A reason why the reader is a little more hopeful: One of the head coaches in Darien is former Dartmouth captain Rich Joyce '91, co-captain of Buddy Teevens' 1990 Ivy League champions. From a story last fall in the Darien Voice:
Two Darien teams in the Fairfield County Football League that went undefeated in regular season play last year as seventh graders are undefeated again this year as eighth-graders.
Darien White, coached by Rich Joyce, went 11-0 last season and won the league championship.
And . . .
Joyce is regarded by some as the best coach in the league. The former Dartmouth co-captain was a first-team All-Ivy selection, and his father was a successful football coach in western Pennsylvania. “He’s the most aggressive player I have ever coached,’’ Jerry Chapman, a Dartmouth assistant at the time, said in a newspaper report in 1990 in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “He gets it done on the field. He takes the game very seriously.”
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A total of 16 Ivy League players are in NFL camps this summer according to the Ivy League website. The breakdown by school:Brown
Colin Cloherty, Atlanta Falcons (5th Season)
Zak DeOssie, New York Giants (7th Season)
James Develin, New England Patriots (4th Season)
Columbia
Jeff Adams, Miami Dolphins (2nd Season)
Josh Martin, Kansas City Chiefs (1st Season)
Cornell
Kevin Boothe, New York Giants (8th Season)
Luke Tasker, San Diego Chargers
JC Tretter, Green Bay Packers (1st Season)
Bryan Walters, Seattle Seahawks (4th Season)
Desmond Bryant, Cleveland Browns (5th Season)
Ryan Fitzpatrick, Tennessee Titans (9th Season)
Kyle Juszczyk, Baltimore Ravens (1st Season)
Kevin Murphy, Minnesota Vikings (2nd Season)
Penn
Brandon Copeland, Baltimore Ravens (1st Season)
Greg Van Roten, Penn - Green Bay Packers (2nd Season)
Princeton
Mike Catapano, Kansas City Chiefs (1st Season)
Absent from the list are Yale and Dartmouth but look for the Big Green to have perhaps two – or more – players giving it a shot next summer.
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It helps to have connections.When the Philadelphia Eagles lost Jeremy Maclin to an ACL, head coach Chip Kelly reached into his Rolodex and dialed up a player he knows well from the University of New Hampshire – David Ball, who has been knocking around the periphery of pro football since 2007.
A player Dartmouth knows only too well from the UNH-Big Green series, Ball broke Jerry Rice's IAA career touchdown record with 58. Find a story about his signing with the Eagles here.
Ball, 29, last played in the Ultimate Indoor Football League.
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It's back to the Tommy Keane Invitational golf tournament today. Spotted on the Hanover Country Club porch yesterday was former Dartmouth head football coach Joe Yukica. "JY" was there watching son Joe Jr., and grandson Mike advance in the second flight of the event. Mike, by the way, will be headed to UNH where his grampa was the head football coach for a couple of years in the mid-1960s. Yukica, who stepped down as head coach at Boston College to take over the Dartmouth program in 1978, won three Ivy League titles in nine years at the Big Green helm before giving way to Buddy Teevens in 1987.For a story I wrote out of yesterday's golf tournament, click here.
