Bethany Chupp ’16, MA ’18 (counseling), remembers the exact moment she learned she had landed 91����Ƶ’s prized four-year, full-tuition Yoder/Webb Scholarship.

While on her way to get pizza with a friend’s family, she received a call from History Professor Mark Metzler Sawin, director of 91����Ƶ’s Honors program, who told her the good news. “I got off the phone and told them, ‘I just got a full ride to college,’” recalled Chupp. “T���y were like, ‘Oh my God, well, now it’s a celebration dinner.’”

That was 13 years ago. Today, the Oregon native, equipped with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and an MA in counseling from 91����Ƶ, runs her own private practice, , as a licensed professional counselor. She credits 91����Ƶ’s graduate counseling program with helping her reach her goals.

“I feel like what it gave me, in terms of my career, was a network and a level of trust, because the program is so respected,” Chupp said. “If you’re an 91����Ƶ counseling grad, in this area, at least, it’s what gets you a job, no problem.”

Growing up in a Mennonite family, Chupp said her parents, graduates of Hesston and Goshen colleges, encouraged her to attend a Mennonite school. After visiting various colleges and universities across the U.S., she said 91����Ƶ just felt different. Its students seemed the kindest, she said, and its campus the most active. The fact that she could earn a college degree without paying a dollar in tuition, thanks to 91����Ƶ’s generous donors, was just the cherry on top.

“T��� Yoder/Webb scholarship ultimately sealed it,” she said. “How are you going to say no to that?”

While at 91����Ƶ, Chupp studied in the Middle East for her intercultural in 2015 and attended the Y-Serve Civil Rights Tour in 2016. ​Both of those experiences wouldn’t have been possible for her without attending 91����Ƶ, she said.

Another unique experience offered at 91����Ƶ was the closeness she shared with her professors. “My classes were small enough that we were invited to professors’ homes for dinner, and we called them by their first names,” she said. “That’s not common. That’s something 91����Ƶ does differently.”

She continues to stay in touch with many of them. “T���y’re not just former professors,” she said. “T���y’re friends who happened to be my professors.”

For the past five years, Chupp has been actively involved in the local roller derby community. She skates as Peaches n’ Scream for The Hits, a team that competes in Harrisonburg’s . She had attended games as an 91����Ƶ student but was committed to theater. “Plus, my mom told me I couldn’t join until I was off her health insurance,” she joked. When COVID-19 put an end to her theater shows, she discovered a newfound passion on the roller rink.

“It’s a very inclusive and welcoming community,” said Chupp. “It’s a sport where every body type has a place and a purpose. There’s also something cathartic about it in that it’s curated aggression.”

Chupp has four siblings, including two alumni, Brandon ’19 and Caleb ’25. They aren’t the only Royals she may have helped recruit to campus. The longtime camp counselor and director spent many summers working at Drift Creek Camp, a Mennonite camp on the coast of Oregon. She said several former campers are now students at 91����Ƶ. “When I came to 91����Ƶ, I was the first Oregon student in years,” she said. “T���re was one senior and then me. And now, there’s a whole posse of them that are here.”

Since graduating from 91����Ƶ in 2018, Chupp has regularly returned to campus to attend events, meet with friends, and provide services at the counseling center.

“It’s rewarding to still be part of the community and care about it,” she said. “I think it’s easy for alumni to dismiss it as something from when they were in college, but I continue to feel invested in 91����Ƶ’s success.”

Your support helps students pursue a quality college education without financial barriers. Join us for the 10th annual Lov91����Ƶ Giving Day and contribute to the scholarships that empower future 91����Ƶ students. On April 1, let’s show that our generosity knows no bounds…for the record!

Produced by: Innerloupe Productions

Within 91����Ƶ’s (91����Ƶ) professional counseling program, we strive to achieve the highest standards of excellence in providing psychologically and spiritually grounded training for counselors. We seek to create a community atmosphere within the program, a community bold with creative ideas and open with honesty, partnering in the inner work counselor training requires.

Find out more at: www.emu.edu/graduate-counseling/

Produced by: Innerloupe Productions
Audio: “Mending Wall” – Slow Dance

As per usual in the Solomon Islands, the day was brutally hot. Allen and his team stretched a tarp over the canoe to shade themselves during the six- or seven-hour voyage. They paused for a rest stop on a small island and drank from coconuts along the way. Soccer, they say, is the world’s game. Fitting then, that on this day in 2010, it was soccer that was taking Allen to the far reaches of a distant Pacific island chain by dugout canoe.

Dugout canoe to island tournament

After finally docking at Gizo, where the Solomon Islands Football Federation was hosting a regional tournament, Allen and his players from Rendova Island found the soccer pitch entirely abandoned. This was not entirely a surprise. Soccer, and life generally, proceeds in a more unstructured manner in the Solomons than in the United States. And so, the team from Rendova simply waited for opponents to arrive.

