This and That

Today's Boston Globe has a few paragraphs about the impending installation of lights at Dartmouth's Memorial Field.

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The Indianapolis Star writes about a 3,000-yard high school running back who had been hearing from Dartmouth and Louisville before choosing to pursue running track in college.

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The Globe reports that MAC-bound UMass will get to play at Gillette Stadium rent-free. Whether the Minutemen will be long for the MAC remains to be seen. As the Globe writes ...

... (I)f the Big East called tomorrow and invited the Minutemen as their 10th team in football and 18th team in basketball, a deal would be signed in a Massachusetts minute.

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You had to figure this was coming. From a story in the Yale Daily:

Yale is under federal investigation for possible violations of Title IX, but in the gender equality statute’s traditional sports context, the University seems to be on solid footing, despite different levels of funding between male and female teams.

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The Wall Street Journal has a story under the headline:

How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football
With national reaction to injuries mounting, TR's private summit led to crucial rule changes—including the forward pass.

The piece begins this way:

Football is in trouble. NFL owners have locked out the players, meaning that the upcoming season could be cancelled. Even if the games go on, a lingering dispute over head injuries has saddled the sport with a messy controversy.

From the story:

Today a major problem is concussions. One study sponsored by the NFL found that professional veterans over the age of 50 are five times as likely as the general population to suffer from dementia. Those numbers are bad, but consider the situation in 1905, when 18 people died on the gridiron.

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Here's an interesting take on the value of sports from a story I freelanced last week about Dartmouth women's lacrosse player Shannie MacKenzie:

"The head of the desk I worked on was an athlete at Northwestern and he is a huge believer that the characteristics you develop and the things you learn in sports carry on," she said. "His main takeaway is that there are a lot of smart and really successful people at these jobs and a lot of them don't know what it's like to fail and to lose.

"As an athlete you know what it's like and you know how to rebound. You can't let failing scar you for the next 'X' amount of years. You give it that 10 minutes or two hours of thought and then you bounce back."

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A few snow flurries up here on the mountain this morning. The forecast for this afternoon's practice is low 40's with wind and a 30 percent chance of rain. Wunnerful, wunnerful.

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Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens on the schedule for the rest of the spring from BGA premium:

“We will scrimmage this week on Thursday as opposed to Friday. We’ll go early on Friday morning for an abbreviated practice because we have some morning classes and don’t want to double dip with such a short recovery period after banging on Thursday. That will be a challenge mentally: Can you get up and get out of bed and go full bore?

“I’m glad we’re practicing Friday morning with it being Easter weekend. It’s midterms time as well. That will give them Saturday, Sunday and Monday to recoup. We’ll probably scrimmage a little bit again on Tuesday then go lighter and pick teams on Thursday before we have the (Green-White) scrimmage on Saturday (April 30).