Former Dartmouth offensive lineman Matt Kaskey '19 shows up in a number of photos from the Los Angeles Rams minicamp (LINK) and during a visit with patients at Cedars-Sinai Hospital along with the team's other rookies. (LINK) . . . (Sorry for not posting anything more than screen grabs of the 6-foot-7, 325-pound Kaskey here but between my training as a journalist and the years I spent in newspapers I'm uncomfortable reposting pictures without permission.)
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Speaking of former Dartmouth players a report out of San Francisco includes onetime Dartmouth quarterback Jack Henegan among players working out recently for the team. Heneghan, who spent last summer with the Niners, earlier worked out for the Giants. He had earned a spot on the roster of the Arizona Hotshots of the ill-fated Alliance of American Football this spring.
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A Washington Post story spun out of the Operation Varsity Blues" investigation takes a look at . . .
"the powerful and pervasive role sports play in admissions to the nation’s most prestigious private colleges and universities."
From the story:
"Federal data show 14 percent of Brown undergraduates were varsity athletes in 2017, compared with 15 percent at Yale, 16 percent at Harvard, 19 percent at Princeton University and 21 percent at Dartmouth College."
This ending to the story will surely raise some eyebrows:
“We are an athletic league,” (Ruth) Simmons, Brown’s former president, testified last fall in the Harvard admissions trial, according to the Harvard Crimson student newspaper. “How are we going to field teams to play each other if we don’t admit athletes for those teams? A lot of people outside the Ivy League believe we’re not serious when it comes to athletics, but that’s because they’ve never sat at a table of Ivy League presidents fighting about athletics.”•
On the heels of successful Dartmouth men's tennis coach Chris Drake leaving for Yale after nine years in Hanover, women's lacrosse coach Danielle Spencer is departing for Stanford after just three years, two Ivy League coach of the year awards and a share of the Ivy League title this spring.
While there is surely some hand wringing among Dartmouth alums and fans at losing two successful coaches in a matter of weeks, I'm reminded of something Ted Leland used to say when he was the Big Green athletic director. Leland, who himself would one day become AD at Stanford, said he did not want coaches who would be satisfied coaching at Dartmouth. He wanted coaches hungry to move on to bigger things because they would keep pushing for the kind of success that would help them reach their dreams and never settle comfortably into life in Hanover.
