Is the Atlantic Sun Conference, of which Belmont University is a member, headed for changes as a result of realignment of some of the big university athletic conferences? Perhaps, reports the Associated Press, noting that A-Sun member Georgia State University is expressing interesting in leaving the A-Sun for the Atlantic 10, the Southern Conference or Conference USA.

The 11-team league has six small, private schools that have little in common with Georgia State – Belmont in Nashville; Campbell University in Buie Creek, North Carolina; Gardner-Webb in Boiling Springs, North Carolina; Jacksonville University in Florida; newcomer Lipscomb in Nashville; Mercer in Macon and Stetson in Deland, Florida.
Georgia State President Carl Patton says the school would like to be in a league with bigger schools like itself and attract bigger audiences. If changes are afoot in the conference, Patton said, “We need to either bring some other larger schools into the Atlantic Sun, or we need to look into another conference.”
Troy State, the A-Sun’s representative in the 2003 NCAA men’s basketball tournament, will exit the conference for the Sun Belt Conference one year from now.

Another A-Sun member, Central Florida, “also could be moving on as a result of the trickle down effect from ACC expansion,” the AP reports.
Belmont University President Dr. Robert Fisher is president of the A-Sun Conference.

Naples Daily News of Naples, Fla., mentions Belmont University spring 2003 Dean’s List member Sarah Dew. The Pine Journal of Cloquet, Minn., mentions spring 2003 Dean’s List member Teresa Jeffers. The Bowling Green Daily News in Kentucky mentions spring 2003 Dean’s List member Jeffrey Williams.

Nashville City Paper comments on Belmont’s ELS Language Center:

Foreign students are choosing Nashville as a place they would like to visit while they study English, which is why ELS Language Centers, located locally on the campus of Belmont University, is in need of host families for six-eight week periods.
[ELS Language Center Director John] Robinson said many students choose Nashville out of 30 U.S. center locations because the city is more inland and offers Southern hospitality and a safer environment. The center teaches 13 terms of English per year to a variety of persons, including students from Korea, Brazil, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and Ecuador wanting to apply to a college or university in the United States.

Lance Cpl. Gregory E. MacDonald, a 1995 graduate of Belmont University, was killed in Iraq. The Lowell Sun newspaper in Lowell, Mass., has complete – and moving – coverage.
MacDonald earned a degree in philosophy and social policy in 1995 from Belmont and a graduate degree from American University in Washington, D.C., in 2001.
From the Lowell Sun:

BURLINGTON – “That I have died means that I have failed to achieve the one thing in life I truly longed to give the world, PEACE,” reads the last statement of Lance Cpl. Gregory E. MacDonald.
More than 200 friends and family mourned MacDonald at a military burial yesterday in Pine Haven Cemetery in Burlington, after services at St. Margaret’s Church.
A 21-gun salute was fired in honor of the U.S. Marine whose life’s work was to help achieve peace in the Middle East. MacDonald died June 25 in Hilla, Iraq, when his light armored vehicle turned over on his way to rescue ambushed American soldiers. He was 29.

The Washington Post reports MacDonald, who lived in the Washington D.C. area, joined the Marines after earning his master’s degree at American University because he saw military service as a way to gain credibility and experience in his intended career in Middle Eastern affairs:

“He wanted to do foreign policy work,” [friend Jeni] Spevak said, “and he wanted to do it for the Middle East, and he wanted to create peace in the Middle East.”

The Post says MacDonald was “a cerebral man with red hair and blue eyes who loved books and classical guitar and studied philosophy as an undergraduate (and) did not fit the classic profile of an enlisted Marine.”

Former Belmont University basketball star Joe Behling is profiled in the July 3 Tennessean:

During his basketball career at Belmont University, Joe Behling was the main man. He scored 2,823 points from 1987-90 and is still the school’s all-time leading scorer.
These days Behling is a main man of different sorts as one of the few male teachers at Park Avenue Elementary School in West Nashville.
”I teach in an inner-city school and I feel like that’s where I need to be,” Behling said. ”We’ve got some challenges there, but it’s neat to know that the kids need you. There are a lot of kids there that need a positive male role model.

The June 29 Vicksburg Post profiles Belmont women’s basketball associate coach Donna Brown:

All the kids stare at Donna Brown. From the moment the whistle falls from her mouth, their gazes are fixed on her, anxiously awaiting her words.
The fiery Brown barks out instructions, and the kids follow them without question.
To some, the charismatic coach could appear intense and ruthless, but then she follows it up with some horseplay and joking, putting any notion of seriousness aside. This two-faced combination has served Brown well through her years of coaching basketball.
Brown excelled on the court in her days at Vicksburg High and turned her basketball beginning into a career. After spending four years as a starter for Mississippi State, she took up an assistant coaching job at Belmont University in Nashville.
Her success there will lead her to a promotion next week to associate head coach, Belmont head coach Tony Cross said.