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Students Enter Vans Designing Contest

By Abby Douglas, Staff Writer

Have you ever wished you could design your own pair of shoes? Three students from McClatchy are doing just that, through the 2015 Vans Custom Culture Contest. The contest allows 3,000 high schools around the United States to sign up and receive four pairs of blank white Vans. The schools can then choose artistically talented students to customize the shoes according to the contest’s four themes: Art, Music, Action Sports, and Local Flavor. The designers can be as creative as they want– as long as each of the four pairs of shoes focuses on one theme.

After all the designs are submitted, Vans chooses five Finalist schools and flies the artists to a Final Event in New York City. During this all expenses paid trip, surprise celebrity judges pick one Grand Prize Winner. The Final Event is filled with other fun festivities, including prizes from Journeys, Truth, and Laguna College of Art and Design.vans 2

The Grand Prize is huge. The winning student designers will receive $50,000 for their high school’s art program and a chance to have the winning shoe design sold in Vans retail stores. The four runners up also receive $4,000 in funds for their schools.

McClatchy’s own ceramics teacher, Johnathan Hubbard, got student designers involved and made sure McClatchy was among the 3,000 schools to be sent blank Vans. CKM’s three student designers are John Henry Sedrome, Valentina Polendo-Rodriguez, and Matt Cowley.

John Henry (‘15) chose the “Art” theme and drew the inspiration for his creative Vans from two Hindu gods, Ganesh and Suvannamaccha. He says that his designs are a result of “the clash of different subcultures mixed in with my personal aesthetic.” John Henry has been customizing objects long before this contest– as a kid, he used to draw all over the walls and floors of his house. When he’s not designing a pair of Vans, John Henry enjoys sewing, painting, and drawing.

Though he claims to have gotten involved in the contest because he was “bored in school and swimming hadn’t started,” Matthew (‘15) took an everyday concept– “Sports”– and made a unique pair of Vans with an Aztec influence. His goal was to create a marketable shoe (keeping in mind that the winning design could be sold in Vans stores), and he chose the sport of surfing to make a fun design. Matthew has taken art classes at McClatchy and has loved drawing since elementary school.vans 3

Like the other designers, Valentina (‘15) has been an artist her entire life. She remembers looking up to her talented brother and starting to carry a sketchbook with her wherever she went. As she got older, Valentina began to be influenced by graffiti art and calligraphy, which shows through in her Vans design. Choosing the theme “Music,” she placed elements like a singing mouth, music notes, and colors to represent “the many emotions one can get from just one person singing.” Though she was reluctant to participate in the contest at first because she was worried that it would get in the way of school work, Valentina says that it has been “an amazing memory of my senior year in high school.”

For the fourth pair of blank Vans, Valentina and John Henry collaborated under the theme “Local Flavor.” The two designers decided to center the shoes on Sacramento’s “City of Trees” nickname. John Henry painted abstract tree designs on the sides, while Valentina made the Tower Bridge span across the tongues of both shoes. They also included a Sacramento sunset and view of the river. Valentina drew graffiti words “Sac” and “Town” on the backs. They hope that this beautiful design will give the Vans judges a taste of McClatchy’s home city.

    OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAMr. Hubbard says of the experience, “It was nice to watch the three different student artists work together and collaborate on a piece, and spend a month or so working in a medium that they weren’t familiar with. A lot of problem-solving and great collaborative effort. I’m very proud of them.”

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Ebola Could Threaten 2015 Africa Cup

By Abby Douglas, Staff writer

On Tuesday, November 11, the African country of Morocco was expelled from the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations. The Africa Cup is the continent’s largest and most competitive soccer tournament. It is a biennial championship between 16 teams from many African countries scheduled to take place from January 17 to February 8, 2015.

Morocco was originally scheduled to be the host of the 2015 Africa Cup, but it attempted to postpone the tournament by six months or a year in order to decrease the threat of the Ebola virus to the Cup’s thousands of participants and attendees. This attempted postponement resulted the Confederation of African Football’s expulsion of Morocco both from the position of host country and the privilege of sending a team to represent the country in the Africa Cup.

Morocco was expelled from the tournament due to the Confederation of African Football’s accusation that Moroccan officials were being “alarmist” in attempting to push the Cup back to a later date. According to the New York Times, a postponement of the championship could potentially be financially crippling to the regional soccer governing body.

Currently, the Ebola virus has not reached Morocco, though it is relatively close to the countries of West Africa where the virus has reached catastrophically epidemic levels. The countries of Western Sahara and Mauritania lie between Morocco and Senegal, Mali, and Guinea, three countries either very recently declared Ebola-free, at high risk of Ebola, or currently facing an Ebola outbreak.

Even so, Moroccan soccer officials remain worried about the possibility of Ebola spreading to their country through the Africa Cup. They firmly refused to host the tournament championships at the scheduled time in January 2015.

The West African countries with the largest outbreaks of Ebola are Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. These countries have participated in the Africa Cup in previous years, but no teams from any of these countries have qualified to compete in 2015. Liberia’s soccer team has already been eliminated in preliminary rounds. Sierra Leone is still in the running, but their team is less likely to qualify because it is in last-place in its group. Guinea, however, has a team tied for third in its group that has the chance to qualify later this month.

