Once members of rival boys high-school basketball teams in Arlington, this past winter Alan Treakle and Liam Vitters played different roles for the same Division I men’s college squad that won a national championship.
Treakle, a Wakefield High School graduate, was the director of basketball operations, and Yorktown High grad Vitters was a walk-on freshman forward for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Mocs, which won the National Invitational Tournament with a 5-0 record.
She once helped an Arlington youth team win a national flag-football championship. And now, Azzi Fudd has a college-level national basketball championship to her credit.
Last Sunday (April 6), the Arlington resident scored 24 points and grabbed five rebounds to help the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team win the Division I NCAA national championship with an 82-59 victory over the University of South Carolina in the 2025 title game.
When Eddie Kaufholz and his family moved to Arlington nearly five years ago, they were not thinking about starting a business. They wanted to live in a place that was diverse, interesting and full of opportunity, with a school system they could rely on. Arlington fit.
In the years that followed, working out of a home office off Columbia Pike, he consulted with organizations across Northern Virginia and around the country: nonprofits, advocacy groups, mid-sized companies, agencies of various sizes. The work itself was good. But somewhere across all those projects, he started to notice a pattern.
”The agency model has gotten really bloated,” Kaufholz says. ”Layers, handoffs, middle management. The senior people who pitch the work often disappear once it starts. The idea with PILLAR was to strip all of that down; keep senior people on the work, approach each client with humility and care, do world-class strategy and execution, and pass the efficiency back to the client instead of absorbing it as agency margin.”
That thinking, slowly, became PILLAR, the Arlington-headquartered creative, communications and marketing agency Kaufholz founded.
PILLAR, he says, is built on an old idea. ”An idea that has always been possible but rarely practiced: that an agency should be structured to serve the work itself.” The team that delivers the work is assembled around the specific needs of each client and only stays as long as the work calls for them.
”The senior strategist on your kick-off call is the senior strategist writing your messaging,” Kaufholz says. ”Every person on a project is there because the work specifically calls for them.”
PILLAR’s recent work has spanned human rights, executive leadership, higher education, advocacy and direct-to-consumer ecommerce. The roster has included national nonprofits, a national multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer brand and a number of institutions navigating significant moments of strategic change. The model is built to scale up to be the agency of record for a national brand, or to scale down to design a logo for a neighborhood nonprofit. PILLAR takes equal pride and care in both.
What Kaufholz did not understand when he started, he said, was how much the County itself would matter in making any of it possible. (more…)
Sometimes overlooked in the crush of Arlington springtime sports is George Washington University’s home baseball season at Barcroft Park.
In a long-standing agreement with Arlington, George Washington has been playing home games at the artificial-turf Tucker Field venue at Barcroft Park since 1993.
The potential for foul weather kept some of the crowd away, but otherwise the annual Arlington Little League opening-day ceremonies went as usual on Sunday (April 5).
The afternoon event began with the traditional parade of dozens of teams through a tunnel of players from varsity high-school baseball and girls softball teams in Arlington onto field No. 1 at Barcroft Park.
St. Agnes Catholic Church in Arlington is hosting its monthly run & walk social on June 18th (Thursday) at 6:30pm. The 3 or 4 mile run (or walk) will start in the back parking lot (off N. Stafford St.) and end at St. Agnes. Participants can enjoy complimentary pizza afterwards. Drinks are BYOB. Extra points if you wear Catholic school swag. Thank you Father Oetjen, who started off our May run from Court House to/from the Marine Corps War Memorial with a prayer (and ran a competitive pace). Also, thank you to the Notre Dame and Georgetown alumni who wore their schools’ colors!
Please RSVP at the link, so we know how much pizza to get. Thank you!
In recent Liberty District high-school baseball games between Arlington rivals, the host Wakefield Warriors topped the Washington-Liberty Generals, 8-5, then the Yorktown Patriots downed visiting Wakefield, 9-3.
For Wakefield (2-4, 2-3) against W-L, Cort Bringham was the standout. On the mound, the right-hander worked 6 1/3 innings of two-hit ball (one earned run), fanned five and walked two to get the win. With the bat, Bringham had three hits, with a double, and drove in three runs.
The Yorktown Patriots’ undefeated season through seven matches is extra-notable due to the difficult schedule the girls high-school lacrosse team has played so far.
The defending Virginia High School League Class 6 state champion has faced and defeated perennial powers like the Langley Saxons, Oakton Cougars, Robinson Rams, Battlefield Bobcats and C.G. Woodson Cavaliers.
Gabriela Netwall winning multiple girls events and Ian Crowley doing the same for the boys helped the two host Washington-Liberty Generals teams win the annual Arlington County outdoor track-and-field meets.
The girls won with 200 points and the boys with 191. Both Wakefield Warriors squads placed second in the high-school meet.
Not only is the Marymount University Saints’ flag football team undefeated this spring — the second-year squad has not allowed a point through nine games.
The Division III squad has outscored its opponents, 310-0, with its most recent win a 39-0 victory over Holy Family University in Philadelphia. Marymount’s closest game was a 12-0 road win over Eastern University.
With a 6-2 record through eight boys lacrosse matches, the Washington-Liberty Generals are enjoying one of their best starts in program history.
Among the high-school team’s victories were a 11-7 win over private-school Sidwell Friends along with triumphs over Northern Virginia public-school squads West Springfield, 13-8, Marshall, 16-3, Falls Church, 16-5, and South County, 6-3.
