Wearers of the Green

This 2009 revision of the Wearers of the Green film is well worth watching. It features comments from Casey Cramer, David Shula, Murry Bowden and Andrew Dete and includes video of one of David Clark's two 97-yard touchdown runs, but it is the comments from former women's basketball standout Courtney Banghart, now the head coach at Princeton, that make the film.

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Two times during his super successful tenure at Colgate football coach Dick Biddle has struck gold with a freshman quarterback who ended up playing four years. First it was Ryan Vena '00, still active in the Arena Football League. For the past four years it has been Greg Sullivan, whose 2,337 yards rushing are the most by a Patriot League quarterback (and that would make him the Dartmouth overall rushing leader ahead of the 2,252 yards of Al Rosier '91).

The Big Green's season-opening opponent for 2011 has posted its recruiting class and it features three quarterbacks who will be bidding to replace the graduating Sullivan this fall. There's one who ran for 963 yards and 15 touchdowns last year, and another who ran for 675 yards and eight touchdowns while completing 73.4 percent of his passes with 24 touchdowns.

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The Dartmouth baseball team opens the home season against Siena today at 3 on Red Rolfe Field at Biondi Park. It's the earliest Big Green home opener in history, thanks to FieldTurf and snowblowers ;-) AccuWeather is calling for 46 degrees and mostly sunny.

Speaking of baseball, I downloaded the Dartmouth schedule to iCal yesterday (didn't realize the website offered that until yesterday). The Ivy League season begins Saturday at Columbia and ends May 1 at Harvard, meaning the entire conference campaign lasts just 30 days.

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Still on Dartmouth baseball, ESPN writes about the American League all-star who got away (thanks for the link):

At Vista High School near San Diego, (Trevor) Cahill ranked fifth in a class of about 650 students and scored 1,950 out of 2,400 on his SATs. He was on his way to Dartmouth to play baseball when the A's chose him in the second round of the draft and signed him for a $560,000 bonus.

And you have to like this from A's pitcher Dallas Braden on Cahill:

"He's without a doubt the smartest dumb kid you'll ever meet in your life.''

Cahill just turned 23.

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Former linebacker Gordy Quist and The Band of Heathens have released their new album, Top Hat Crown & the Clapmaster's Son. The Austin-based band is in Aspen, Colo., tonight as it begins a tour that includes dates in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. They will be in Germany, Sweden, Netherlands and the United Kingdom next month.

Gordy tells me he's hoping to bring tBoH to New England sometime next year. (Find his home page here.)

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Should have linked to an Associated Press story that begins this way:

Though the sushi and sashimi combo at the Yama Restaurant in Hanover probably isn't what their newest students had in mind, Dartmouth College is doing its best to welcome a group whose study abroad plans were derailed by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Dartmouth, which last year accepted students displaced by earthquakes in Haiti and Italy, is now taking in seven students from Brown University and Boston University who were indirectly displaced by the disasters in Japan.

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The morning headlines include a story about a 17-year-old Florida girl "accepted into several Ivy League schools," who allegedly "pistol-whipped" her mother to make her buy her a car.

Oh man, can't you just see Ivy League admissions people tearing into their files right now to see if they are one of those schools?