Brooke Coley ’03, chemical engineering, remembers it as a dream play for a football defense. Two defenders burst through the offensive line just moments after the snap, trapping the quarterback in the backfield. One defender tackles the quarterback, allowing the second defender to zero in on the ball and yank it loose.

As the football falls from the quarterback’s hands to the turf, the second defender alertly scoops up the ball and scampers all the way down the field for a 41-yard touchdown. Coley was the second defender on the play, and the touchdown she scored were the first points ever tallied by the Pittsburgh Force: a women’s football team that began playing last year.

She still smiles broadly when she talks about the play. “I go in the history books for our team. For the first TD to be a defensive TD; I wasn’t expecting that at all,” says Coley. “It was cool. It was a really good feeling.”

Coley is a Tidewater, VA native who played four sports in high school. But as a member of the tenth class of Meyerhoff Scholars at UMBC (M10), Coley decided to limit her pursuit of athletic glory as she pursued a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering.

After graduation, Coley began working toward a Ph.D. in bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. She expects to receive her degree this spring.

But Coley heard the call of athletics – and the gridiron, in particular – as she sprinted for a doctorate. It began one night while she was playing pickup basketball one night, when she received an offer to try out for the Pittsburgh Passion, a team that was playing in a women’s football league. While Coley had played some rugby while she was at UMBC, she had never really considered playing football.

Coley made the team and quickly fell in love with the game. She joined the Pittsburgh Passion as a safety and linebacker in 2006. Coley played with the Passion for three seasons until moving to a new expansion team in the women’s league – the Pittsburgh Force – this past spring.

“I’m an aggressive person, but I’m always thinking, always calculating,” says Coley. “One thing that was hard for me for football was that our coaches tend to want us to be animated, and they want us to growl. They’ll say, ‘You girls aren’t mad enough, aren’t angry.’ If a player comes my way, I’m going to get her, but I don’t have to growl at her or anything like that.”

Coley prefers to let her play do all the talking. Another one of her favorite plays came when she had to cover a wide receiver who was talking trash at the line of scrimmage. Coley gave no verbal response, but instead flattened her talkative opponent when she tried to catch a pass only moments later. As the player lay stunned on the ground, Coley quietly reached down and helped her up.

“She didn’t say another thing the whole game,” recalls Coley with a smile.

Coley isn’t sure what the future holds for her professionally, but she professes that she’d love to return to UMBC – which she says is “like a second home to me” – as a teacher and researcher with Dr. Timmie Topoleski, who was a mentor during her undergraduate years.

Coley picked UMBC and the Meyerhoff program over Duke after receiving acceptance letters to the schools only one day apart. Coley said her trip to UMBC during the Meyerhoff selection process quickly sold her on the school, even though she had spent lots of time talking with her family about her love for Duke.

Though Coley is now busy crunching data and finishing her doctoral thesis, she says she will continue playing football this spring. She views the three-hour practices that the Force holds three times a week during the season as great outlets for relieving academic stress and staying in shape.

“Football used to be a game I watched on TV,” Coley said. “I watch the game differently now. Now I know what it means to be a player.”

— Jeff Seidel ’85

If you marvel at how well UMBC’s buildings have been maintained over the last decade or so, you can point to the hard work of James Donlan ’85, economics, who until recently served as the university’s director of facilities management.

In that position, Donlan supervised the maintenance of 3.6 million square feet in UMBC’s 49 buildings. He also guided the university through some of its most challenging renovations of major buildings and constructions of new buildings in the past 15 years.

And while his departure means the university has big work boots to fill, Donlan is tackling a challenge that will call on his organizational skills, and the experience he has gleaned from his years at UMBC and his experiences as a colonel in the United States Marine Corps Reserves: leading a project designed to combat the deadly improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that are a favored weapon of insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Donlan says that he is sad to leave UMBC. “But the opportunity presented itself to work on a project with a significant impact on saving lives,” he says. “That made the decision easier.”

It was Donlan’s work on a recent tour of duty as a Marine combat engineering officer in the Marine Corps’ War Fighting Lab in Quantico, VA, that led him to his new position. The lab, he says, “finds scientific and technological solutions to problems the Marines are having in combat.” The goals of such work, he observes, is to find ways to “harden vehicles and protect people.”

Donlan’s work in that group led him to participation in a joint working group on the deadly explosives culled from all branches of the armed forces by the Department of Defense. “It is sort of a Manhattan Project to predict and prevent IEDs,” says Donlan of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO.

After Donlan’s tour was up, he was contacted by CenTauri Solutions – a defense contractor which had won an $11.7 million bid with the Pentagon and JIEDDO to work on new techniques to detect IEDs with aerial electromagnetic sensors. The group recruited Donlan as a project director on the new effort, dubbed “Yellow Jacket.” He began work on the project in the autumn.

On his tour of active duty in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 (including a stint in Fallujah), Donlan says that he “encountered multiple IEDs on a daily basis, either disarming them or finding them.” Helping his fellow solders identify and neutralize the threat, he adds, proved a strong lure to sign up for Yellow Jacket.

Donlan’s tasks at UMBC may not have taken on the life or death quality of his work as a Marine, but his steady efforts as the university erected new structures and renovated key buildings were a crucial element in UMBC’s growth. Donlan succeeded the late Richard Butler in 1994, first as associate director and later as director of facilities management.

In Donlan’s tenure, UMBC constructed the Information Technology and Engineering (ITE) building, the Public Policy building, the Physics building and a number of new residential buildings. “In the 1990s, there was construction fence everywhere,” Donlan recalls. “As I look back at it now, it seems like we were building everywhere.”

