This year, Appalachian State University is celebrating 50 years of women’s varsity sports. Appalachian student newspapers from the time show that the university had impressive and competitive female club and intramural teams for quite a few years before the women’s field hockey team in 1968 became the first-ever women’s intercollegiate sport in Black and Gold history.

Appalachian State University is in its fourth week of school at a state-mandated laboratory school it launched in Winston-Salem this year. The Academy at Middle Fork is a public school and partnership between the Reich College of Education at ASU and Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools that serves kindergarten through fifth grades.

Hurricane Florence threatened areas far inland — including Appalachia — with landslides and other perilous effects. But people keep building in the mountains, apparently unfazed. “Early people, they were living away from streams and up on flat lands,” according to Dr. Ellen Cowen. “They weren’t the best views, but they were the safest to be. But now there’s nowhere to go, so the slopes have been cut.”

For North Carolina native and Appalachian alumnus Brock Long ’97 ’99, Hurricane Florence is personal. Long, who grew up in Newton, was 14 in 1989 the night Hurricane Hugo swept in, toppling trees and damaging buildings.