{"id":15295,"date":"2025-09-27T15:38:01","date_gmt":"2025-09-27T15:38:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/?p=15295"},"modified":"2026-07-15T17:33:43","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T17:33:43","slug":"first-year-student-athlete-from-west-coast-finds-home-at-lvc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/2025\/09\/27\/first-year-student-athlete-from-west-coast-finds-home-at-lvc\/","title":{"rendered":"First-year student-athlete from west coast finds home at LVC"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Stephen Morisani III \u201928, staff writer<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the desert to the valley, every student has a story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here at LVC, not everyone is from Pennsylvania; there are students from Maryland, Delaware, or even New York, and as always, those students will have some extra adjustments to make living in Annville, Pennsylvania than those who lived in Pennsylvania their entire life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But first-year student Azavia Parks is not even from the east side of the Mississippi River; he traveled over 2,000 miles to attend school here from the city of Tucson, Arizona.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Azavia discovered LVC through mail, and upon looking into it, found out about its excellent exercise science program and came in contact with the football coaches for recruitment to the team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Azavia is currently an exercise science major and a cornerback on the football team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Azavia grew up in Tucson, a large city in Arizona, where he had over 5000 kids in his school that he attended from age 3 in Pre-K. It was hot all year round, save December and January, when it might have rarely snowed but never stuck for long after falling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his process to decide which school to attend, Azavia looked into the campuses of each school, and LVC\u2019s stuck out. He liked that the campus was small. His high school campus was small, and he wanted to keep that consistency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to have to travel to a bunch of places to get class,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since his time here in the Valley, Azavia has noticed geographical changes. He noticed that the towns here are not that far away from each other, noting the town of Lebanon is only fifteen minutes from campus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“In Arizona, you get to the next town, say Vail, that’s 30 minutes from Tucson,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He mentioned that the large towns were more like cities and that there really are not any rural towns in between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe football team treated me like family since day one,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Azavia did have one major adjustment that was not easy: the change in time zone. Coming from Pacific time to Eastern is a loss of three hours. He felt groggy and slow to wake up in the mornings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He stated once the day starts, it feels like it flies by fast compared to back home. He specified it was extremely hard at first, and he had to adjust his morning routine and wake up a lot earlier than home. His roommate assisted him in his adjustments. He mentioned it took him until a few days ago to fully adjust to the time change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adjusting to college can be hard, but Azavia has found a home, even if it is 2000 miles away from where he was born.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Stephen Morisani III \u201928, staff writer From the desert to the valley, every student has a story. Here at LVC, not everyone is from Pennsylvania; there are students from Maryland, Delaware, or even New […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":15932,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7,8,4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-15295","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-features","8":"category-front-page","9":"category-homepage","10":"category-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15295"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16876,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15295\/revisions\/16876"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}