Dartmouth women's basketball won a share of the Ivy League title last night when it beat Brown and Harvard was upset by Yale. Most folks who follow Dartmouth athletics have a clue that the women's basketball program is pretty good. But this good? The Ivy League championship is Dartmouth's 16th in 29 years.
The Big Green finishes the regular season tied with Harvard (11th title) and Cornell (first title). There will be a coin flip and two of the teams will play Friday at Columbia with the winner taking on the team that won the bye for the right to go to the NCAA Tournament. Dartmouth made it through that gauntlet two years ago and very nearly upset Rutgers down in Trenton.
The news also was good for the Dartmouth men's hockey team at Cornell last night where the Big Green forced a third and deciding game today with a 5-3 playoff victory over the Big Red. The news was not as good for the Dartmouth women's ice hockey team which dropped its series against St. Lawrence and now sits atop the NCAA bubble. The announcement of the field comes tonight. And finally, the defending national championship Dartmouth skiing finished fourth at the NCAA's.
The Dartmouth men's basketball team gave it everything it had in the final weekend of the season without anything to show for it. Against Yale and Brown – teams that beat the Big Green by a combined 65 points a few weeks back – Dartmouth lost this time by a total of six points. Saturday's game finished on a poignant note when two-year captain Johnathan Ball took off his sneakers at game's end and left them at center court while he walked to the locker room for the final time in his socks. Ball had eight points in a furious rally over the final 3-plus minutes to help the Big Green battle back from 12 points down. I've been doing this stuff a long time and John Ball is one of the class individuals I've seen come through Hanover. He left to a well-deserved standing ovation.
What else? Remember the blog note a few weeks back about John Grisham's book Playing For Pizza? Former Harvard wide receiver Corey Mazza is following in the tracks of Grisham's hero and is playing for the Parma Panthers of the Italian Football League. He's going to have a weekly column on the ESPN The Magazine site. His first column is here.
Speaking of Harvard football, it continues to be Harvard month at Any Given Saturday, the home of FCS football talk. There continues to be a fact-a-day about Harvard here. Last October was Yale month. Wouldn't it be neat to see a Dartmouth month on AGS? (Hint, hint)
Someone made the good point the other day that the whole Harvard recruiting mess wouldn't make much of a splash if it were any school other than Harvard. I don't think that's entirely true but there's something to it. Now it's the Providence Journal's turn, writing:
... (W)ith Tommy Amaker at the helm, Harvard basketball is turning into the UNLV of the Ivy League, with admissions standards slipping and some unethical, if not quite illegal, recruiting practices having been exposed by The New York Times in a story last Sunday, leaving some administrators at haughty Harvard crimson-faced.... The Detroit Free Press gives Harvard its "Caught Crimson-Handed" award while a New Haven Register columnist gets in a few shots of his own.
And finally, if there are any web designers out there, would you please, please, please stop with the rotating "lead" story thingie in your pages? It is unbelievably annoying to click on a story just as it's changing and having another story pop up on the screen. On some of the pages it is intuitive how you go about bringing the story you are actually interested back to the front; on others I find myself sitting there waiting for the right story to return and then hoping I click in time. It's like playing Whac-A-Mole.
I'll leave you this morning with a Moose Mountain fly-over ...
Fiddling around with Google Earth a few days back I found our house (although not where the program said it is). The white rectangle to the left of the house is our 1984 VW camper van. If you look closely you can barely make out our dirt road on the left side of the picture. This shot was taken before we put a green standing-seam roof on the house. We'll probably disappear completely on the next fly over.
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