Yet Donlan feels that UMBC has retained a lot of what made it special for him as a student in the 1980s. “The campus has doubled in size,” he observes. “But it still feels small. It’s big enough that it has all of the amenities of a larger school, but it’s still small enough that it feels like a family.” (Indeed, his son Justin Donlan ’11 is a student in UMBC’s Honors College.)

Out of all his accomplishments at UMBC, Donlan points to the renovations of the biology and chemistry buildings as the most satisfying. “The biology and chemistry buildings were two of the toughest jobs we did,” he says. “We did both of them in occupied settings.”

The chemistry renovation posed vexing problems for Donlan and his team to solve.

“We were building a building on top of a building,” Donlan recalls. “The building was built like a tank. The air handling systems and everything else were in the basement. At [the time of the building’s construction], that was great idea. It worked well. But when you’ve got to replace those systems, there’s no way to get back in there. So we actually had to take the mechanical rooms that were in the basement and put them on the roof.”

Sensitivity to the important research that was happening in both buildings was also a key element in both successful renovations, Donlan says, because any mistakes “could have a devastating impact on researchers’ careers.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

Sideshows featuring amazing feats and astonishing freaks became an industry in the United States in the 19th century. But these traveling caravans have been on the endangered list in recent decades. Collecting the artifacts and celebrating the artistry of this vanishing industry has proven addictive to James Taylor ’73, interdisciplinary studies.

Taylor’s magazine about the sideshows – James Taylor’s Shocked and Amazed! On & Off The Midway – has been featured prominently in The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun. His collection of sideshow memorabilia was the backbone of Baltimore’s late, lamented American Dime Museum, and it can now be seen as you sip a beer at one of Washington D.C.’s hippest taverns: the Palace of Wonders.

UMBC Magazine asked Taylor why he loves the sideshow – and keeps its manifold wonders in the public eye.

Why do I love sideshow and its talent: all the sword swallowers and magicians and knife throwers and jugglers and ventriloquists and fire breathers and human blockheads?

There’s an easy answer: Because it’s a kick, a rush, a thrill. Tell me anyone doesn’t get a bit of an adrenaline surge watching Zamora the Torture King launch into his body-skewering and literally electrifying (himself, that is) act? I once watched two guys – big as linebackers, the pair of them – pass out stone cold, falling over at the ankles while watching Zamora’s act. Another time, I watched a young girl, staring hard at his final stunt, sit and weep, her eyes never leaving his. Who wouldn’t be shocked and amazed at that show?

But there’s a more complicated answer, too. It might seem strange to most folk. It’s all about the love that these performers have for their craft and their audiences.

Whenever I deliver my “writing in the real world” spiel to a classroom of students, I tell them that you have to decide first what you love, and then whether you can (or even want to) make a buck off it. I don’t mean to be crass, but this is America: You better be makin’ the moolah, or you’re just un-American, some poor loser.

That’s a particularly brutal – and unlovely – life assessment for many creative folk in this country. But I make that judgment because I’ve seen that interplay of love and money at work – up close, alive, livin’ and breathin’, right in front of me – in the lives of the people who still work the midways. It’s a sight I’ll remember till the longest day I live, as the old-time sideshow guys used to say.

These oddball jugglers, hula hoop manipulators and fire breathers will tell you flat out that they’re in it for the money… which they’re not making. They’re starving to death. They’re limping along at best. Many of them can’t figure out how they’re going to make it to the next show.

Most people would ask: “Then why do you keep doin’ it?”

One of the best answers was told to me by showman Mark Frierson many years ago. When he mounted and trouped out his first show, Frierson told me he had so much fun while he made his money that he couldn’t believe that what he was doing was legal.

Not that there aren’t trials. Sideshow folk talk endlessly about how horrific things are now or were in the past. My ma’s late boyfriend, carnival owner Jerry Farrow, owned a monkey show back in the ‘50s, a show with an assortment of monks, all of which escaped from the barn he’d housed them in, all of which ran riot throughout Glen Burnie for about a week, and all of which were shot dead by police before Jerry’s – and Glen Burnie’s – nightmare ended. A horrifying story by today’s standards, not so in the 1950s when I grew up. And in the telling, it remained one of Jerry’s most uproarious tales, a tale of near financial ruin for him but always hilarious despite that.

The wild stories are verbal armor against more truly horrific circumstances they face almost every day. But what you hear even more than that in these over-the-top, half-fabricated-for-entertainment-effect tales – the carnival folk call them “jackpots” – is the obvious love and the outrageous passion that these show people have for the work they do.

Take the late Jeanie Tomaini, a performer born with literally nothing below her waist. In her heyday in the 1930s and ’40s, she was billed as “the World’s Only Living Half Girl.” Put “on show” by her desperately poor parents, and later “adopted” by an evil stepmother from the orphanage where Jeanie’s father had abandoned her after her mother died, Jeanie only escaped the stepmother’s clutches when she married fellow freak performer Al Tomaini, “the American Giant.” Of course, they were billed as “the World’s Strangest Married Couple.”

When I met her toward the end of her life, I asked her what it meant to be a freak act in the sideshows. After hearing all that life drama, I asked her how she’d sum up such a life. Jeanie looked me dead in the face and with a grin said: “I had a ball.”

That’s why I love this weirdness that doubles as entertainment. I love knowing there’s a business, a world, where people so love what they do – entertaining us – that, even though they often pretend otherwise, they would work just for the thrill of thrilling us.

And while it may seem strange, weird, bizarre, exotic or unusual to you, love can look all of those ways sometimes, now can’t it?