Busy Weekend

The first big football recruiting weekend of January has wrapped up in Hanover and if what I've gleaned is true there was a pretty high-profile kid on campus. You've read about him before if you are a regular visitor to this electronic neighborhood, or spend much time with the Boston Globe sports pages.

If nothing else, there was a buzz in town this weekend with thousands of high school, college and club athletes swarming Leverone Field House for the annual Dartmouth Relays. We sat in the stands behind a group of competitors who came all the way from Halifax, Nova Scotia. In case you are wondering, that's a 12 1/2-hour trip in good weather and they ran into a snowstorm that made it a good deal longer. As I joked with them at least they had a chance to go south for a few days.

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A few more responses have trickled in to the editorial in The Dartmouth headlined Verbum Ultimum: Reassessing Recruitment. The latest, which won't be well received by those who believe student-athletes bring something special to the school, begins this way:

Before you apologists for athletics get too worked up over this. . .

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A high-profile University of Virginia quarterback who decided to transfer out of the Cavalier program reportedly had Penn on his short list but has decided to stay in-state at the University of Richmond. link

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One of the advantages of being the only college football team in New York City – with apologies to Fordham for overlooking the Rams in the first version of this piece – is that when the TV folks sitting around an editorial meeting decide they need a football player or two for a story they are working on, Columbia sometimes gets a call. So it shouldn't be a surprise that when the CBS Sunday Morning show put together a piece called, A gridiron fashion statement about football uniforms they brought in a couple of Columbia players to model various uniforms for a designer who I'm going to guess never played the game ;-)

(Editor's Note: Maybe some day I'll post the video from when I wore a uniform for a similar piece on the Today Show back when Bryant Gumbel was the host. True story. On second thought, that puppy is staying in cold storage.)

Here's the CBS Sunday Morning video.

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As my family will tell you, for someone who steadfastly refuses to have a cell phone/smart phone, I'm something of a geek when it comes to electronics. Maybe that's why I think this iPad app to help college football coaches with recruiting is, as they say in these parts, wicked cool.

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Tragic news from Barcelona where a Dartmouth junior has died on a foreign study program not affiliated with the college. Details on what happened haven't been released. link

A member of the Dartmouth rugby team, Crispin Scott was from Mercer Island, Washington.