Princeton University Athletics
Art Lane Award
June 22, 2006 | General
Devan Darby, Lauren Ehrlichman, Eric Leroux and Weston Powell have shared the Art Lane Award for 2006.
The Art Lane Award is given to honor selfless contribution to sport and society by a Princeton undergraduate athlete.. Art Lane, the very embodiment of the award that now bears his name, won the Pyne Prize and captained the 1933 Princeton football team to the national championship as an undergraduate before going on to a career as a Naval officer, a federal judge and a corporate general counsel.
Devan Darby is a member of the NCAA champion first varsity 8 women's open crew. In addition to her athletic achievements, Devan also has served as a volunteer working in hospitals and clinics in association with Health International, which included work in Mumbai, India, where she distributed supplies to local doctors. She also has volunteered with University Health Services here on campus in a wide range of functions, from setting up a lending library at UHS that is now part of Firestone Library to organizing events such as Flu Fest. She has worked at the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen, has tutored adults in basic writing and math skills, has been a resident advisor, a fund-raiser for the American Cancer Society and a winner of the Spirit of Princeton Award.
Lauren Ehrlichman is a member of the Ivy League champion field hockey team and of the U.S. team at the Junior World Cup. Described by Tiger coach Kristen Holmes-Winn as "a substantial human being with interests and passions that go ar beyond the playing field," Lauren has spent time as a tutor, youth coach and volunteer with Anchor House working with at-risk children. She has also worked at a free health care clinic whose patients are almost exclusively Spanish or Portuguese, low income and uninsured. Finally, she also traveled to Cartagena, Colombia, to work and do research for her senior thesis on complications of cleft lip and palate, a subject she came to through the work of her father Richard, a plastic surgeon, who spent much of her childhood traveling to Colombia on surgical missions called "Healing the Children."
Weston Powell of the men's lightweight crew has served as a resident advisor and peer mediator on campus, as well as the president of the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship and assistant to the youth pastor at a local church. He has taught and serviced as assistant dean of the students at the Emily Fisher Charter School in Trenton, where he worked with special education students. He has also been a valuable advocate for his fellow student-athletes as president of the Varsity Student Athletic Advisory Committee.
Eric Leroux was a first-team All-Ivy League goalie in hockey. It is off of the ice, however, where Eric has left a truly awe-inspiring mark.
Eric spent last summer in Kenya as an HIV counselor living in a rural village in a mud hut with no running water and the summer before that in a malaria clinic in Ecuador where on weekends he helped build a rehabilitation clinic from Amazon Jungle vegetation.
Upon his return from Ecuador he founded the Princeton World Health Initiative, which recovers unused medical supplies from area hospitals and pharmaceutical companies and distributes them to hospitals in developing nations. He is also involved with the Society for Orphans with AIDS Network.
He has also touched lives in and around the Hobey Baker Rink as a Big Brother to an area teen and tutor to adults at the Hutton House Center for Disabled Adults. He is the founder of PUCK, a team initiative to donate old hockey equipment to youth hockey programs that last year was successful in contributing more than $5,000 worth of equipment to the Baltimore Area Youth Hockey Association.
For all of his work, he was honored with the 11th Hockey Humanitarian Award, which was presented at the men's hockey Frozen Four.