In the months since the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, these countries have faced issues surrounding their soccer teams playing in other places. Sierra Leone in particular experienced brutal discrimination against their soccer team when they played in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as in Cameroon. While Sierra Leone’s team was on the field, a chant of “Ebola, Ebola” started. They were also placed in an empty hotel while playing in Cameroon as well as forced to undergo checks for the Ebola virus twice a day, even though the players had not been in Sierra Leone for about three months.

No country has stepped up enthusiastically to take Morocco’s place, though Angola, Nigeria, and Gabon are possibilities. The Confederation of African Football will have to either find a new host country, postpone the tournament, or cancel it altogether. African soccer players, officials, and fans await their decision, which is expected to come soon.

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Mr. Tagg: Rockstar Turned Teacher

By Abby Douglas, Staff Writer

Recognize this guy? If you do, it’s probably because it’s Mr. Tagg, McClatchy’s resident rock star. For those of you who have had Mr. Tagg as an English teacher, his musical career as a bass player in the band Bourgeois Tagg may not be big news. No matter if you’ve been in his class or not, there are probably still a few things you don’t know. So, we at The Prospector dug a little deeper.

For starters, will you tell us a little bit about your role in the band?

Brent Bourgeois and I were in a previous band together. We moved to California with this band, Uncle Rainbow. One of the guys in the Doobie Brothers, Michael Hossack (the drummer) moved us out to California because he wanted to record us. One thing led to another and Brent and I broke away from that group and formed our own group. That was in the early 80’s. We actually had the luxury of writing our own songs first. There was a guy who rented us a house so we could work—we didn’t have to work for a while. So we called him an angel. He allowed us to write material for about a year before we even got started. We recorded our demos and then we put the band together to do the material. The band was in town, in Sacramento, and northern California for about a year and a half before we got signed. We got signed in the old fashioned way—there was an agent that came up from Los Angeles and sat in this place downtown and we didn’t even know he was there. Then we got a call a couple days later saying, “We’d like you to sign with Island Records.” So Brent and I wrote the music, we sang the music, and we were just kind of the band leaders.

Was there a specific instrument that you played?

Yeah, bass guitar. When we went down to sign the record contract we really thought we ought to change the name of the group [Bourgeois Tagg]. The head of the record company said, “Oh no, I love that name.” For what reason, I have no idea. It ended up being the name of the group, and that’s how it worked.

Was Bourgeois Tagg your first band?

No, I’d been at it quite a while. I’d been in a lot of original bands trying to get signed. Not a lot, but two or three. It wasn’t my first time trying to do it. Uncle Rainbow, for instance—they were trying to get signed.

Would you say that you were pretty well known?

Well, yeah, we were well-known in our heyday, but it only lasted for three years. But yeah, we would go to Europe, for example, and I was in London one time and someone walked up to me and said, “Aren’t you Larry Tagg?” So, that’s kind of an indication

Was that fun—being well known?

Oh, yeah. Absolutely it was a fun time.

What was the best part about being in the band?

Traveling. I loved to travel. The other good thing was the respect from your peers. You know, you run up against somebody that you already know, and he knows you, and he says, “I love your stuff.” That was the big payoff—when your peers know who you are and like your stuff.

What was the worst part?

Things with the band tend to get a little, you know…inside the band, when there’s so much money to be made, people start getting kind of grudge-y. That was the only downside I can see. Otherwise, it was a good time.

Can you tell us a story that you particularly remember from your musical career?

The one story that I think about is when I was auditioning for Hall & Oates, another group. It was in Central Park and they told me I was going to be playing with them during the Earth Day concert. So I thought about forty people on blankets. They flew me into New York and they rehearsed me for a couple weeks so that I would be ready for this Earth Day thing. As it turns out, Earth Day was the first day of spring—they had had a really long, cold winter—and everybody showed up in Central Park. There were a million people in front of the stage. It was the Great Meadow stage. People were all the way into the woods on the far end of it. Even the guys in the band, even Daryl Hall, who had seen a lot of big crowds, was backstage going, “I can’t believe the people that are here.”

I remember last year you told us about how you carried a dictionary around on the bus while you were touring. Did any of your band mates or any fans ever make fun of you for being a nerd?

Always. Always. But it’s just who I was. I was always that guy. They had these tour buses that had bunks in them so we could sleep on the bus. And rather than being in the TV room with everybody else I was always in my bunk reading my little books and stuff, and looking up my words. The fans didn’t know about it, so they didn’t really give me a hard time. But the guys in the band, always.

It was obviously a big transition to go from being a full time musician to being an English teacher. Why did you do that?

By the time I made the transition, I was actually a staff songwriter with a publishing company, and you know what? It just wasn’t that fun. But that’s just a part of it. The main thing was that I had kids, and being away from my family was also not fun. So when you’re unmarried it’s one thing, and you can travel around and be the free agent. But once you’re married, things are a little different. That’s the main answer.

Do you ever regret leaving your musical career behind?

No, I never do. As a matter of fact, I see my friends that are still musicians and I feel so lucky. Because you know, there’s kind of an arc to a [musical] career, and once you’re on the downside of that, it’s not that much fun. It’s great when you’re looking at the audiences getting bigger, and then when you see the audiences getting smaller it’s really not that much fun. Plus I love being with you guys [my students]. It’s just fun to me. I come out of a classroom with you all, and I think, there’s no better job than this. I love this so much. Just because we’d had a really good discussion. Plus my wife is a teacher, we have so much to talk about. I have such a full life at this point. And you know, I did that [music]. And I’m glad I did it. But I’m happy that I’m not still doing it.

So you’re happy to be a teacher.

Absolutely.