The D1 Ticker website has a piece headlined 2022-23 Executive Leadership Book Recommendations that offers up book recommendations from NCAA athletic directors and commissioners. (LINK) Dartmouth's Mike Harrity was one of two Ivy League ADs to participate in the survey, which recommended around 100 books.
Harrity offered two titles, with one that hits close to home:
Dr. Sian Beilock, an expert on performance and brain science, reveals in Choke the astonishing new science of why we all too often blunder when the stakes are high. What happens in our brain and body when we experience the dreaded performance anxiety? And what are we doing differently when everything magically “clicks” into place and the perfect golf swing, tricky test problem, or high-pressure business pitch becomes easy? In an energetic tour of the latest brain science, with surprising insights on every page, Beilock explains the inescapable links between body and mind; reveals the surprising similarities among the ways performers, students, athletes, and business people choke; and shows how to succeed brilliantly when it matters most.
Harrity's other recommendation is Jeff Pearlman's The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson. (LINK)
The other Ivy athletic director to participate in the survey is Cornell's Nicki Moore, who recommends The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students by Anthony Abraham Jack. (LINK)
Former Dartmouth quarterback Brian Mann '02, now the AD at William & Mary, offers up Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle. (LINK)
Campbell was a Columbia football player and head coach of the Lions from 1974-79 who rose to become chairman of the board of Intuit and board director of Apple among others. Along the way mentored/coached people like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Jack Dorsey, Sheryl Sandberg and the Google team. The William V. Campbell Trophy, the academic Heisman, is named in his honor.
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| Lalos and Brooks (courtesy Dartmouth football) |
During his recruiting trip to Washington, Dartmouth defensive line coach Duane Brooks had a chance to visit with his former charge Niko Lalos '20, who is second on the XFL's Seattle Sea Dragons with seven tackles for loss and the leading tackler on the team's defensive line with 35 stops.
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With the NFL Draft beginning tonight, The Athletic has a timely story headlined Steelers GM Omar Khan’s path to his NFL dream: Monopoly, letters and sleepless nights that mentions Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens' oversized role in helping get Khan's career started. The story is behind a paywall but includes this (LINK):
Khan met with then-Tulane and current Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens. Impressed with his ambition, Teevens offered Khan an opportunity. He started in a copy room working on any task he was assigned.
. . . (U)nbeknownst to Khan, Teevens had a close personal relationship with Saints GM Bill Kuharich that dated to their days in prep school. Teevens and his wife, Kirsten, are godparents to Kuharich’s third daughter. The Tulane coach put in a good word to help Khan stand out from the numerous other letters Kuharich received each week.
One afternoon, Khan returned home from college to find his answering machine blinking. It was Chet Franklin, the Saints’ assistant general manager and vice president of football operations, asking if Khan might be interested in an internship.
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Chris Wilkerson, a member of Buddy Teevens' staff when he returned to Dartmouth in 2005 and the Big Green's associate head coach before moving on to become the successful head coach at the University of Chicago in 2013, just finished his first season as head coach at Eastern Illinois of the Ohio Valley Conference. In a story on the Prairie State Pigskin site he addresses one of the impacts of the new FCS rules about running the clock after first downs. Wilkerson is quoted in the story (LINK):
“The NFL timing rules are in place for a very valid reason. No. 1, they play with 55ish players so their rosters are much smaller (than ours). So, the media timeouts and the length of games determine the number of snaps and that helps them because their squad sizes are not as big as our collegiate rosters.
“I have some mixed emotions about it. Personally, I think the timing rules are valid the way they are and I would hate to see them make some of these drastic adjustments. The volume of snaps we get at the collegiate level with the size of our rosters helps us with player development. And it does sometimes show your depth, or lack thereof.”
And . . .
“Right now we know statistically the number of possessions approximately per half and per game. All of a sudden, you’re going to be down a possession or two per half. It makes each possession that much more valuable.”
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EXTRA POINT
Mrs. BGA and I watched the Carol Burnett special last night honoring her on her 90th birthday. Maybe you have to be of a certain age to appreciate the outtakes they played from her old show but she nailed it when she said this sketch worked then, works now and will work forever. Trust me, I don't find anything funny about going to the dentist, but just try not to laugh watching dentist Tim Conway and the fittingly pained expression on patient Harvey Korman's face as he tries not to laugh:
