Author Spotlight
Caroline Gould
The “Lancer Spring Smash,” a pickleball tournament fundraiser for the All Sports Booster Club, will take place on March 20 at Homestead Country Club and is now open for anyone to register.
With this being the All Sports Booster Club’s only fundraising event of the year, there’s a $50 entrance fee for a two-person team under the age of 19 and $200 for a team of two adults to enter, and teams can register via EventBrite.
The entrance fee includes admission, a T-shirt for each player on the team, food, drinks and free admission to the post-party for the adult teams. The Booster Club is also accepting general donations via their registration link.
The adult-only post-tournament party will cost $50 for any adult wanting to attend who is not already participating in the tournament. To stay within the COVID-19 safety guidelines, the tournament will be consciously social distanced requiring masks on during games and the post-party will take place outdoors.
The tournament is open to both recreational and competitive players of all ages. As far as recreational players come, the East Pickleball Club plans on coaching some of the more inexperienced players who are signed up.
Senior Sienna Sun is one of the students who founded Pickleball Club at the beginning of this school year, which now has around 30 members. She is looking forward to hitting balls back and forth, going over the sport’s basic rules with the new players and possibly helping out by volunteering at the tournament.
“It seems like [pickleball] is a sport that’s made for all ages, so I’m not too concerned about how [hard it will be for] people to pick it up, and I think it’s a good fundraising idea to bring in all ages,” Sun said.
Prairie Village released their 20-year future plan for the city on Jan. 19, coining it as the “Village Vision 2.0.”
According to the Prairie Village website, the comprehensive plan for the city’s future was laid out in fall of 2018, but this year the city council authorized the city staff and the planning commission to begin updating the Village Vision.
The original vision was developed in 2007, and since many of the goals and plans outlined in that version have been accomplished or are no longer relevant to today’s issues, the city felt it was time to start from a blank slate, according to Deputy City Administrator Jamie Robichaud.
“So after several conversations with our planning commission and our city council, they directed our staff to facilitate an update to that plan to make it more relevant to today’s challenges and issues,” Robichaud said.
The city council held a public hearing on Jan. 5 to receive the input of the community before they proceeded with voting on the final adoption of the plan on Jan. 19. The plan was broken down into five different categories — strong neighborhoods, sustainability, productivity, quality public spaces and viable commercial centers.
Even though the plan doesn’t technically create laws or official regulations within the city, the plan largely focuses on preserving where Prairie Village is today, along with outlining how the city can improve in these categories, which is why Robichaud believes the plan is crucial for the city to have.
“It also outlines the public parts of the city, so our streets and our sidewalks and all of those that are part of what we call the ‘public realm,’ and it outlines what our goals are for that to make sure our city continues to be walkable and easily accessible to different commercial centers, schools and all of those things,” Robichaud said.
After the discovery that highly transmissible COVID-19 variants have spread to the United States, public health experts are suggesting that Americans begin to double mask.
Doubling up on masks could be as easy as strapping on one mask over another, or could include pinning or sewing a fabric mask onto a surgical mask. This could also include everyday Americans wearing KN95s or other higher-quality surgical masks that experts have previously urged saving for hospital workers.
According to the Washington Post, the United States is continuing to fall behind other countries when it comes to mask mandates, as several Asian countries — such as South Korea and Singapore — have had high-quality masks made to be sent out to their citizens.
Within the past few weeks, countries in Europe have started to require medical-grade masks to be worn out in public because the virus strain that originated in the United Kingdom is continuing to spread at a rapid pace. This new virus strain is estimated by British scientists to be around 70% more likely to spread than the original strain, according to The Washington Post.
Senior Paige Good has recently started wearing a surgical mask under her cloth one to school, as she thinks it’s important to listen to public health experts’ recommendations. According to Good, wearing two masks isn’t uncomfortable during the school day and she feels as though two masks are needed for the congested hallways at school.
“I definitely think filtration-wise [wearing two masks will] be a lot better,” Good said. “I know a lot of people wear cloth masks — which are great, cute and fashionable — but they don’t necessarily filtrate as well as surgical masks.”
While the Biden Administration has not yet made double-masking mandatory nor called for the mass production or distribution of higher-quality masks, public health experts still encourage Americans to double-up on masks.
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