Sports Updates (Photo Illustration/MetroCreative)

Marietta Pioneer Club Golf Outing

Now in its 39th year, the Marietta College Pioneer Club Golf Outing is set for Friday, July 19 at the Marietta Country Club. BSN Sports and FieldTurf are presenting sponsors for the 2024 outing.

The entry fee is $120 per golfer ($480 per foursome) and includes 18 holes of golf, cart, golf favors, and refreshments on the course. The Young Alumni discount returns for the sixth year where members of the Long Blue Line from the classes of 2020-2024 can play for just $75 per player.

There will be two flights of golf with shotgun starts at 8 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. for the second. Each flight will be limited to a maximum of 20 teams. Flight preference will be on a first-come, first-served basis. To register for the Pioneer Club Golf Outing, visit: https://tinyurl.com/mr3avdnf.

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2024 Summer All-Comer Track Meets

The 2024 Summer All-Comer Track Meets are scheduled for 6:30 p.m. on June 13 and 20 at Belpre High School.

The event is for all ages, and entry fee is $10 per participant for unlimited number of events.

Rolling schedule with automatic timing. All events will be timed finals with heats based on the times that athletes submit at registration, held 5-6 p.m., the day of the meet, at the track.

Ribbons will be awarded to the top six place winners in each event.

Athletes must provide their own shot and discus. Starting blocks will be provided.

Spikes will be checked and must be 1/4″ or less pyramids. No needle spikes will be allowed. No spikes will be sold at the meets.

For information: Rod O’Donnell, rrodonnell41@gmail.com.

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St. Marys Wrestling Golf Scramble

The St. Marys High School wrestling program is holding a golf scramble June 1 at St. Marys Golf Course.

Registration begins at 2 p.m. with a 3 p.m. shotgun start. Cost is $50 per person or $200 per team. Food and drinks included, and prizes include closest to the pin and longest drive.

For information: Jay D. Smith, 304-966-6577

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Marietta Weeping Willow Church Softball League

The Marietta Weeping Willow Church softball league will begin play June 3.

There will be three divisions and teams play 14 games and a tournament.

For information: Mark Duckworth, 740-525-2376 or Scott Stalter, 740-376-0305.

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MOV Sports Hall of Fame Banquet Tickets

Tickets are now on sale for the Mid-Ohio Valley Sports Hall of Fame Class of 2024 induction banquet.

The banquet will be held 6 p.m. Saturday, June 8, at the Grand Pointe Center in Vienna.

Tickets are $50 per person and the deadline for purchase is May 26.

Tickets can be obtained from MOVSHOF committee members and inductees, or by contacted Sec./Treasurer Don Ullmann at:

Box 11

Belle Valley, OH. 43717

Email: drudou@gmail.com or call 740-732-5558.

Tickets must be purchased in advance and will not be available at the door.

The Mid-Ohio Valley Sports Hall of Fame Hall honors outstanding achievement in Sport in a seven-county region in Ohio and West Virginia.

Ten new members with major contributions to the area sport scene will be enshrined in the Class of 2024.

The inductees include: Bryan Canterbury, Jackson County; Michael Cox, Pleasants County; Janet Frazier, Wirt County; H. Dugan Hill, Noble County; Megan McAuley, Washington County; David R. Mossor, Ritchie County; Tim Phillips, Wood County; Rod O’Donnell, Washington County; Fred Sauro, Wood County; Jim Wharton, Wood County

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Wirt County Sideliners Golf Scramble

The Wirt County Sideliners and the Wirt County High School football team will be holding their annual golf scramble on June 1 at Mingo Bottom golf course.

Tee times will start at 9 a.m., $200 per team, there will be cash prizes for first, $400, second, $200 and third place, $100, 50/50 and closest-to-the-pin prizes.

We also have a $5,000 hole in one prize on #10 Par 3 hole and some very nice prizes for a hole in one on all other par 3 holes. Food and drinks will be provided. Please pre register if possible.

For information: Yogi Peterman, 304-767-3150 or Billy Dotson, 304-275-3378.

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Williamstown Offensive Skills Basketball Camp

The 34th annual Offensive Skills basketball camp will be held June 17-21 at Williamstown High School.

