Diamond Champions

Football will have to wait today as the headlines belong to the Dartmouth baseball team.

After dropping the first game of the Ivy League Championships Series at Columbia, the Big Green battled back to clinch its second Ivy League title in as many years with an 11-5 win in yesterday's rubber game of the series. The Daily Dartmouth has a story about the championship weekend and the official Dartmouth website has a detailed recap of Sunday's decisive game. From the latter:

The Big Green, having won the Ivy League’s automatic bid to the NCAA Regionals, will have to wait three weeks to discover their fate as to where they are assigned in the brackets. This will be Dartmouth’s seventh trip to a regional and the second time it has done so in consecutive years (also in 1969-70).

Oh, and here's how the Columbia Spectator wrote up the weekend. The Spec also blogged the game.

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The final count on the Dartmouth football team's bone marrow drive: 117. The Daily Dartmouth has a brief on the effort.

Dartmouth defensive back Chad Hollis has a piece in the Daily D that is "a playlist for my Spring athletic experience." Not much football mentioned beyond this:

After a few big plays this spring, Kevin de Regt ‘12 has earned the nickname “Hit Stick.” Opposing receivers tremble whenever he steps on the field because they know carrying the ball is no longer safe.

Hollis is right. There were two No. 42s in the spring and it got a little confusing because de Regt wasn't hitting like a corner. He was hitting more like a linebacker who wants his own number next fall.

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Harvard has announced its recruiting class for football. Not surprisingly, California led the way with six recruits who will be wearing Crimson next fall while Texas had four.

The Columbia Spectator writes about how a "Midseason lull ends football’s title hopes." From the story:

Of those five straight losses, its loss to Dartmouth the next week was the most embarrassing. The Big Green entered the game winless, which was mostly a result of having played the strongest schedule of any Ivy League team to that point. Still, the Lions were heavily favored to win and they needed to in order to keep their hopes of an Ivy League title alive. However, the Light Blue played its most uninspired football of the season and was dominated by the Big Green, 28-6.

I must admit I'm not quite sure exactly who it was that said the Lions were "heavily" favored to win in Hanover.

One team that most would probably agree was heavily favored against Dartmouth last fall was New Hampshire. Although the Wildcats are not on the schedule for 2010, those who have watched the past couple of UNH-Dartmouth games might be interested in a story in Foster's Daily Democrat that begins this way:

Last summer University of New Hampshire quarterback R.J. Toman was voted preseason co-offensive player of the year in the Colonial Athletic Association.

Now he's fighting for his job.

That brings to mind the dilemma Buddy Teevens had the first time around when quarterback Matt Brzica won Ivy League Rookie of the Year honors in 1990 after quarterbacking Dartmouth to the Ivy League title – and then Jay Fiedler came along the next year. The solution, of course, was that Brzica was moved to wide receiver and Fiedler took over as QB, winning Ivy League Rookie of the Year and leading the Green to its second of three consecutive championships.