The Bangor Daily News has a story about coach Bob Whalen's work leading the Ivy League champion Dartmouth baseball team to the NCAA Tournament. Dartmouth plays at North Carolina Friday and as the story notes, Whalen doesn't want his players to be content with simply making it to the regionals:
“I’ve made it clear to them that we aren’t going down there to just try to be the little train that could. Baseball isn’t like football. If we play well and get a well-pitched game (we can win). ...Whalen, by the way, was an assistant at Maine under legendary coach John Winkin when Buddy Teevens had a successful two-year stint as the Black Bears' head football coach in the mid-1980's.
“We have to go down there with the understanding that our goal is to become the first Ivy League team to ever reach a Super Regional ... . ”
Something has been bugging me since watching the Cornell-Syracuse lacrosse championship Monday afternoon. Each time Cornell scored a goal, the Big Red band would strike up Give My Regard to Davy, the school fight song, which was stirring. Even with the NCAA semis and finals sandwiched around graduation, the Cornell band mustered enough of a presence to be able to spur on the Big Red players and crowd. Kudos to them.
Syracuse's goals in the championship game, meanwhile, were accompanied by the ubiquitous sound of the Kernfraft 400, the hockey goal-scoring song being piped over the Gillette Stadium PA system. While I'm sure the folks controlling the music would have done the same thing for Cornell if the Big Red band hadn't been there, there's a piece of me that wonders if it was the organizers' responsibility to get the Syracuse crowd and players charged up. Sure made it seem like a Syracuse home game to me.
Today's Daily Dartmouth covers a speech by Dartmouth president-elect Jim Young Kim here. The story includes this quote, which is pretty funny:
Once I started showing a real interest in the nitty-gritty of Dartmouth College, people started coming out of the closet, as Dartmouth people, to me, people who I thought were otherwise perfectly normal.Occasionally the real world intrudes even on a sports blog. At Harvard a murder in a dormitory entry has led to a woman in the senior class being barred from graduation. There's a story in the Harvard Crimson that follows yesterday's story in the Boston Globe.
And finally, that certain Hanover High junior softball player's bus left the high school for a weekday doubleheader at Laconia yesterday at 1:30. She got home at 11 p.m. I'm a huge supporter of high school athletics, but that's absolutely ridiculous. And Laconia (1:40 away by Yahoo Maps) isn't even the farthest the team has had to travel this spring. It also had games in North Conway (2:20 away), Wolfeboro, NH (2:08 away) and Durham (2:01 away).
There are at least five Vermont high schools that are less than a 30-minute drive for Hanover but the stubborn New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association (NHIAA) – headquartered in Concord in the middle of the state and clearly out of touch with schools that aren't centrally located – has historically made it almost impossible for schools that play out-of-state games to make the state tournament. Perhaps the most ironic thing about the NHIAA's stance is that Hanover's home field is actually across the river – in Vermont.
Gas prices and travel costs aside, if the folks at the NHIAA could have seen the sleepy Hanover kids last night it might have finally woken them up.
That certain junior had two of Hanover's five hits on the day and once again caught a runner stealing. But she seemed to have no joy in talking about it after straggling in, and I think it had little to do with the fact that the team lost both games. The kid was beat.
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