A couple of football-centric notes and then on to a big day for Dartmouth winter sports . . .
#
Coady Keller, who had a good run as Dartmouth's director of recruiting from 2019-21 before moving to Miami University, has been promoted from director of player personnel for the Redhawks to the program's general manager. A story about his career trajectory refers to him as a "fast-riser in the profession." (LINK)
#
Dartmouth will celebrate its 2024 Ivy League championship team with its annual banquet on Sunday, April 6. Spring practice begins on Tuesday, April 8.
#
The big news on the winter sports scene concerns Dartmouth men's basketball and ice hockey.
The men's basketball team qualified for the four-team Ivy League Tournament for the first time with a 78-58 win over Brown at Leede Arena Saturday. The tournament berth leaves Columbia as the only men's team never to have made the field since the Ivy League kicked off its version of March Madness in 2017.
The tournament will be played at Brown's Pizzitola Center March 15-16. Yale (19-7) has clinched the top seed in the tournament with a 12-1 record. The Ivy tournament champion will advance to the NCAA Tournament. The Big Green is bidding for its first appearance in the true March Madness since 1959, the longest drought in the country for any team that has played in the national championship event.
Dartmouth is now 14-12 overall and 8-5 in the Ivy League. Hard as it is to believe, it's the first time this century the Big Green has finished with a winning record. The last: 14-12, 10-4 in 1998-99.
#
The Dartmouth men's hockey team took a 5-1 win over Yale Saturday night to claim the Ivy League championship for the first time since 2006-07, and first solo title since 1979-80. The Big Green is now 15-12-2 overall, and is fifth in the ECAC at 12-9-1. Dartmouth will host No. 12 seed Saint Lawrence in the opening round of the ECAC Tournament.
Green Alert Take: Ivy League hockey is different than other sports in that Ivy teams are part of a much larger conference. As a concession to other schools in the ECAC, when I worked at Dartmouth we were actually told to low-key all references to an Ivy League title. Fortunately, that has changed, as shown by this graphic out of Hanover:
EXTRA POINT
On this day in 1904 a Dartmouth graduate by the name of Theodor Geisel was born. You may know him better as Dr. Seuss. From Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac (LINK):
At Dartmouth, he majored in English and wrote for the campus humor magazine. But one night he was caught drinking gin with some friends; since this was during Prohibition, it was an illegal act. The Dartmouth administration did not expel him, but as a disciplinary punishment, they did make him resign from all of his extracurricular activities, including the humor magazine, of which he was the editor-in-chief. From then on, he wrote for the magazine subversively, signing his work with his mother's maiden name, Seuss.
His mother’s family pronounced it “Soise,” the way it’s said in Germany, but people in the States kept mispronouncing it Seuss. He eventually embraced the Anglican mispronunciation: After all, it rhymed with Mother Goose, not a bad thing for an aspiring children’s book writer.
