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Tom Gilmore, let go as Holy Cross head coach seven games into the 2017 season, has landed on his feet as the new head coach at Lehigh. (LINK) Gilmore spent eight years on staff at Dartmouth, serving as defensive coordinator for the undefeated 1996 team before leaving to become defensive coordinator at Lehigh. Most recently he was an assistant at Wake Forest.
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Training camp has begun for the Alliance of American Football spring league and former Dartmouth quarterback Jack Heneghan is working with the Arizona Hotshots while former center Jacob Flores is with the Memphis Express. Heneghan was a late cut from the San Francisco 49ers last summer. Flores spent time in the Green Bay Packers' organization.
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Speaking of Gilmore and the 10-0 team from 1996, last week I stumbled across a 10th-anniversary story I freelanced about that team. From that story:
On the way to becoming the first 10-0 team in school history, the Big Green won low-scoring games (6-3 against Harvard) and high-scoring games (38-21 against Cornell). It won by overpowering a once-beaten team (40-0 against Columbia) and by sneaking past a .500 team (27-24 against Brown). It won with a little bit of luck and a lot of faith. It won with character and characters.Relive that historic season HERE.
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And finally, there's a theory in sportswriting that the smaller the ball, the better the writing. Thankfully, it doesn't always hold true but there's something to it. Here's another theory: The smaller the college, the more they appreciate media coverage and I can attest to that.As much fun as it would be to cover Penn State football, it's a pretty safe assumption that the folks in Happy Valley wouldn't be anywhere near as accommodating and appreciative of the attention as Buddy Teevens, his staff and the people at Dartmouth are.
I bring that up because in addition to Dartmouth, when I was at the newspaper I covered sports at Colby-Sawyer College, a small, Division III school in nearby New London, N.H., where I was always warmly received. Since leaving the paper I try to make it a point to go to at least one men's and women's basketball game a year at Colby-Sawyer to have a chance to say hi to coaches who I consider friends. To that end, Mrs. BGA and I headed down I-89 last night to catch the Chargers against the University of St. Joseph, a West Hartford, Conn., school fielding a men's team for the first time.
Making the men's game a little more interesting was that St. Joes is coached by Jim Calhoun. Yes, THAT Jim Calhoun, he of the three national championship teams at UConn. Calhoun spent much of the game on a stool a couple of feet away from the Blue Jays' bench calmly watching the action. But at one point when things went a little south he fired a water bottle onto the floor behind his seat and late in the game he became quite animated when a foul call went against his team, which ended up losing, 91-88. (Find a story about Calhoun's visit to the outskirts of the Upper Valley HERE.)
Doing a lot of the coaching for St. Joes was Glen Miller. Yes, Ivy League basketball fans, THAT Glen Miller, he of the seven years as head coach at Brown and then three-plus years running the show at Penn. He was named associate director of men's basketball at St. Joes a year ago. (LINK)
For what it's worth, St. Joes – which has a handful of transfers including one who scored five points against Dartmouth as a freshman at Boston College – is 9-6 in its first season.