Eventually that happened, and Allen’s team did well enough to reach the quarterfinals but no further. They puttered back home, and the team kind of disbanded – it was not an incredibly serious, well-organized endeavor to begin with – and Coach Allen’s first tournament in the Solomon Islands was in the books.

Growing up in Richmond, Virginia, Allen was once a promising young soccer player himself. He played on an Olympic development team and received some Division I recruiting interest but didn’t quite grow big or tall enough to play at the top collegiate level. Being an elite player as an adult “takes a lot of hard work and planning, and at the same time, you have to kind of get a little bit lucky, too,” says Allen, who was not lucky in the physical stature department.

Soccer-playing brothers at dad’s alma mater

Lacking any better ideas for life after high school, he enrolled at 91����Ƶ, encouraged by his father Earl Allen, a Methodist pastor who earned a bachelor of divinity from 91����Ƶ in 1984, then a master’s in counseling in 2002. Allen saw decent game time as a freshman midfielder but then suffered a series of knee injuries that kept him mostly on the bench for the rest of what he recalls as a frustrating and disappointing career as an 91����Ƶ soccer player. (He was proud, though, to watch his younger brother, Peter Allen ’01, enjoy a much more successful career.)

After graduating with a psychology major and coaching minor, Allen began a small photography business at a ski resort near Harrisonburg, Virginia. He spent the next five years working “night and day” to build it into a much bigger affair – three divisions, 25 employees – only to have his two biggest clients suddenly decide to take photography in-house. At some point around the time of the ensuing bankruptcy, Allen became aware of and interested in the missionary group Youth With A Mission, and eventually enrolled in a discipleship program in Townsville, Australia. That trip in 2008, which included ministry work with Aboriginal Australians on the Cape York Peninsula and Torres Straight Islanders (who, as you might guess, inhabit the Torres Straight Islands), was Allen’s first foray to Oceania.

With YWAM in the Pacific

It was also the beginning of a new sense of broad purpose in his life. After coming home to Virginia, Allen wanted to go back; he wasn’t sure what, exactly, he wanted to do, but he knew where he wanted to be. In 2009, he went back to the Torres Straight Islands – politically, part of Australia and geographically, halfway between it and New Guinea – and stayed until his visa expired. The next year, he returned for more YWAM training in Wollongong, Australia, with the intention of taking a missionary assignment in Cambodia.

That plan fell through, though, leaving Allen hanging in Australia and in search of some option other than coming back home. When a friend of his father’s named Dennis McAdams (himself an ’84 seminary grad, with an MA in religion) invited Allen north to Rendova, in the Solomons’ Western Province, he jumped at the opportunity.

Owner of chili pepper farm

Allen decided to stay with McAdams in the Solomons, independent of any assignment or support from YWAM or any other group. Rendova Island is remote and undeveloped; Haponga, the village where Allen lived, lacked electricity and other basic infrastructure. The islanders mostly got by on subsistence agriculture and fishing. In order not to go hungry himself, and in hopes of bringing some economic development to his new neighbors on Rendova, Allen put his entrepreneurial skills to work and started up a chili pepper farm in hopes of selling the crop to a nearby tuna processing plant.

The chili pepper thing never really panned out like Allen had hoped, though, and he began poking around at other ideas, projects, ways to keep himself occupied and solvent and to provide some employment for others in the community.

In the meanwhile, Allen was glad to discover that lots of folks on Rendova were as big into soccer as he was. He joined in from time to time, to the extent that his long-ago injured knee would allow, and eventually got to the point where soccer was occupying most of his time. He realized that he’d found a great way to connect with the locals – communication in English is far from a sure bet on Rendova – and, thus, after catching wind of an upcoming regional tournament in Gizo, did Allen decide to do a little coaching.

Players share 11 pairs of cleats

Allen’s efforts to convene an all-Rendova team were hampered by all sorts of practical and cultural obstacles. Only after considerable scrounging around, for example, did the team come up with 11 pairs of soccer shoes, enough to keep everyone on the field shod, but requiring shoe-switching at every substitution. Being a total newcomer to the island with limited ability to communicate and little social capital to smooth over fractious intra-village politics on Rendova presented its own set of challenges, as did social norms like non-adherence to rigid schedules.

As might be obvious by now, Allen had developed a determination to make things work out somehow in the Solomons, and he eventually pulled together a team. (Other business ventures that he dabbled in include bok choi farming, firewood chopping and solar panel sales; his persistence and ambition seem at times to be a sort of tropical island reboot of an immigrant chasing the American Dream.) All told, the team got in about one week of practice before the voyage to Gizo.