Campers in grades kindergarten through five will attend from 8 a.m. to noon. Campers in grade 6-9 will attend from 1-5 p.m. On the first day campers should arrive 15 minutes early for registration purposes. Cost is $100.

For information: Fred Sauro, 304-488-4522.

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37th annual Ohio River Basketball Camp

The 37th annual Ohio River basketball day camp for boys and girls entering grades 3-8 will be held from 8:30 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. on June 3-6 at Ravenswood High School’s old gym.

All aspects of the game will be covered at the camp by director Mick Price. Cost is $70 and all campers will receive a T-shirt.

For more information or to register, email goreddevils@hotmail.com or call coach Price at 304-634-7312.

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Mid-Ohio Valley Prep Baseball, Softball Stats

Area teams wishing to participate in the weekly Mid-Ohio Valley prep baseball and softball statistical leaders are asked to send in final full season to date cumulative stats by 3 p.m. each Monday to jbennett@newsandsentinel.com and jholland@newsandsentinel.com.

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Wood County Rec Summer Tennis Program Schedule

Wood County Rec Summer Tennis Program at the City Park Courts will be June 10-July 29 excluding the 4th of July week.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 8 a.m.-noon. Full schedule available on our website. Ages 5-18 (Boys & Girls).

The cost is $40 and includes a T-shirt. There are scholarships available. You can sign up now online at woodrecreation.com and we will have in person sign ups on June 8 from 9 a.m.-1 p.m. at the tennis courts. Players may be moved to a different time slot depending on their skill level.

For information: rec office, 304-424-7311.

VINTON COUNTY, Ohio (WSAZ) – A teenager died Friday in a four-car crash on state Route 93 near McArthur, the Ohio State Highway Patrol said.

The teen died at the scene of the crash, troopers said.

Investigators say the teen was a passenger in a 2012 Honda driven by a 36-year-old man from McArthur who was flown to a Columbus hospital for his injuries.

Troopers said the Honda went left of center, resulting in a chain-reaction crash with the other vehicles involved. All of the other drivers had minor injuries.

The wreck was reported around 4:15 p.m., about a mile north of McArthur, and state Route 93 was closed nearly three hours during the investigation.

Copyright 2024 WSAZ. All rights reserved.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A battle is under way for the future of Ohio’s $94 billion teacher pension fund, as would-be reformers’ attempts to deliver long-promised benefits to retirees with the help of an aggressive investment firm touting an untested AI-driven trading strategy face intense scrutiny.

The eyes of Wall Street and the half-million members of the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio are on the state as the drama unfolds. A special meeting has been called for Thursday of a board nearly paralyzed by infighting whose executive director is on long-term leave over misconduct allegations he denies.

Years of tension at the fund came to a head on May 8, when Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced that he had come into possession of an anonymous 14-page memo and other documents containing “disturbing allegations” about the STRS board and was handing them over to authorities.

Republican Attorney General Dave Yost launched an investigation the next day into what he called the fund’s “susceptibility to a hostile takeover by private interests.” He followed up with a lawsuit seeking to unseat two reform-minded board members — Wade Steen and Rudy Fichtenbaum — for backing a plan to turn over $65 billion, or roughly 70% of STRS assets, to a fledgling investment firm called QED. The outfit is co-run by two people, one a former deputy Ohio treasurer, out of a condo in suburban Columbus.

“This isn’t monopoly money; it’s hard-earned income that belongs to teachers,” Yost said in launching his probe. “There is a responsibility to act in their best interests.”

The Ohio Retirement for Teachers Association, a retiree watchdog group, says Steen and Fichtenbaum have been unfairly targeted. The group defends reformers’ push for change as a fight against years of opaque management and greed.

Teachers, who are generally ineligible for Social Security and so rely heavily on the fund in retirement, are particularly upset at the dearth of cost-of-living adjustments and market losses that the fund has seen over the years, even as STRS investment professionals have collected large bonuses. They have called for more transparency into the fund’s investment and pay practices.

“We’ve been calling for an investigation for years,” said Robin Rayfield, the association’s executive director. “So our response to them would be, ‘Where you been?’”

Rayfield said public education in Ohio will be “fully politicized” if DeWine and Yost succeed in shutting down STRS reformers. He described it as the third leg of a stool that also includes approval of a universal school voucher program in last year’s state budget and the transfer of K-12 education oversight from Ohio’s independent state school board into DeWine’s Cabinet. An ongoing lawsuit challenges the latter as unconstitutional.

