Monday, September 05, 2011

Lessons Of Football

Football comes up immediately in a New York Times Q&A with onetime Dartmouth linebacker Enrique Salem '87, now president and CEO of computer security company Symantec. Salem told the NYT:
When you play football, you really understand it is a team effort. When you play organized sports, especially team sports, it’s not about individuals. I think organized sports are a way to learn a lot about things that will be helpful in business.
Find Salem's Symantic bio here.
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Pete Lembo, a Dartmouth assistant from 1994-96, won his first game as head football coach at Ball State when the Cardinals knocked off Big Ten Indiana Saturday, 27-20. The Star Press follows up on the victory for Ball State, which had just six wins in the previous three years. The victory improved Lembo's career record to a sparkling 80-36. He was 44-14 at Lehigh, 35-22 while rebuilding the Elon program, and is now 1-0 at BSU. Find his bio here.
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Princeton brought in Merrill Reese, longtime voice of the Philadelphia Eagles, to do a radio ticket promo for Tiger football. You can hear it here.
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For a peek at how Fitton Field at Holy Cross looked under the lights for Saturday's tough loss to UMass, click here.
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Providence Journal sportswriter Bill Reynolds has a story about former Brown running back and baseball star Bob Flanders, who still values the lessons he learned four decades ago in Providence. Said Flanders, who went on to a successful career as a lawyer and judge:
“In sports you always are failing. Most of my football career I spent on my back. Every year at Brown we would only win two or three games. The best baseball players fail two out of every three times at the plate. The very game I ran 94 yards for a school record I also shattered my knee. Sports teaches you how ephemeral everything is. It teaches you that the most important thing in life is just showing up every day.”
And the story includes this:
Flanders has come to believe that, maybe most of all, sports teaches you how to manage failure. They teach you that there’s always another game, always another day, another opportunity.

It’s one of the reasons why he was attracted to litigation as a lawyer, how it’s about winning and losing, just like sports.
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Dartmouth returns to action today as it kicks off a week of practice that will culminate with a visit from Harvard for Friday afternoon's preseason action. Be sure to check out BGA premium tonight for a practice wrapup. If you haven't signed up for BGA yet you're going to have a lot of catching up to do. There have been 25 full-length Dartmouth football stories posted since media day on Aug. 9, including at least one every day since practice began.
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That Certain Hanover High Grad moved into her dorm room Saturday. She begins official cross country practice today and starts training as an undergraduate advisor at midweek. ... That Certain Hanover High Senior, meanwhile, narrowly missed his first hole in one yesterday as his tee shot on the 204-yard, par-3 fifth hole at Hanover lipped out. He and Mrs. BGA left at 5:30 this morning to spend the day at the PGA's Deutsche Bank Championship in Norton, Mass. – a town more famous as the home of Dartmouth tailback Nick Schwieger ;-) – today.



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