From Cleveland comes an interview with Callie Brownson, whose career took off after Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens discovered her at the Manning Passing Academy and brought her to Hanover. She began as a preseason intern with the Big Green and soon rose to quality control assistant and recruiting coordinator before leaving for a position with the Buffalo Bills and now the Browns. Find the story and listen to it HERE.
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From FootballScoop:
NCAA president Mark Emmert announced the organization will continue to monitor the coronavirus spread throughout the U.S. with an eye on fall sports.
“Today the Board of Governors and I agreed that we must continue to thoughtfully and aggressively monitor the health conditions around the country and the implementation of the COVID-19 guidelines we issued last week,” Emmert said.
And . . .
There was a legitimate fear across college sports that the Board could cancel fall sports, given the same group canceled all winter and spring championships in one fell swoop back on March 12.
Green Alert Take: It's called kicking the can down the road and if you don't believe it's money driving decisions at the FBS level, why do Division III conferences and keep shutting down the way the Ivy League, the Patriot League and the CAA (among others) have at the FCS level?
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Announcing yesterday that they are taking a different approach than the big DI schools are the Presidents Athletic Conference, which counts eight of its 10 schools in western Pennsylvania, and the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, both Division III leagues.
From the Presidents' website:
“I cannot stress this point enough: this is a postponement of certain fall sports competitions. Our Presidents' Council has indicated every intention of having our schools play football, soccer, volleyball and cross country league schedules to the greatest degree possible during the spring 2021 semester, with a continued highest priority on student-athlete health and safety” said PAC Commissioner Joe Onderko.
“We remain extremely hopeful that improved, more available and more cost-effective testing procedures for Covid-19, if not an outright vaccine, will make spring competitions in these high-impact sports a much more viable option than in the fall. Moving all winter sports competitions until after January 1 also gives us a greater degree of confidence in both starting and finishing those seasons,” said Onderko.
From the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference website:
(T)he SCIAC Presidents have unanimously agreed to cancel conference competition at least for NCAA categorized high-contact risk sports in the fall semester. The following sports are included in this recent decision: men's and women's soccer, men's water polo, football, women's volleyball, and men's and women's basketball.
And this, which leaves the door potentially open for some sports:
Our current understanding is that residential and in-person higher education programs continue to be conditioned on state and county approvals under Stage 3 of California's Resilience Roadmap. If such approvals are in place, SCIAC will consider opportunities for conference competition in low and medium contact risk sports. These sports include men's and women's cross country, tennis, golf, and swimming and diving.
The conference has taken more of a wait-and-see approach about spring football than the Presidents Athletic Conference:
The SCIAC and its members remain committed to exploring meaningful competitive conference experiences for fall sport student-athletes in the spring semester.
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How about the Washington Football Team being called the DC Sentinels? (LINK)
Green Alert Take: That's pretty good and wouldn't seem to annoy anyone except those who didn't want a change. Still, the suggestion from a loyal BGA reader is pretty good as well: the Washington Citizens.
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Dartmouth grad Kyle Hendricks spun a three-hit, no-walk, complete-game shutout yesterday. He fanned nine and didn't allow a runner to reach second base as he recorded the first Opening Day shutout by a Chicago Cubs pitcher since 1974. (LINK) Hendricks improved to 64-43 in the majors while becoming the second Dartmouth alum to start on opening day. Mike Remlinger was the first with Cincinnati in 1998.
Hendricks is joined in the big leagues this summer by Dartmouth classmate and fellow right-hander Cole Sulser, a reliever with the Baltimore Orioles. (LINK)
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EXTRA POINT
We've taken two 90-minute trips to the Burlington area to have work done on our '84 VW Westfalia poptop camper, two camping trips and assorted drives around the area and haven't yet had a chance to flash the peace sign at any other of these vehicles. (The peace sign is the universal hello gesture between VW buses of any generation, an homage to the Sixties.)
While we haven't seen any other VW buses, this one has gained its share of comments and induced its share of questions here at the Tommy Keane Invitational at Lake Sunapee Country Club, where it serves as home office (and mobile motel) for the TK blog. (LINK) Lots of questions about what year it is, a few, "I used to have one of those" sighs, and some peeks inside. It's a keeper ;-)
