Sam Hopkins, a familiar face to the Friends of Dartmouth Football and others around the program since taking over as Associate Athletic Director for External Relations in the fall of 2010 is moving on, but fortunately he's not moving far.
Hopkins, who added the title of Senior Associate Athletic Director in 2015, announced this week that he'll have a new role at the college, albeit outside of athletics. In a note explaining his move he wrote:
I’ve had the amazing privilege to support Dartmouth Athletics for the past 18 years and have worked alongside some of the most talented coaches and administrators in the business. I am grateful to you all for your partnership as we strived to create the best possible experience for our student-athletes, alumni, donors and fans. Though I’ll dearly miss working with you, this new role will allow me to continue my professional development while maximizing the time I have to devote to my family.
I want to thank Mike Harrity for his unwavering support through this process and his understanding as I navigated this difficult decision.
His last day will be June 17.
Green Alert Take: If you tuned in when Sam hosted Monday's Friends of Dartmouth Football Zoom call you saw him at his finest. I'm lucky to have had the privilege of working with him for more than a decade and like the program, I'll miss him both professionally and personally. Good luck, Sam!
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Incoming running back Chris Roper is one of the recipients of a Bill Napier scholarship down in Georgia. Find a short story and photograph HERE.
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Everyone has their own preseason Top-20 or Top-25 but when Athlon's magazine hits the stands it is time to start paying attention.
Coming in at No. 8 in the venerable magazine's projection is New Hampshire, Dartmouth's Week One opponent.
Two other teams of some interest for Dartmouth followers also made the cut.
Old friend Holy Cross, no longer on the schedule but the Big Green's most-played nonconference opponent, is Athlon's preseason No. 5.
And William & Mary, where former Dartmouth quarterback Brian Mann '02 is athletic director, came in one slot ahead of the Crusaders at No. 4.
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Speaking of the upcoming season and New Hampshire, the HERO Sports countdown to the new season featured another player the Big Green will see this fall earlier this week:
EXTRA POINT
Those of you who have been following along for a few years know that between selling our home on the shoulder of Hanover's Moose Mountain and landing on our Vermont hillside, Mrs. BGA, Griff the Wonder Dog and I lived for a summer in an off-the-grid tiny house on a wooded mountain in Vermont.
The owners are now renting the place by the day through Airbnb and so we signed up to spend a couple of very relaxing days unplugged. (Except for a mobile hotspot and laptop powered by a Jackery solar panel and battery that allow me to post BGA Daily of course.)
The tiny house owners now have a guest book visitors can sign, and looking through it after we arrived yesterday we kept smiling and nodding as guest after guest wrote messages expressing what we felt in our 3½ months here. Here's what one person wrote:
This house has as much soul as any person I’ve ever met.
That may stretch it a bit, but the place is special. Here's Griff on the back deck yesterday afternoon:
That's the outdoor shower to the left of the green rain barrel. Steve Ward, the late, great Dartmouth football equipment manager, visited us one day when we stayed here five years ago and with tongue in cheek warned Mrs. BGA to watch our for drones when she was in the open-air shower. Even when the temperature dropped into the 30s in early fall the shower was wonderful.
Curious what the inside is like? Take a look:
That's pretty much it, except for the sleeping loft.