“Governor DeWine has done more to ruin public education than all the other governors combined,” he said.

The nearly $6 trillion U.S. public pension sector has increasingly swapped stocks for riskier actively-managed alternative investments, such as hedge funds and private equities, in recent years — a trend that David Draine, the Pew Charitable Trust’s principal researcher on public sector retirement systems, says demands the type of transparency that the Ohio reformers have sought.

“As public pensions are taking on both risky and complicated assets, it’s important that they’re being transparent about those investments: what the returns are on their performance, what they’re paying for them, and what the risks are,” he said.

However, detractors say putting the shadowy QED in charge of STRS investments brings even greater danger.

Aristotle Hutras, former director of the Ohio Retirement Study Council, a legislative oversight committee, believes the governor is rightly trying to protect STRS from reformers’ rosy AI-fueled visions for improving the fund, which he dubs “magical thinking.”

“STRS has survived a world war, a major depression, a major recession and a worldwide pandemic, and still paid benefits,” said Hutras, a Democrat. “This notion of QED, and essentially steering a contract, in my humble opinion, is the most serious threat to STRS’s solvency in the last 96 years.”

The fund’s then-board chair issued a statement after DeWine’s referral saying that STRS was cooperating, but reassuring beneficiaries that the fund was safe, secure, well-run and in “sound financial position.”

Among claims in the 14-page memo, whose murky origins one board member said should be investigated, is that QED’s Jonathan Tremmel approached STRS in 2020 with assertions that the fund was improperly calculating performance, benchmarks and investment costs. “He also claimed to have AI-based trading strategies that would fix STRS’s ‘problems,’” the memo said.

Leaders rejected Tremmel’s initial pitch because of QED’s lack of professional registrations, clients or track record. His business partner, Seth Metcalf, who served under former Republican Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel, returned to STRS asking that QED be given a second look.

Around that time, the memo’s authors contend, Steen, Fichtenbaum and two other then-board members began raising almost identical questions about STRS performance to QED’s and started working behind the scenes to get an affiliated company, OhioAI, pension fund business. The metadata on some letters and memos showed they originated with Tremmel or Metcalf.

The Federal Trade Commission began cautioning businesses around that time to proceed cautiously with automated tools that might have biased or discriminatory impacts. Last year, the commission took its warnings further, putting companies on notice that false or unsubstantiated claims about what AI could do for their clients could lead to enforcement actions.

Neither Metcalf nor Tremmel returned calls seeking comment on their statements to STRS. In his lawsuit, Yost told the court, “The owner of this shell company continues to peddle to STRS a secretive and untested investment scheme while his own condominium is in foreclosure.” The attorney general accuses Steen and Fichtenbaum of ”backdoor ties” to QED.

Steen denies Yost’s claims, including that $65 billion was ever on the table. He argues that reaction to his persistent questioning of STRS’s practices proves that he’s struck a nerve.

“He’s hiding behind litigation that’s defamatory, it’s not true,” Steen said after the board’s May 15 meeting. “I thought there was going to be a fair, impartial investigation. I guess this might be the fastest investigation ever done in Ohio history. But we’re going to defend this vigorously. None of it’s true. It’s all false.”

DeWine called it a “huge red flag” when Aon, a nationally respected consulting firm that had been enlisted to help address management and fiscal performance issues, abruptly exited its contract with the pension fund earlier this month.

“The unstated implication is that the governance issues at STRS are so concerning that Aon could not continue its contract in good faith,” DeWine said in a statement. A spokesperson for Aon declined comment.

STRS reformers have not backed down. Now in control of a majority of votes on STRS’s 11-member board, they pushed ahead during the board’s May meeting to oust rival leadership and elect Fichtenbaum, an emeritus Wright State University economics professor, as board chair.

Many of the retired teachers in attendance applauded after the coup. Nearby was a poster with a different STRS acronym: “Stealing Teachers’ Retirement Savings.”

“It’s needed to happen for years,” said Lee Ann Baughman, 82, who taught elementary school in suburban Columbus for 32 years. “It’s been hard for these retirees. A lot of them have a part-time job, and they’re old, and it’s been very hurtful not to get what they were promised.”