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The 14,000 square-foot sports performance center features a weight room, nutrition bar and indoor turf training area, dedicated team meeting rooms, additional coaches' offices, and an enclosed pavilion and outdoor courtyard for Bears Club hospitality and engagement space.

Minor will lead the university's marketing and communication efforts, which connect LR with various audiences through an integrated and expanding platform of digital and social media channels, digital marketing and media relations.

The Bears name was adopted in 1924 after a sports reporter described the baseball team charging out of the dugout like mountain bears. The original Joe Bear was introduced to campus in 1927 as a live black bear, the symbol of the college athletics mascot.

Prior to LR, Pate served as director of athletics at the University of Illinois Springfield for five years, where she was responsible for the administration and oversight of a 16-sport NCAA Division II intercollegiate athletics program in the Great Lakes Valley Conference.

Students embark on a weeklong performance and tour of Ireland learning a deeper understanding of the historical and cultural context of Irish music and culture in the process.

The university's Phi Beta Lambda chapter won multiple awards at the 65th Annual North Carolina PBL State Leadership Conference held in Charlotte.

LR's Balloon Engineering and Rocketry Club took seven months to build and successfully launch a 92-inch rocket. They competed against teams selected from 22 states.

LR offered its first graduate degree program in the 1970s, and has since expanded to over 30 master and doctorate degree program offerings with more than 900 students enrolled.

Reuters News Pictures photographer Jonathan Ernst has flown on Air Force One and covered three presidents on five continents in more than 40 states, but he learned the ins-and-outs of news coverage at Lenoir-Rhyne.

Former LR football standout Hank McCrorie is owner of Burly Wine, named after his Bears nickname, which is available at a variety of restaurants and fine wine shops in 23 states.

In the course The Meme-ing of Life: An Introduction to Visual Rhetoric, students learn communication through internet memes. Others have learned by taking the class, The Force of Star Wars: Examining the Epic.

Thompson-Ballard has 20 years of progressive experience at LR, where she has received multiple promotions and continuously increased her leadership responsibilities.