Saturday, May 08, 2021

A Leader Of Men (And Soon, Women)

As offensive coordinator at Dartmouth from 1992-99 Roger Hughes helped guide the Big Green to two Ivy League championships and the school's last undefeated season in 1996 before . . . 


. . . moving on to Princeton where he served as head coach for 10 years, guiding the Tigers to the 2006 Ivy League championship with a 9-1 record.

Hughes eventually landed as head coach at Stetson, which was just reinstituting football. Steadily building the program over eight years he helped the Hatters to 8-2 and 7-4 records in his last two full seasons before this spring's COVID-plagued campaign.

And now Hughes is moving on again.

One of the rare coaches with a PhD, Hughes is returning to his alma mater, but not as football coach:


From the release announcing his appointment:

“My life has been devoted to helping young people become leaders and the best version of themselves—instilling habits and values that will make them successful for their entire life. The opportunity to extend that to the Doane community is compelling,” Hughes said.

And . . .

“Although it is rare to find a Ph.D. who is a football coach and who continues to pursue strong academic interests, they do exist—Dr. Hughes is among them. He is an outstanding team-builder who excels at developing relationships, fund-raising, and is a highly capable visionary leader,” said search committee chair and incoming chair of Doane’s Board of Trustees Paul Schelstraete.

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The FCS playoffs have reached the semifinal stage today with two games slated for national broadcast.

In the first, Delaware (7-0) travels to No. 1 seed South Dakota State (7-1) at noon Eastern on ESPN.

Then it will be No. 3 seed James Madison (7-0) at No. 2 seed Sam Houston (8-0), at 2:30 Eastern on ABC.

Green Alert Take: Regardless of how you feel about football in the spring you have to admit the FCS playoffs have delivered two quality semifinal contests. Why the two related TV networks carrying the games would have the second start well before the first ends is curious.

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Following up on yesterday's note about the University of Hartford's plans to drop its sports teams from Division I to Division III, here's how the softball team responded:

Dartmouth's fourth spring practice session is being held Saturday morning. Once again, it is closed to the general public because of COVID protocols, but you can read about it on BGA Premium tonight.

A reminder that for both bookkeeping reasons and out of an abundance of caution regarding the ability to finish out the spring session and return to the field in the fall, BGA Premium is delaying the new subscription cycle until July at the earliest.

Because you won't be able to sign up until then the paywall has been taken down for spring coverage and those stories are freely available. Information on how to sign up for the 2021 season will be posted both here and on the site as July approaches.

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EXTRA POINT

Huge congratulations to That Certain Dartmouth '14 who managed to finish her Master in Environmental Management (MEM) program while working full-time as an educational ranger in the National Park system.

She will collect her diploma from Western Colorado University today and in addition to her duties with the NPS has been invited to teach a class at the school next year. We wish we could be there to share in the celebration!

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