Through Our Windows
By Connie Kachel White
Arts and athletics have long been windows into Wichita State’s distinctive academics. Today, Andrae Carter and Aleesha Oden, who were photographed in front of Jardine Hall, represent the university’s thousands upon thousands of students whose special talents have been showcased through our campus windows over the years.
Xavier Bell ’24 was named after another standout Shocker athlete: Xavier “X Man” McDaniel ’96. Bell — who’s taking a quick break with Lille Nightingale ’25 from The Shocker’s cover photo shoot taking place on the fourth floor of Jardine Hall — explains why he’s named after one of Wichita State’s best-known athletes. “My dad, Wayne Bell, played football at WSU at the same time X Man was playing basketball,” he says. An early summer thunderstorm has nixed the outdoor aspect of the photo session, although the clouds, glimpsed through the window behind them, are starting to scatter and clear.
Wearing the #1 jersey, Bell’s own playing days for the Shockers tipped off in 2022 after two seasons at Drexel University in Philadelphia. As a senior in 2024-2025, the shooting guard led WSU in scoring with a 15.2 PPG average and became the 49th Shocker to score 1,000 career points.
That season, the Shockers earned a berth (its 14th) in the National Invitation Tournament, and Bell poured in a game-high 24 points in first-round NIT action against Oklahoma State. A First Team All-Conference selection, he was also the American Conference’s Men’s Basketball Scholar-Athlete of the Year. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and is now working on a master’s degree in sport management.
Like Bell, Nightingale is a Wichitan who sports a far-ranging list of accomplishments. As a senior, she blended art and science in her study of wildebeest migration patterns, which she transformed into a choreographed dance. She presented her research this past February for Undergraduate Research Day at the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka. In May, she graduated from Wichita State with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance and a minor in sustainability. Her academic pursuits also included earning a certificate in environment and sustainability.
A former competitive gymnast, she has danced in many WSU productions, including the spring 2023 Wichita Contemporary Dance Theatre Concert in Wilner Auditorium. The concert’s run of show featured “Dear Me,” choreographed by one of her WSU faculty mentors, Cheyla Clawson ’00, director of the School of Performing Arts and associate professor of dance.
Among Nightingale’s fellow “Dear Me” castmates was incoming freshman and soloist Andrae Carter. Carter, now a senior, has added numerous credits to his performance portfolio since that concert. He has danced the solo in “Dear Me” at an American College Dance Association regional conference in 2023, was a guest dancer with the Regina Klenjoski Dance Company in “Half-Light,” which premiered during the 2024 Converge II tour, and, in 2025, was in “The Angel of Death” penned by Amanda Schmalzried ’25. Carter, who fell in love with dance as a middle-schooler in Wichita, says of all its various forms and types, he’s partial to hip hop.
Aleesha Oden hails from Council Bluffs, Iowa. In last season’s regional championship games in Lansing, Michigan, she posted the highest individual score for a Shocker bowler. The regional win propelled the Shockers into the NCAA Final Four. “We had a heck of a season,” the left-handed bowler says as she and Carter take a breather from being photographed in front of Jardine Hall. It’s a calm, summer evening on campus, with one feisty squirrel throwing down nuts and leaves from the trees shading the walkway to Jardine’s main entrance. “So,” she adds, “there are some pretty cool core memories for me and my teammates with that!” In May, she won the United States Bowling Congress’ U22 Queens tournament as an individual bowler and is now preparing for another season of bowling with the Shockers.
Wichita State’s powerhouse bowling program — with both men’s and women’s teams competing as independent varsity sports in USBC-sanctioned events until 2024 when the women’s team became an NCAA Division I competitor — holds 24 national titles: 13 for the men and 11 for the women. Including women’s bowling, WSU currently sponsors 16 NCAA sports plus many more independent and club sports, the list of which includes soccer, men’s volleyball, Esports and men’s and women’s rowing.
“Our intercollegiate athletics programs exist to serve the educational mission of WSU,” says AD Kevin Saal. “Our purpose, internally, is to ‘develop young people and programs through first-class service,’ but our connection to WSU’s overarching purpose can’t be overstated. Shocker sports provide many different constituencies with unique connections to WSU. They enhance campus life and highlight our university’s unlimited points of pride.”
From her own academic window of perspective, Fine Arts Dean Marie Bukowski adds: “Whether through performance, visual creation, design or interdisciplinary collaboration, the arts invite us to engage with ideas from multiple perspectives, bridging cultures, generations and disciplines. They’re powerful drivers of knowledge, creativity — of transformation.”
WOODY CRUMBO, a noted Native American artist and dancer, enrolled at the University of Wichita in 1933 to study with two of the university’s most celebrated fine arts faculty members: musician and composer Thurlow Lieurance and the illustrious watercolorist Clayton Henri Staples.
XAVIER MCDANIEL was a true force
on the floor as a Shocker player and then as a pro. His All-Star journey through the NBA saw him don the jerseys of the Seattle SuperSonics, New York Knicks, New Jersey Nets, Boston Celtics and Phoenix Suns.
THE FIRST HOOPSTERS: Walter Martin ’09, Claude Davis ’07, Percy Bates ’09, Elmer Cooke,
Bliss Isely ’06 and Lawrence Abbey ’09.
KANSAS DANCE FESTIVAL 2018 featured performances of “Loose Marbles” from Wichita State, “Brink” from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, “The Keepers” from Friends University, “Seven Sonnets” from WSU, “Freudian Slip” from WSU, “One Too Many” from the Regina Klenjoski Dance Company and “Unspoken Reverie” from WSU.
WSU WOMEN’S BOWLING reached the Final Four in its first season in the NCAA, competing in the championship games in April 2025 in Las Vegas. The Shockers finished their inaugural NCAA season with an overall record of 87-38.
EDDIE MARTINEZ ’92 was inducted into the WSU Fine Arts Hall of Fame in 2016. He studied and danced in NYC before joining, in 1995, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, one of the most influential and visionary dance theater companies in the world.
GREG BRUMMETT ’91 was one of the Shockers to lead the team to the
College World Series in 1989, defeating the Texas Longhorns to win the national title.
ORCHESIS, a student dance group active into the 1970s, served as a precursor to WSU’s dance program. Among the many individuals credited as being key to the program’s development are twin sisters Alice and Elizabeth Sherbon, who co-founded the American Dance Symposia in Wichita.
SYDNEY MCKINNEY ’23, the No. 1 pick in the 2023 Athletes Unlimited Softball League draft, finished her first season in the AUSL as a member of the Bandits.
WSU ROWING was set up as a varsity program in 1975, thanks to the Wichita Yale Alumni Club, whose members included C. Howard Wilkins (later of WSU softball stadium fame). In 1981, women’s crew won the national title at the Dad Vail Regatta in Philadelphia.
REGINA KLENJOSKI DANCE COMPANY members have featured many Shockers, including Aviance Battles ’20, Timothy Portwood ’21, Elleigh McClelland ’21 and Rhiannon Vieyra ’21.