After several more twists and turns in this story, too long to recount in full here, Allen, by happenstance, met the coach of Koloale FC, a club team that’s pretty much the New York Yankees of Solomon Islands soccer. At the time, Koloale was floundering in the O-League, an international competition between the best club teams in the South Pacific. While back briefly in the U.S. – visa renewal was in order – an email from the Koloale coach, whose team had lost three straight matches, popped into Allen’s inbox: Help needed, please come?

Rescuing the pride of Solomon soccer

Allen answered the call, arriving back in the Solomon Islands’ capital of Honiara for what he thought would be an assistant coaching gig with Koloale. Management had other ideas, though. Midway through the 2010-11 season, days after arriving back in the country, Allen was on a flight to Fiji, the new head coach of Koloale FC. The O-League isn’t quite the World Cup, but it’s a far cry from the provincial, loosely organized Solomon Islands Football Federation regional tournament back in Gizo where Allen cut his coaching teeth in the Pacific (earlier in life, it should be noted, he’d coached extensively back in the U.S., from youth to collegiate soccer; Koloale, though, was by far the highest profile gig he’d landed).

Ten minutes into the game against Lautoka, its Fijian opponent in the O-League, Koloale went down by a goal. In the few days he’d had with the team, Allen had tried to emphasize tactics, formation, structure, and something had worked. Koloale equalized within 10 minutes, then scored another, and another, and a few more, and flew back home victors by a 6-1 scoreline. The fans in the Solomons were ecstatic, and Allen was suddenly a bona fide celebrity in the country, which takes its soccer very seriously.

“That can be good, and that can not be good,” says Allen. “If you lose, the whole place can turn on you.”

Koloale finished up the season with two more wins in Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu ­– not enough to qualify for the finals after the early-season losses, but plenty to place the outsized hopes of soccer fans in the Solomons squarely on Allen’s shoulders.

By the time the next O-League season began – this was the 2011-2012 season – there’d been some upper-level machinations at the club that led to the release of a number of Allen’s best players. After losing the first two matches, Allen presented management with a series of requests that he thought would help get things back on track; after these were turned down, he resigned. Expectations were still huge, and Allen no longer felt like he’d be able to satisfy them, and he wasn’t eager become a national villain on account of decisions beyond his control.

Marriage, new business and soccer dreams

Personal matters also figured prominently into his decision to step down. Allen’s wife Suzie, whom he’d met in Honiara and married during the previous off-season, was pregnant with their daughter, Eliana, now one. Allen and his family now life in Honiara. Business-wise, he’s finally hit on something that’s panned out: cell phone sales. In partnership with a brother-in-law, he’s started a company that sells phones, airtime minutes and solar-powered charging devices, with 30 employees and stores in several towns, including Gizo and Honiara.

Allen’s ties aren’t totally severed with Koloale, either. Later in 2013, he hopes he’ll be coaching the team again in the O-League. Then there are always more plans and possibilities to investigate. This past winter, Allen and his family came back to Richmond for a visit, where he spent some time looking into the possibility of buying some farmland in the Shenandoah Valley. He’s been thinking lately about giving farming a try back in the States, maybe setting up some sort of exchange program with the Solomons. Soccer-wise, he’s been thinking about some sort of exchange system too, maybe getting a few players who came up through the tactical, heavily coached American system to balance out the raw talent and technical skill that are present in droves in the Solomons.

This would not have been the stuff of his wildest dreams when he was playing soccer at 91����Ƶ. It all just sort of happened, piece by piece, and doesn’t seem over yet at any rate.

“It’s not something you plan. And that’s the beauty of it. There’s a lot of grace in it. … I don’t know how I ended up coaching that team,” says Allen. “I think God’s definitely got his hand in it. I don’t think you’d ever imagine you’d ever be doing something like that.”

And, for most parents, that can be difficult. Just ask Kristina Catterton, a mother of two, who also has two stepchildren.

“I just think of them as they were babies and in preschool and all the milestones … Now they’re hitting new milestones as they grow and get into middle school,” Catterton says of her four children. “It’s different, but it’s good.”

Catterton tries to let her children be independent.

But that’s not always easy. One thing she’s learned is that, as they get older, she has less control over who their friends are. When they were younger, her kids’ friends were all children of her own friends, Catterton said.

“As they get older, they become more independent – they have their own circle of friends that are separate from you, especially as they go to middle school,” she said. “It is a little difficult because I don’t necessarily know all these people, so there’s a level of trust that you have to have there.”

Catterton’s goal is to raise autonomous adults.

“So, part of parenting is slowly letting go of that control … and trusting in them that they will make good decisions, and that I have done my job as a parent,” she said.

Letting Go

According to , an associate professor of at 91����Ƶ, back-to-school time provides an opportunity to build trust between parent and child. As an attachment therapist, she speaks to the parents of incoming students about letting go.

