About 12 years ago, Courtney Allen started off in sports by helping her brother‘s baseball team. She eventually joined the boys’ baseball team as a player, and her love for baseball and softball has grown every since.

Allen, who is undecided about her major, is now going into her second season on the City College women’s softball team after a five and a half year break from the sport due to personal reasons. She played softball for Elk Grove High School before coming to City College.

Allen is one of six kids, and also the twin sister of Panthers starting quarterback Cody Allen, who was born one minute before her. Cody was given the award of male athlete of the year for his play during the 2009-2010 season.

Allen says that although she and her brother both have found success in their respective sports, they do not compete to see who is the better athlete.

“We help each other a lot through struggles,” says Allen. “I try not to compare each other to our successes.”

The rest of the softball team calls Allen “the grandma” of the team, since she is 24 years old and mostly plays alongside 18- to…» Read More

From the sprawling animal reserve in the Tsavo National Park to the glacial peaks of Mt. Kenya, the African continent boasts a vast array of sights and sounds. For Diana Muhoro, a 24-year-old theatre arts major at City College who grew up in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, Africa is with her always.

“I’m definitely proud to be Kenyan and I thank God,” Muhoro says. “Being born in Kenya has shaped me to be the strong woman I am today.”

While in Kenya, she gained an interest in politics. Her father campaigned in elections as a counselor for Embakasi constituency, one of the eight constituencies in Nairobi Province.

“My father and a few of my extended family members were the ones who were involved in politics,” Muhoro says. But instead of working in politics like her father, Muhoro decided to follow another career path.

“I wanted to pursue medicine, not just because I have a huge heart for serving people and helping people, but also my family and the situation I was in, influenced me,” Muhoro says. “It’s hard to have great opportunities from where I come from if you don’t have a ‘good’ degree.”

When Muhoro came to the…» Read More

Every day we are bombarded with images of teens texting all the time. T-Mobile’s recent television commercials show teens texting while waiting for and on a school bus and at a football game. Movies and television programs show teens on their cell phones or trying to get a signal.

It seems that every teen has a cell phone and can speak and understand the language of texting better than any other language.

So this brings to mind the question should books be translated into texting?

Don Piraro, a freelance cartoonist, brought this up in a March 2007 Sacramento Bee comic, “Bizarro”. In the cartoon, Piraro had a teacher holding up a new textbook which read, “Shakespeare in Texting”.

It’s not just cartoon teachers who use texting as a way to learn, but it happens in real life as well.

In a September 2010 article for The Press-Enterprise, a Southern California publication, Kevin Pearson wrote about a school that have students texting the answers and encourages learning through the many new technologies that students are using in their everyday lives.

In instances like the mass shooting in Columbine High School, being able to text parents and police during…» Read More

The City College news publication, the Express, garnered an impressive 14 awards at the Journalism Association of Community Colleges NorCal conference Nov. 6 in San Jose.

Online news editor for SacCityExpress.com, Stephanie Rodriguez, won first place for her article about the recall effort of ASG president Steve Macias during fall 2009. Under Rodriguez’s leadership as editor in chief during the spring 2010 semester, the Express was one of six community college newspapers in Northern California to win the general excellence category.

“Winning general excellence shows the Express is a student-publication worth paying attention to,” Rodriguez said. “It definitely shows all the hard work, late nights and stress of running a publication pays off in the end.”

Two other first-place awards were presented to the Express page designers. Casey Mar, former Express design editor and current “Nightlife” columnist for The Sacramento Bee’s Ticket, won first place for her student-designed advertisement. Mar, Victor Quintana and David Kitchell won for their front-page newspaper design. News editor Maxwell McKee, recently hired as a public relations technician in the City College Public Information Office, placed second for his profile on Scott Bailey, a City Theatre staff technician.

The Express website, SacCityExpress.com, presenting original online content…» Read More

She led the City College Panthers to their first women’s golf state championship, a Nor-Cal Championship and a Big-8 Conference Championship last season. The Big-8 named her a member of the All-Big-8 Conference Team. She is a Nor-Cal Medalist and a State Medalist for the second consecutive year.

This successful golfer is City College’s Erika Salinas, the 20-year-old who was first introduced to the game at the age of 6 by her father. She was awarded the 2009-2010 City College Female Athlete of the Year award.

“Winning Female Athlete of the Year was a great accomplishment for me, and a great honor.” says Salinas. Salinas led the Panthers as the 2009 Desert Classic Tournament Champions, the Suttertown Classic Champions, and the Santa Barbara Classic Tournament Champions.

She is also currently third in the history of City College women’s golf with an individual best score of 71. She set new school records with teammates Kayla Riede, Michelle Bello, and Elisse Van Deusen for best team score with a 290.

