Tight End Set For Dartmouth

Snow day in the Upper Valley with 12-16 inches predicted by the forecasters this morning. We'll see ...

Another day, another recruit announces for Dartmouth. This time it is Justin Foley, a tight end from Harrison, Ohio, who is listed as 6-foot-2, 211 pounds on one site and 6-4, 215 on another. Foley caught 33 passes for 574 yards and seven touchdowns last year and 58 balls for 927 yards and 10 touchdowns over his four years as a Harrison starter according to this Cincinnati.com article. ...

For a couple of photos of Foley click here and here.

There's a brief story about quarterback Nyk McKissic choosing Dartmouth (see next post) in the Austin American-Statesman.

With signing day next week all kinds of recruiting news will be breaking soon, some of it good for the Ivies and some of it not so good. News of the latter variety at Yale is reported on the Portal 31 blog which writes:

Rivals.com is reporting that Chris Wade, a linebacker from Northshore High in Slidell, La., has committed to Miami (Ohio). Wade was one of the 11 players who were accepted early into Yale and until Miami got involved with him in the recent weeks, Wade was expected to be a cornerstone of Yale's incoming freshman class.

Speaking of recruiting, the Ivy League was at the forefront of the news regulations on text messaging young athletes. One of the first to run afoul of the new rules is the University at Albany. The NCAA writes of the up-and-coming New York school's program:

On 36 occasions during the 2007 fall semester, following the effective date of NCAA rules eliminating text-message communication with prospective student-athletes, several assistant football coaches sent impermissible text messages to prospective student-athletes. The majority of the text messages were sent using a recruiting software program that enabled a coach to type a single message and send it to several prospective student-athletes at once. As a result, the 36 occasions when football coaches sent text messages resulted in 331 messages sent and 220 prospective student-athletes contacted. Further, during the summer of 2008, the head baseball coach sent 56 impermissible text messages to five prospects.

Former Brown quarterback and head coach Mark Whipple has made it official. He's leaving the Philadelphia Eagles' coaching staff to become the offensive coordinator for the Miami Hurricanes. Whipple has had success everywhere he's coached, leading UMass to the national championship as head coach and guiding Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger to his first Super Bowl. The Miami Herald writes:

His UMass teams set more than 40 offensive team records. His 1997 Brown team set Ivy League and school records for total offense (474.3 yards per game). While at New Haven, his 1992 squad led all NCAA divisions in scoring offense (50.5 points per game) and total offense (587.7 ypg).

There have been a couple of truly sobering stories about head trauma, concussions and brain damage in the past several days. A New York Times story leads with findings about a former Cornell standout who went on to the NFL:

Doctors at Boston University’s School of Medicine found a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the brain of Tom McHale, an N.F.L. lineman from 1987 to 1995 who died in May at 45. Known as C.T.E., the progressive condition results from repetitive head trauma and can bring on dementia in people in their 40s or 50s.

A couple of related takeouts from the story:

Brain damage commonly associated with boxers has been found in a sixth deceased former N.F.L. player age 50 or younger, further stoking the debate between many doctors and the league over the significance of such findings.

And ...

“This is a medically significant finding,” said Dr. Daniel P. Perl, the director of neuropathology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York who is not affiliated with the Boston University group. “I think with a sixth case identified, out of six, for a condition that is incredibly rare in the general population, there is more than enough evidence that football is clearly strongly related to the presence of this pathology.”

From a Boston Globe story:

In a discovery bound to reverberate through the nation's youth football community, clinical researchers reported Tuesday that the brain of a recently deceased 18-year-old high school football player showed the earliest signs of an incurable, debilitating disease caused by the kind of repetitive head trauma he experienced on the field.

Had the teenager lived, neurologists said, he eventually would have developed early-onset dementia that would have advanced unabated until his death.

The story includes this:

Rick White, football coach at Dartmouth High School in Massachusetts, believes more precautions will be taken when a player has a concussion.

"The time a player takes off, the time they're allowed to come back, has changed dramatically over the years," said White. "As this research keeps coming out, you're going to see kids have to sit out longer. Some of these injuries could be season-ending, and even career-ending.

We are fortunate in our community that Hanover High School, like Dartmouth, is part of the Centers for Disease Control research study "focusing on the effects of biomechanical force exposure (eg. head acceleration) on cognition in student athletes." From a newsletter we just received:

This study includes a comprehensive battery of neurocognitive tests, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), genotyping, ImPACT online cognitive assessment testing, and the Head Impact Telemetry (HIT) System. The HIT System, developed and manufactured by Simbex, utilizes an array of six accelerometers that fit inside the athletes' helmets to collect real-time data on the sequence, magnitude (g force) and direction of hits taken. By combining the onfield data with state-of-the-art brain imaging technology and neurocognitive assessments, we aim to further the understanding of the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of sports-related concussion in high school athletes. A similar study is being conducted with the Dartmouth College football and hockey teams.

Simbex is headquarted in nearby Lebanon.

More from the newsletter:

According to the American Journal of Sports Medicine, "a 50-player high school football team can expect three or four concussions a year."

Hanover high, which had 29 student-athletes take part in the study, had four concussed participants this year according to the newsletter.

That certain Hanover High freshman was part of the study last fall, although he couldn't complete the MRI because of his braces.

Several more notes before I let you go today ...

The Brown Daily Herald reports the school's endowment, "stands to lose $800m."

I've been wondering when I would read something like this. The Yale Daily reports that, "In an attempt to encourage students to pay attention to lectures and to facilitate class discussions, at least two dozen professors and teaching assistants have banned, or at least discouraged, laptop use since classrooms were outfitted with wireless in 2006."

And finally, the Daily Dartmouth has a story that certainly tops the one I freelanced recently on Dartmouth hockey coach Bob Gaudet coaching sons Jimmy and Joey this winter. The D piece is about one of the incoming freshmen assistant squash coach Hansi Wiens will work with next year.

That would be his wife Valaria, 22, an early decision admit. From the story:

Originally from Russia, Wiens finished her final years of high school in Germany, where she first began playing squash. Even with only six years of playing experience, Wiens is expected to be the star of next year’s team ...