Do I Know You?

Courtesy of Forever Young Foundation

Incoming recruit Mike Tree of Brophy Prep in Phoenix is flanked by a couple of familiar faces while supporting Steve Young's Forever Young Foundation. Tree, a first-team, all-state Arizona pick, had 63 tackles, 15 stops for a loss, 11 sacks and forced six fumbles last fall.

FootballScoop had it right. Former Yale associate head coach Keith Clark has joined the Big Green coaching staff. A Lafayette grad, Clark coached for five seasons at Columbia. He's also coached at Wagner, Maine and Rutgers since serving as head coach of the Bolzano Jets, a professional team in Italy. Find his old Yale bio here.

With Ivy League admissions notices having gone out, the Daily Dartmouth writes:

Dartmouth accepted a record low 12 percent of applicants for the Class of 2013, down from 13.5 percent last year.

The story also includes this:

While all of the Ivy League schools received more applications this year, according to The New York Times, several small liberal arts colleges have seen applications drop. Williams College received 20 percent fewer applications this year as compared with last year ... .

The Ivy League schools’ strong and widely known financial aid programs may explain their continued success in attracting applicants, (Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Maria) Laskaris said.

“I think it goes back to the strength of our financial aid programs and the awareness of our financial aid programs,” Laskaris said. “Concern about the amount of financial aid that smaller schools could provide versus the amount of financial aid that Dartmouth and its Ivy peers could provide may have been some of the reason for (decrease in admissions numbers at liberal arts colleges).”

Speaking of admissions, the New York Times has started a new blog that might be worth visiting from time to time. It's called, The Choice: Demystifying College Admissions and Aid. From the introduction to the blog:

It is worth noting that there are nearly 2,000 four-year colleges and universities in this country, and that all but four dozen or so admit far more applicants than they reject.

With that certain Hanover High School junior looking at schools that fall well within that category, I know the Times blog will get at least one regular visitor.

And finally, Dartmouth football (along with all Dartmouth sports) lost a special friend with the passing in Hanover of Dick Dunham '53 at age 78. A former member of the United States Olympic Committee, Dick was a familiar name in the world of U.S. and international rowing, and a member of the National Rowing Hall of Fame.

Dick was one of the last of the alumni "regulars" at football practice, seldom missing a session until the last couple of years, but still managing to stop by occasionally last fall even while battling illness. He was a familiar sight at practice, toting along battered manila folders of rosters or statistics that he'd had copied at a shop in town earlier in the afternoon just so he could share them with fellow onlookers.

Long after fair-weather (literally) fans stopped coming to practice, Dick would bundle up in flannel or wool pants and a sort of Elmer Fudd hat with earflaps and stop by to watch the sessions. We talked often at practices over the years, and even in recent seasons when wins were hard to come by, the man never had a negative word to say about the program. Ever. I was never quite sure how much he understood about the game but it didn't seem to matter. A truly gentle man, he just seemed to enjoy watching.

I first got to know Dick when he would drive the late Lee Julian – then the widow of former basketball coach Doggie Julian and 30 years or so his senior – to Princeton or Yale or wherever the Dartmouth men's basketball team happened to be playing. He and Lee even traveled to Portugal to watch the Big Green men's hoop team when it ventured overseas. What a sight the two must have been!

Until the past few years he'd load up his minivan and head off to football games at Colgate or Cornell or wherever, offering rides to anyone who wanted to tag along. He invited me along many times but I never took him up on it, I can admit now, because I'd heard a few stories about his driving that made me a little leery ;-)

I can remember many a Dartmouth baseball game looking around to see if he were there and then being startled to discover him standing right next to me a second later. He just seemed to appear, and if you knew the man, you know what I mean.

Dick had many stories about his work with the USOC and all the Olympic Games he went to but he was so modest that I had to push him to share them with the newspaper when it was looking to "localize" Olympic coverage. His first-hand recounting of the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972 was made more chilling by that fact that he was in a room overlooking the Israeli quarters where the hostages were being held during the crisis.

The Dartmouth baseball team opens the home season today in the beautiful new Red Rolfe Field at Biondi Park and it won't be the same without Dick Dunham there. But I have absolutely no doubt he will be watching.