Georgia Has Dartmouth On Its Mind

More recruiting tidbits ...

From the Atlanta Journal Constitution this week: "Ryan Murphy, a 6-foot-4, 225-pound defensive end for Walton, is being recruited by Dartmouth, Georgetown, Harvard and Princeton."

Following up on an earlier post about quarterback Matt Moody of Landmark Christian, another Journal-Constitution note had this to say about the former teammate of Dartmouth freshman linebacker Zech Glaize: "According to his mother Beth Moody, Matt has received strong interest from Dartmouth, Lehigh and Liberty. She added that the one pull to Georgia Tech is former Landmark Christian teammate Miles King, who is a wide receiver for the Yellow Jackets." ... The piece continued: "The 6-foot-3, 220-pound Moody plans to visit Georgia Tech, Dartmouth and, possibly, Liberty in January."

Meant to mention this before but Harvard center Frank Fernandez will play in the Hula Bowl this Sunday in his hometown of Honolulu. Teammate Clifton Dawson is headed for the Texas vs. The Nation game Feb. 2 in El Paso. The game pits players who went to high school or played college in Texas against players from colleges outside of Texas. Find the Harvard release here.

In other sports news ...

Here's something I didn't realize until this morning: When the Duke men's lacrosse team opens the 2007 season next month in Durham, N.C., the opponent will be ... Dartmouth. Now that ought to be a media circus. Find a story here. ...

This was mentioned sometime back on this electronic space (a friend came up with that description and I like it ;-), but a couple of Dartmouth alums write the acclaimed Women's Hoops Blog; Inane commentary on a game that deserves far better. The bloggers are the subjects of this Minneapolis Star Tribune story. I mention this because the story notes a post on their site triggered a Connecticut newspaper columnist to go off on the NCAA Committee for Women's Athletics for its "call to banish the Mikan drill from the women's college game because it makes others watch while teammates practice rebounding and layups, and because it is named after a man." Inane doesn't do that idea justice. ...

Off the field of play ... the Daily Dartmouth reports that the president of the Dartmouth review is stepping down over the recent controversial front page of the conservative publication. ...

Speaking of inane, I tried to download the Boise State-Oklahoma game video off iTunes yesterday. At $2.99, I figured it would be fun to show the kids, who were asleep long before the epic contest was over. I went through all the steps, ordered the game and the computer started to download the 3-hour broadcast. Um, have I told you our internet service up here on the mountain is slow? Even with the radio relay that delivers us higher speed than dialup, the message I got was that it would take 75 hours for the game to download! Those numbers are usually off by quite a bit, so I let the computer go for two hours and it still told me there were more than 70 hours to go. Needless to say, I stopped the download. I may try again once I'm in town and can access a faster wifi connection, but only if I can figure out how to restart an iTunes download. Otherwise, I've contributed $2.99 to the betterment of Apple. I could do worse.

And finally this: When we got home after our 7th-grader's basketball game yesterday, the 9th-grader handed me her backpack. I almost toppled over. The thing was so heavy I took it upstairs to weigh it. It came in at ... 38 pounds! Thirty-eight pounds! And there was nothing in there that didn't belong except for a folding umbrella. No wonder the hike up and down the Grand Canyon last summer was no problem for her. She's been training for years. I should have had her carry the six liters of water. ;-) Now, Hanover's as good a school system as there is Northern New England and the freshman has a pretty tough load in honors courses at HHS, but that's an unbelievable amount of texts and notebooks she's toting around. Whatever happened to the days when we used to be able to bring everything home with one of those rubber cords that just locked the books together? Yikes.