My annual public service announcement on the eve of Signing Day: A quick reminder to Dartmouth commits, high school juniors starting to hear from coaches, and current players to scroll through your Twitter and other social media accounts and re-think any posts that your mother would find objectionable. Coaches, admissions representatives, potential future employers (and the prying eyes of the media) will see them.
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The Dartmouth has a story under the headline, Reinstated teams lash out at AD Harry Sheehy on ‘explosive’ Zoom call. (LINK)
Among the most outspoken, per the story, was former Dartmouth swimmer Connor LaMastra, who picked up and transferred to Northwestern University after the Big Green program was dropped. From the story:
Toward the end of the call, LaMastra denounced Sheehy and directly asked if he would resign. Sheehy said he would not. When he then asked Sheehy for a personal apology, Sheehy responded, “I’m sorry you transferred,” which LaMastra said felt like “a slap in the face.”
After the meeting, LaMastra argued that the athletics department needed a “complete rebuilding from the ground up,” a sentiment echoed by several others.
“When an administration has failed in a process like this, in such an egregious way and continuously degraded and been disrespectful and dismissive of their athletes, I think there needs to be a total revamping of the athletic administration, starting with the removal of Harry Sheehy,” LaMastra said.
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Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal has a story under the headline Lauded for early decisions to cancel sports, Ivy League faces criticism for failing to return to play. From the story (LINK):
A growing alliance of Ivy Leaguers, including several well-known sports business executives who want to see athletic competition resume at their alma maters, is applying pressure to stop the ongoing sports shutdown at the conference.
And . . .
Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai, Bruin Sports Capital founder and CEO George Pyne and John Slusher, Nike executive vice president of global sports marketing, are among those who have pledged to lobby university presidents as well.
(Slusher '90, was a two-year football letterwinner at Dartmouth and is the father of a standout Princeton lacrosse player.)
Also from the story . . .
“The issue really comes down to campus safety,” (Ivy League executive director Robin) Harris said. “Competition itself may not lead to higher rates of transmission, which is great, but there are still restrictions on travel and what they can do on campus. We are seeing nationally that teams have to pause because of transmissions away from the field. … What our presidents are focused on is the campus because those team members are students and they live with other students who are not necessarily on the team and that could cause a spread throughout campus. So that’s the concern.”
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A New York Times story on a Journal of the American Medical Association study includes this (LINK):
College football players sustained far more concussions during practices than they did in games, medical researchers reported on Monday, a finding certain to add to the yearslong debate about regulating training regimens across the sport.
The authors of the new study, published in JAMA Neurology, a peer-reviewed journal, found that 72 percent of the concussions they reviewed over five college football seasons happened during practice. And although preseason training accounted for about one-fifth of the time the researchers studied, they found that nearly half of the concussions occurred during that period.
Green Alert Take: Seriously, it took a highly respected scientific journal and five years of study to realize that?
Green Alert Take II: The researchers could have saved themselves a lot of time and agita by simply watching a few practices. Coaches and players could have told them straight out that there were more concussions in practice than in games. The question that really mattered to coaches wasn't if practices were more dangerous but rather, Could you eliminate what causes concussions during practices and still win games? Dartmouth and coach Buddy Teevens seem to have answered that question in the affirmative.
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NJ.com has a story headlined, College coaches can now call N.J.’s top 2022 football recruits: Whose phones are blowing up? Here's the lede from the story (LINK):
New Jersey’s top high school junior football recruits take center stage as college coaches can now call and appeal to their talents. Which have received the most calls from coaches since 12 a.m. when they were first allowed per NCAA rules? Which coaches reached N.J.’s top recruits first?
And here's one of those recruits (italics are mine):
Nasir Hill, ATH, St. Augustine : “I spoke with Coach Koch from Northwestern, Coach Terp from Holy Cross, Coach Fein from Harvard, Coach Dobes from Dartmouth and a couple other schools as well.
Green Alert Take: In the story just two Ivy League schools are mentioned for calling recruits from football-rich New Jersey on the first allowable day – Dartmouth and Harvard.
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FootballScoop has what it terms a Guide to the Spring FCS season HERE. There are capsule looks at how each conference is handling the spring football season after an introduction that includes this:
(T)he FCS playoffs, a slimmed-down 16-team event, falls at the sweet spot in the schedule — after the NCAA tournament and the Masters, but in the dog days of the NBA, NHL and MLB regular seasons. The FCS title game will also miss the NFL draft, the PGA Championship, the Indianapolis 500 and the Kentucky Derby. It’s quite possible FCS Championship is the biggest event in sports on the weekend of May 15-16.
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LONGEST DARTMOUTH PUNT RETURNS
Yards | Returner | Opponent | Year |
90 | Shawn Abuhoff | Sacred Heart | 2011 |
87 | Drew Estrada | Columbia | 2019 |
85 | Jim Henander | Harvard | 1956 |
85 | Greg Hoffmeister | Cornell | 1991 |
83 | Tom Quinn | Yale | 1968 |
82 | Shawn Abuhoff | Harvard | 2010 |
80 | Bill McCall | Columbia | 1930 |
80 | Ed Toothaker | Columbia | 1930 |
79 | Scott Truitt | Penn | 1985 |
78 | Peter Lavery | Columbia | 1982 |
76 | Warren King | Springfield | 1937 |
76 | John Orr | Bates | 1938 |
This was from Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac this morning:
Today is the birthday of Irish writer James Joyce (1882) . . . best known for his novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), which takes place all in one day on the streets of Dublin.
Before earning a master's in journalism I was an English major who was required to (try to) read Ulysses. When my best college buddy (a fellow English major) confessed that, like me, he didn't understand a word of the book and had thrown it down in disgust, we decided to go to New York City where the 1967 film based on the novel was being shown. It didn't help. Not even a little bit.
What would have helped was something Joyce's wife said that Keillor included in today's posting:
Nora Barnacle said Joyce had “a necessity to write those books no one can understand.”
