There's no football content but The Dartmouth has a couple of stories under the headlines From NARPdom to stardom: Walk-on athletes share their experiences (LINK), and A deeper dive into the varsity sports recruiting process (LINK).
For the uninitiated, NARP is shorthand for Non-Athletic Regular Person. From a football perspective, the story about walk-ons becoming stars could have mentioned Kyran McKinney-Crudden '81, a four-year letterwinner at the nickel position who served as a team captain in his final season. Like linebacker Luke Hussey '11, he went from walk-on to All-Ivy League recognition.
Green Alert Take: Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens never used the term "walk-on," and almost bristled when he heard it. Once someone joins the Big Green and puts in the time, he'd say, you are a Dartmouth football player, plain and simple.
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A story out of Canada headlined Five Things To Know: Toronto Argonauts refers to former Dartmouth standout Flo Orimolade ’17 as a “budding superstar” north of the border. (LINK)
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A story on The Analyst site under the headline Top Returning Offensive Players lists just one player Dartmouth will see this fall, but if you've been following along it’s the one you might have guessed.
That would be New Hampshire running back/returner Dylan Laube, the 5-foot-10, 204-pound speedster who had 2,328 all-purpose yards last year including 424 against Fordham. He’s The Analyst’s fourth-rated running back in the country. Find the story HERE.
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HERO Sports is doing its annual countdown to the first game of the FCS season with a daily Tweet featuring prominent players wearing the number of the days until that opening game, and a Yalie has popped up:
Patterson had 6.5 sacks among 7.5 tackles for loss last fall.
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The lawsuit challenging the Ivy League's rule against athletic scholarships is addressed in a Sportico column headlined, ‘Go to Duke,’ Ivy League Argues in Athletic Scholarship Lawsuit. From the story (LINK):
The Ivy League further reasons that conferences enjoy autonomy to design their rules as they prefer, with prospective students able to attend colleges in other conferences with different rules.
To that end, the league contends that “some student-athletes considering a school in the Ivy League might choose instead a full athletic scholarship from UVA, Michigan, Berkeley, UCLA, Duke, UNC Chapel Hill, Stanford, Georgetown, Rice, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt” or other non-Ivy schools that are likewise academically prestigious with major DI athletic programs.
A recent Columbia Spectator story on the same issue included this (LINK):
First-year football linebacker Lucas Bullock expressed support for the lawsuit, revealing that most athletes have to deal with the repercussions of not receiving scholarships during recruitment.
And . . .
“It’d be amazing. It’d be awesome for me and all my teammates and all the athletes in the Ivy League,” Bullock said. “It would bless, overall, hundreds of families that are trying to figure out how to send their kids to the Ivy League to play whatever sport that they’re trying to play.”
Bullock said he and “most” of his teammates have had to balance part-time jobs to fund their education in addition to spending long hours training and studying, a financial burden an athletic scholarship could potentially lessen.
"It’s ridiculously difficult … I mean, taking five classes, trying to work a job, you know, four to seven hours of five to six days a week are already taken up by sports,” he said. “So you’re pretty much cutting everyday in half. And then cutting that part in half again, by trying to work a job is just like trying to fit all of your academic requirements into just a very few amount of hours in a day. It is definitely a challenge, to say the least.”
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Fun story in the Harvard Crimson headlined, ‘C6 H0’: The History and Legacy of Harvard Football’s Stunning 1921 Loss to Centre College. The writer, a graduating Harvard senior, was inspired to research the story in part because his father is a graduate of Centre College. The story begins this way (LINK):
Inscribed today on a wall in the campus of Centre College, a prestigious private institution home to 1,300 students in Danville, Kentucky, is a short combination of white letters and numbers: “C6 H0.” Centre’s students first carved this message into the brick on October 29, 1921, to celebrate the score, six to zero, of their football team’s improbable victory over Harvard University, then among the most dominant programs in American college football. In 1950, the Associated Press named the game as the greatest American sports upset of the first half of the 20th century, a sentiment echoed in 2006 when ESPN selected it as the third-best college football upset in the history of the sport.
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EXTRA POINT
Yesterday afternoon our Volkswagen "Bus Whisperer" called with an update on what he found while looking over our 1984 poptop camper, which had refused to start. We've used the fellow for a few years now and trust him implicitly, so I simply gave him a lot of "yups" and "uh-huhs," as if I had a clue what he was talking, which I most certainly did not.
Unbelievably, within an hour of that call I got an email from someone whose old VW bus refused to start on a road trip far from home. He wrote:
"Fuel pump, check, battery hook ups, check, Crawl under van and search the starter and look at wires, check, wait a moment! Connector is off the starter. Slide on connector, slide out from under bus. Ask (my wife) to try to start… And, that wonderful sound!
And, even better, my VW bus cred just went up a notch. Nothing better then having your wife proud of you!
I feel bad enough that I am totally clueless when it comes to things mechanical, but that only made me feel worse. Why? Check out the italicized part of his email:
I wonder if anyone around noticed that we had an issue or that the guy with the guide dog went under the van to fix it?
Green Alert Take: I am such a loser. ;-)
