Checking In With Team Wodka

Early decision acceptances have gone out and names of incoming recruits will be showing up in coming days. One of the first to go public is 6-foot-3, 265-pound offensive lineman Zach Wokda, brother of Alex Wodka, a 6-3, 275 freshman at Dartmouth this year. The brothers hail from Buffalo Grove, Ill. There's a story about Team Wodka in the Daily Herald. From the story:

The Wodkas figure to have a chance to work together on the field with four senior offensive line starters graduating from a 3-7 team. Dartmouth also has a $20 million athletic facility that just opened.

For last month's Green Alert posting about Zach Wodka choosing Dartmouth, click here.

Casey Cramer '04 was one of the more quotable players at Dartmouth in recent years and the beat writers covering the Tennessee Titans have discovered the fullback/tight end isn't afraid to talk. He's quoted in a Tennessean story headlined: Players sacrifice health for game; Titans say benefits now outweigh later problems. Casey told the paper:

"Is playing an extra couple years really worth walking with a limp or not being able to play catch with your kids? I'd have to think about that," he said.

"There are all of those rumors going around that the average lifespan of an NFL player is 57 years. That's not true. That's just kind of a little legend they pass around to scare you."

And, he said:

"Surgeries, medicines, and all of those things have improved over the years. I've said jokingly that I'm banking on science to fix my body afterwards, (but) I feel like 20 or 30 years from now, science will be a lot better."

Dartmouth football coach Buddy Teevens will be in the inaugural class of the new Silver Lake Regional High School hall of fame according to this brief in the Boston Globe.

The Nov. 25, 2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer featured a Norman Chad column about NFL officials. Included in the column was this:

Don't all the great lawyers and judges come from Harvard and Yale? Yet not a single Harvard or Yale grad is an NFL official; rather, just one side judge from Princeton and one back judge from Dartmouth. Heck, Dartmouth's no more than DeVry with pine trees. It's time for the league to recruit officials from upper echelon Ivy League institutions.

That's the kind of quote that's hard to forget. I thought it was pretty funny the first time I saw it -- a year ago. Here's a Nov. 27, 2006 Green Alert blog note regarding the same quote. It would appear the P-I either re-ran the column or sat on it for a full year before using it. Strange.

The New York Times had a Sunday story about kids playing squash and how that might help open the doors to elite colleges. The setup for the story:

In an era of increasingly competitive college admissions — when Princeton, for example, turns down four of five valedictorians who apply — anxious parents are looking for some edge, any edge, to help their child gain entry through the back door of the nation’s most selective universities.

From the story:

Q: When are parents not thrilled to discuss their children’s athletic endeavors? A: When they think it might reveal the trump card that could get their kid into Dartmouth.

I'll bet they are loving that in the squash offices. But according to someone who should know, if your little linebacker is going to remain a little linebacker, you actually might want to hand him a squash racket along with that SAT prep book:

“I’ve had lots of kids who pick up squash in ninth grade and become nationally ranked by the time they apply,” said Michele Hernandez, founder of Hernandez College Consulting in Weybridge, Vt. “I can’t think of another sport where they can start so late.”

Hernandez, by the way, is a former Dartmouth student and assistant director of admissions at Dartmouth. If you are trying to get every edge you can to squeeze your child into an Ivy League or elite school, she's someone you want to check out. Find her bio here.