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Princeton's Andrew Starks, a 6-foot-2, 240-pound linebacker, is headed to a rookie minicamp with the Bears May 10-12.Yale's Will McHale, a 6-1, 236 linebacker, will go to rookie minicamp with the Saints the same weekend.
That brings to 10 the number of Ivy Leaguers who will get a look from pro football teams this year, including the three draftees.
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THOSE CERTAIN UPDATES
Several emails came this way yesterday after our local daily posted this story under the headline: The Road to Confidence: Dartmouth Women’s Track Athletes Commit to Girls on the Run.
All-American Abbey D'Agostino is rightfully in the lede to the story. Quoted a little further down is the organizer of the effort who recruited Abbey to help out, That Certain '14, who refers to herself as a "retired" Dartmouth runner. As the only kid in her high school class to graduate with the maximum 12 varsity letters, having played every inning of softball over four years on the high school varsity, and having been selected the outstanding female athlete of her class, I'm not sure the word quit is in her vocabulary.
I recently talked with a former All-America distance runner at Dartmouth whose biggest regret all these years later was not taking a term overseas – but with cross country, indoor track and outdoor track, running is a three-season sport. That Certain '14, who is determined to squeeze every bit out of the orange (or green as it were), did not want to have that regret. She chose last spring to go to Barcelona and missed the outdoor season. As an Earth Science major, she had the opportunity to go to the Rockies on the college's legendary Stretch program last fall, and that meant missing cross country season. In the winter she was thrilled to be selected as one of the college's SEAD interns and missed the indoor season working long hours at a high school in the southern part of the state. Getting back up to speed after a full year away was going to be tough when there was so much more of Dartmouth she wanted out of her Dartmouth experience, like her run for Student Body president, leading one of the Girls on the Run efforts and so much more.
As for the other guy, That Certain Nittany Lion had no fewer than three final exams on Monday, starting in the morning and finishing in the evening. He has his last exam tomorrow. We are taking him out to dinner tomorrow night at a restaurant in State College that no one ever took me to when I was there ;-), and we make the long drive back to the Upper Valley Friday.
I hear all the time about parents reminding their kids to make sure they spend more time hitting the books in the library. We've spend a lot of this spring encouraging That Certain Nittany Lion to occasionally get out of the library. If there was a Penn State game, football, basketball, hockey, baseball and even a wrestling match, he was there. Otherwise he was wearing out his carrel in the library.
After the three exams Monday, he had two full days and part of another before his last exam tomorrow. He has made it a point to stay up on all his reading and so we encouraged him to go out and play a round of golf yesterday to get his mind off the books for three hours and attack studying for the next final fresh. It took a ridiculous amount of encouragement to get him out of the library and into the fresh air for a bit, but in the end he seemed to understand the good it did for him. Of course, we woke up this morning to a text sent at 12:30 last night that he didn't think he'd accomplished as much yesterday as he'd hoped.
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| In this era of limited "live" action at practice, tackling drills sometimes include pads to break the fall. This is from Tuesday's Dartmouth practice. |