“I think the key question for all of us [to ask those we trust] as we make transitions is `Will you be there for me when I really need you?’ ” Early said.

That means, as parents, being aware of your emotional shortcomings.

“Those transitions tend to go better when we are tending to those dimensions, and that means, as parents, we are focusing on our anxieties and dealing with them and not putting them on our children.”

When your child is going through a transitional period, the best thing to do is to allow him or her room to grow, according to Early. Even as parents take a step back, they should still be available to answer questions and provide emotional support, she said.

Doing that, she said, helps to create a resilient person who can not only “withstand, but benefit from stressful situations.”

“What we want to do is build resilient children; not just protect them from the world, but help them to have the skills they need to help them recover,” she said. “These transitions for children, we would want them to be opportunities for growth.”

Provide your children with room to go out and make mistakes, but also be there to comfort and console when things go wrong, said Early. Doing so will create a good balance, making children feel secure.

“When we feel safe, we can go out and explore and be successful,” she said. “And if we’re feeling scared or feeling a sense of danger – I call them alarm bells – we want to make sure that we calm that down and address those needs that revolve around, `Will you be there for me when I really need you?’ ”

Two Types Of Parent

Toward that end, Early says parents fall into two groups. The first is the “secure” parent who provides his or her children with the right balance of freedom and protection.

The second is the anxious parent who either over-regulates or under-regulates his or her children.

“One is the parent who feels anxious about letting go and steps in too soon and the other is the parent who provides too much distance and needs to step in sooner,” she said.

In any case, there are important messages parents should convey, she said. Kids thrive on words of encouragement such as “I believe in you; You are listened to; You are cared for; You are very important to me” and “I know you can handle [growing up].”

Whichever type of parent you might be, though, Early said, don’t always expect to be the perfect role model.

“It’s not always in getting it right – it’s going back and repairing the mistakes where security is built and where healing happens,” she said. “Transitions are oftentimes where parents can recreate or build something that’s never been there. So, transitions are wonderful times where parents can build new bonds with their children and repair things from the past.”

Courtesy Daily News Record, July 28, 2012

To be a candidate for the scholarship, Koser had to complete a 25-page essay on the relationship between his work and its connection to Rollo May, an existential psychologist and co-founder of Saybrook Graduate School.

“I drew from a number of different cases,” said Koser. “The essay wove together direct clinical work with qualifying essays and what happens in a relationship between a therapist and client.”

As a practicing psychoanalyst, Koser said, “Psychoanalysis has been historically categorized by most people as belonging only to the white, upper-class community. I want to subvert this presumption by bringing psychoanalysis to the underrepresented and reach people that it hasn’t in the past – not just in academics but also in clinical work. Psychoanalysis is a radical approach that applies to each unique subject.”

Koser, who earned his undergraduate in and graduate degree in from 91����Ƶ, said his work as a student and faculty member “greatly influenced his doctoral work.”

“I did not grow up Mennonite, but what resonated with me is the focus on relationships and community that is found in the Mennonite faith.”

, director of the MA in counseling program at 91����Ƶ, said the award “positions Nate to be a respected contributor to the field of Existential/Humanistic psychology and it also reflects the intention we have as a counselor training program to embrace the Existential/Humanistic way of working and being in the world.”

A student of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud, Koser said winning the award is a significant professional accomplishment, but its meaning has changed over time.

“Initially, I felt that receiving this award would provide me with some sort of authorization, as if winning it would provide a kind of credential,” said Koser, who also works for . “However, because I am unable to refuse analyzing such things, the award has provided me with yet another opportunity to learn something about myself, my motivations, and my desire. This seems much more important to me than any kind of credential.”

“T��� at 91����Ƶ is designed for working men and women,” said, PhD, director of the program. “The includes study in the areas of professional identity, counseling theories and group counseling.”

Two tracks

• a 60-credit track approved by the (CACREP). It  prepares students for clinical practice and meets educational requirements for Licensed Professional Counselor in the state of Virginia.
• a dual degree program that helps students earn both the master of divinity and an MA in Counseling at less cost and in less time than if the degrees were pursued separately.

Admission

Students are admitted on the basis of their qualities and abilities in scholastic achievement, work experience, and suitability of their character and personality to work in the counseling field.

Applicants must be a graduate of a regionally accredited college or university. They are required to submit official transcripts of credit from all colleges and universities attended and three references, two of which must be academic. Potential candidates will be invited for an interview.

A complete application file is due by  Feb. 15. After this deadline, the admissions committee will continue to review applications if space remains available.

More information

For more information about the master of counseling program, or to apply, contact Brenda Fairweather at 540-432-4243 or email counseling@emu.edu.