After a month or so of training with Zirkle, he completed his first qualifying races early in 2002. By June, he had quit his job at Goff Moore Strategic Partners and purchased a team of Alaskan huskies. In November, he moved to a village near Fairbanks with his wife, D’Ann, and infant son, Trenton. D’Ann was pregnant with the couple’s second child (due in April), but wasn’t daunted by the prospect of spending her winter in a 20-by-20-foot cabin with few amenities. “Her only requirement was that it had to have running water,” Chappel says. “She didn’t want to be walking to an outhouse when it was 30 below [zero].”

Compared to the challenges of caring for the dogs and dealing with severe weather and sleep deprivation, driving the sled “is the easy part,” says Chappel. “You have to be a sort of miniveterinarian, checking the dogs’ feet, making sure they aren’t injured, preparing their food [each dog burns more than 10,000 calories per day during the race] and melting snow for the dogs’ drinking water.”

His love for the dogs and his admiration for their athleticism were only reinforced by the experience. One day late in the race, near the tiny coastal village of Shaktoolik, the team plowed through temperatures of minus 18 and winds gusting to 50 mph, recalls Chappel, who averaged about three hours of sleep a day during the 11 days on the Fairbanks-to-Nome course.

Chappel finished second among the 19 rookies and earned a trophy for placing in the top 30 overall. He still owns 10 of the dogs, including Jazz, his star lead dog, whom he took home—along with the family—to Texas.

Chappel went “way past” his $50,000 budget and admits the cost may prevent him from returning. “I would love to do it again, but it’s expensive, and we have a new baby. We’ll see.”

A Dance Legend Shares His Steps

FAMILY HERITAGE: Nicholas joined granddaughters Nicole, ’06, center, and Cathie at a tap class.

Glenn Matsumura

An invitation to dance on Friday and Saturday usually means a fraternity party or local club, but for one weekend last quarter, students had a chance to kick up their heels the old-fashioned way. Fayard Nicholas, half of the legendary Nicholas Brothers tap-dancing duo, appeared on campus for a two-day residency in early February.

Fayard, now 89, and his brother Harold, who died in 2000, starred at Harlem’s famous Cotton Club in the early 1930s, performed on Broadway with Fannie Brice and Josephine Baker, and appeared in more than 30 Hollywood films. The team became famous for their soaring split leaps and inventive choreography, including a spectacular staircase routine in Stormy Weather.

Susan Cashion, a senior lecturer in Stanford’s drama department, says the Nicholas Brothers brought African-American culture to mainstream audiences, who previously associated dancing with white stars like Fred Astaire. “They took the form and made it their own,” she says.

The event featured film showings, two question-and-answer sessions with Nicholas and a tap dance class led by Nicholas’s granddaughter, Nicole, a Stanford freshman.

What's That Helicopter Doing Here?

SPECIAL DELIVERY: Capt. Timothy Perez said the Air Guard ferried three patients.

James Robinson

Considering the climate—the war in Iraq had just begun and terrorist alerts were everywhere—the appearance of two Air National Guard helicopters on campus might have seemed cause for alarm. But this was a mission of mercy.

Early on the afternoon of March 19, a pair of Pave Hawk helicopters landed at Roble Field to deliver three elderly patients for medical treatment at Stanford Hospital. The patients had been plucked from the Statendam, a Holland America cruise ship on its way to Enseñada, Mexico, after they suffered heart ailments. According to Col. Ed Lewis, the choppers left nearby Moffett Field at 4 a.m. and traveled more than 500 nautical miles out to the ship. Refueled in the air by accompanying airplanes, the camouflage helicopters, which were too large for the hospital helipad, touched down at Roble about 2:30 p.m., immediately attracting a crowd of students.

Resident fellows and students had been alerted that the aircraft were coming, so their arrival wasn’t too distressing. Senior Chris Lynskey didn’t get the word. He looked out his window in Lagunita Court, “saw that big gun” and wondered whether a military operation was under way, he told Stanford Report.

Noah's Arc

AIMING HIGH: Marty’s invention was shown at the Final Four.

Mark Tuschman

Silicon Valley is famous for inventions that began in somebody’s garage, but here’s one that began in a driveway. Two years ago, friends and churchmates Alan Marty and Ridge McGhee met at Marty’s house for their regular pickup basketball game. Each had been looking for a way to help his daughter improve her shooting and was convinced that the proper arc of a shot was key. Both men had rigged homemade practice aids—Marty’s involved a rake on a ladder—to get their daughters to shoot the ball at the proper height. Discussion led to collaboration, which led to a product that may revolutionize how shooting is taught.

It’s called Noah, and its marketing tagline elegantly describes its function: “building the perfect arc.” Using a video camera and machine vision technology that allows computers to “see,” Noah documents the trajectory of a basketball shot and tells the shooter how he or she is doing. In the product’s online demonstration, a player shoots a series of free throws. After each shot, Noah—a 5-foot-tall device that looks like a cross between a computer and a sneaker—verbally spits out the angle of the arc: “45.8,” “48.2.” According to Marty, a player using Noah in practice can develop the proper muscle memory to replicate the optimal arc, between 42 and 48 degrees.

Marty, MA ’84, MBA ’84, and McGhee, who specializes in machine vision technology, also recruited Tom Edwards, ’83, PhD ’88, a rocket scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, for the project. After developing a prototype, they tested it at local high schools and with the Stanford men’s basketball team. Players who trained with Noah increased their shooting percentage about 7 percent.

The Dallas Mavericks began using Noah last fall, with encouraging results. They led the NBA in free-throw percentage (80.6) as of April 8, and the team’s shooting coach, Gary Boren, has endorsed the product.

FOLLOW-UP

On Title IX, a Voice of Dissent

At a Capitol Hill press conference on February 26, former Stanford soccer star Julie Foudy, ’93, challenged a federal commission chaired by athletics director Ted Leland, PhD ’83, calling its findings on Title IX “biased and slanted.”

Foudy served on the 15-member Commission on Opportunity in Athletics, but refused to sign its final report. The group looked at the 30-year history of the law that bans gender discrimination at schools receiving federal funding (“What’s Next for Title IX,” March/April) and recommended changes in how it is implemented.

Captain of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team and former president of the Women’s Sports Foundation, Foudy argued that the document “fails to recognize the discrimination that still exists” against women participating in sports. “Other than mentioning one statistic, nowhere does the report address the participation disparity of 18 percent between men and women.... Rather, the report’s emphasis is on rectifying the exclusion of men,” Foudy wrote in a letter to Leland and commission co-chair Cynthia Cooper. Foudy and Olympic swimmer Donna de Varona issued a dissenting report with its own recommendations, principally that Title IX’s current policies remain intact.

Hours after Foudy’s announcement, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige said he would only accept the commission’s 15 unanimous recommendations and disregard eight proposals in the report that prompted the dissent.