When I started at the local daily we were in competition with another daily from just down the road, sometimes with a Vermont daily, always with the network TV affiliate in White River Junction, and even with a local a.m. radio station that did a lot of local sports at the time. And beating The Dartmouth with a story from its own campus was always a goal.
If/when we learned of breaking news in my early days at the paper, and later when I took over the Dartmouth beat, we would confirm it and rush a story to print to try to beat the competition (which we usually did).
These days the local daily is quite often the "day after" paper, the other remaining papers pay no attention to Dartmouth, the TV station was absorbed by another in Burlington and seldom looks this way, local radio has pretty much gone the way of local newspaper and The Dartmouth is a shell of what it was at one time. The Sports Weekly, an independent Dartmouth publication that was by far the toughest competition I had in trying to break news in the mid-'90s, morphed into something much less aggressive and finally disappeared.
All that is by way of telling you there's no pressing need to "break" news on BGA. That being the case, I can share a couple of tidbits today, but still hold a little back out of respect for the individuals involved. Keep reading and you'll know what I mean.
First, I received an email last week informing me that someone of local football interest has landed a new college position. I've chosen not to share more about that quite yet because he hasn't put that information on his own social media, which I check each morning. There's been nothing reported by the school where he's been on staff, or by the school that is bringing him on. I have no doubt the validity of the news I received, but on this platform I can do what I feel most comfortable doing, and that is allowing the individual in question to let the news come out on his timetable.
And that leads me to the next news. Dartmouth has hired a new strength coach to step in for Spencer Brown, who has accepted a position at Rutgers. (Spence hasn't updated his social media to announce his new role, but when I saw Sammy McCorkle I asked if I could post it and he gave me the go ahead.) Dartmouth's new strength coach is still listed on his old school's website and his social media has not been updated, so I'm going to sit on the specifics, apart from sharing that he is coming from a Power 4 football school. I continue to check his social media and the web, and will post the details once the news goes public.
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A few updates from Sammy McCorkle gleaned by yesterday's Zoom call.
• Dartmouth has not yet finalized its 2025 football schedule. The Big Green still has a Sept. 27 open date for a non-conference opponent. The other two non-league opponents are New Hampshire (Sept. 20 in Hanover) and Fordham (Oct. 18 in The Bronx). On a Zoom call shortly after the season concluded Athletic Director Mike Harrity suggested the Big Green was close to filling out the schedule, but that hasn't happened yet.
• With new offensive coordinator Shan Montgomery onboard, Dartmouth is currently in the process of interviewing replacements for nickels coach Joe Castellitto, who moved on to UMass, and secondary coach Aashon Larkins, who left for Appalachian State.
• McCorkle reported the Big Green closed out a successful recruiting season with players from 15 states. "We hit every spot that we needed to positionally," he said, noting that "about half the class was completed prior to the start of the (2024) season."
• Dartmouth has 62 players on campus for the winter term, which is about as many as McCorkle could recall since he joined the program in 2005. Per McCorkle, another 20 or so are off in the winter and will be back for the spring term.
• In Brown's absence, Schuyler Harting and Olivia Indorf, both assistant strength and conditioning coaches, "have done a phenomenal job" filling in, said McCorkle.
• Dartmouth will once again hold spring practices Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays starting April 8 and finishing May 10. The 12 sessions allowed by the Ivy League will be spread over five weeks with a break after the second week that will give the coaches the opportunity to do "junior" recruiting and the players a week for recovery.
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EXTRA POINT
The wind has been howling for two days, creating an interesting pattern on the surface of the snow. What looks a little like an aerial view of the ice flows in the Arctic Circle is actually our field.