All of Salinas’ accomplishments enabled her to be granted the Female Athlete of the Year award for 2009-2010, an award she says she feels honored to receive. Salinas’s teammate of two years,…» Read More

If you walk into any movie theater tonight, chances are that you will have the option to see at least one movie remake.

Lately, there have been many remakes of past movies. This allows the movies to reach new audiences that they may not have reached otherwise, but I would rather see orignal movies more often.

The original “Ocean’s Eleven” from 1960 starred Frank Sinatra as Danny Ocean. Other members of the Rat Pack – like Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr., among others starred in the movie as well. Sinatra’s fans and age group are dying off and today, most people today haven’t heard of him, let alone seen his image. George Clooney, on the other hand, is well known today and brings a new face and fan base to the movie.

Other movies like “Hairspray” and “Alice in Wonderland” are remade multiple times. There are several versions of “Hairspray” including the original version, which starred Ricki Lake and Sonny Bono in 1988. The film was adapted into a Broadway play in 2002. The most recent adaptation of this movie was the 2007 musical version.

Some movie remakes don’t bring just a new generation to the audience, but they also…» Read More

City College’s 2009 women’s golf team won the college’s first golf state championship Nov. 18 at Kings Country Club in Hanford, Calif.

Led by coach Tim Kiernan for the last nine years, the Panthers won the Community College Athletic Association’s Women Golf’s Championship against Bakersfield, Palomar, and Cañada community colleges, all Southern California teams.

“We set goals at the beginning of the year,” Kiernan said, “to win the conference, to win NorCal and to win state. And we accomplished all those.”

The Panthers started the second day of the two-day championship match, trailing Bakersfield College by nine strokes. However, by the end of the second day, they pulled ahead by five and clinched the championship.

Golf team members Kayla Riede and Erika Salinas both were awarded medals for their performance. Riede, who set a new record earlier this season for best individual score, placed second in the top 12 individual scores, Salinas placed fourth.

“It’s really cool because we got second last year,” says City College golfer Kristin Madsen, “and we were really close. It’s cool to be on the team to win it and go out with a bang.”The Panthers have been nearly flawless this season, wracking up 84…» Read More

The United States is often touted as a capitalist country, where prices, production, and distribution of goods are decided by competition in a free market. But with smaller companies closing during this economic downturn and greedy corporations receiving bailouts from the government, our capitalism is quickly becoming corporatism.

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary corporatism is an economic system in which the government exercises control of the market, not through the socialization of industry but through indirect control of private corporations. Capitalist free-market policies usually advocate laissez faire government involvement, meaning there should be no government intervention or restrictions imposed on industry.

At the end of last year, several big corporations were on the verge of bankruptcy which threatened the economic stability of the U.S. financial markets. Ultimately, taxpayers shelled out billions of dollars to prop up the failing institutions, in effect rewarding failure, as the government increased its power over industry.

“The [Bush] administration says Bear Stearns, AIG, Citigroup and other big Wall Street firms are ‘too big to fail.’ They can take dramatic risks and the taxpayers will cover them,” David Boaz wrote in the Dec. 17, 2008, issue of the Investors Business Daily.

While Bush bailed out…» Read More

Since the advent of the radio and the telephone, a steady stream of technological achievements has made communicating with others quick, easy and widely accessible.

Communication technology, like text messaging and social media Web sites, can be very beneficial as long as it doesn’t take over your life.

A random survey of 25 City College students revealed that the most popular medium of communication used on campus is cell phones. Almost every student in the survey owns a cell phone and uses it almost every day.

Text messaging allows students to pause conversations, tuck them into a pocket, go into class and continue later where they left off with a flip of a cell phone. However, when students text in class, they are making their conversations a priority over their education and are distracting students who want to learn.

According to a Nielson Mobile survey, released in September 2008, in the second quarter of 2008, cell phone users in the United States sent more text messages than made phone calls. An even more astonishing statistic is that the number of cell phone users who text increased by 450 percent from 2006, according to the poll.

For making and communicating…» Read More

You walk by the City College Cultural Awareness Center and you see a sign promoting a movie that will be shown in about 10 minutes. You also notice that it’s free, so you walk in. As you enter the room, you hear light chatter and smell the faint aroma of popcorn and Starbucks coffee. When you turn the corner, you see seven people, the majority of whom appear to be 30 years old and up, quietly talking, a table full of shirts for sale by Le Club Français and there’s that popcorn and coffee on another table, with some candy and soda. All the food and drinks are free. As “La Vie en Rose”, which garnered a best actress Oscar in 2008, begins to flicker through the DVD player into a medium-sized screen, five more people trickle in.  Throughout the movie, occasional chatter and small chuckles are heard-as well as the club adviser, Madame Genevieve Flett, occasionally clapping her hands and cheering for the characters and the songs. The film portrays the tragic life of French icon and singer, Edith Piaf. Piaf was born in 1915 in Paris. She entertained people on the streets of Paris until she was offered…» Read More