On Aug. 19 – one month from today – Dartmouth's freshman football players will officially report to begin their collegiate careers. There will be meetings, the annual conditioning test and more over the next several days, with the first regular-preseason practice slated for the afternoon of Sunday, Aug. 22.
As has been the case since Big Green Alert began in 2005, the new cycle of BGA Premium stories will kick off 10 days prior to the start of practice with the first of a series of detailed daily opponent previews.
A reminder that while coverage of spring football was freely available to everyone, with the start of the 2021 preview series on Aug. 12 you will need a subscription to access the site, which will feature at least one full story, seven days a week until Nov. 22. Visit BGA Premium to learn more.
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With their Canadian Football League season starting two weeks from Saturday with a visit by the Toronto Argonauts, the Calgary Stampeders have opened camp. A writer in the Calgary Sun has a column under the headline 50 Stampeders Things that have me interested that includes this (LINK):
35. Can Folarin Orimolade become the guy? We can probably pencil-in Orimolade as starting at one of the d-end spots. He’s had some bad injury luck, but has been around the Stamps system for a while now and has been a terror when he’s on the field. You sort of get the feeling that if he can stay healthy, he could become a star in this league.
An All-American llinebacker, "Flo" Orimolade '17 was the 2016 Bushnell Cup winner as the Ivy League defensive player of the year after finishing his career second on the all-time Dartmouth sack list.
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Gearing up for the NFL season are a pair of Orimolade's former Dartmouth teammates.
The SI.com New York Giants site has a story about Niko Lalos '20, who made a splash in the Meadowlands last season as an undrafted free agent pass rusher. The SI piece giveth and taketh away in analyzing the Dartmouth product's chances of making the roster this year. From the story (LINK):
At 6'5" and 270 pounds, Lalos has good size and strength and decent mobility, and better than average instincts.
He is a power outside linebacker without many pass-rush skills just yet, who could likely compete to fill the physical edge role that Jabaal Sheard played last year.
But here's the bottom line of the piece:
Given the additions made to the pass-rushing group – draft picks Azeez Ojulari and Elerson Smith, and veteran free-agent Ifeadi Odenigbo – Lalos is looking at an uphill battle to stick on the 53-man roster.
He's not even a lock for the practice squad, where he might have to fend off Cam Brown, among others, to hang around.
Carolina Panthers' offensive lineman Matt Kaskey '20, was the subject of a quick piece on SB Nation’s Cat Scratch Reader just over a week ago because there were 63 days until the team began its season and he wears No. 63. From the story (LINK):
“Before his NFL journey, Kaskey was the starting left tackle for Dartmouth. His senior year, he made the FCS All-American Second Team, and he was a two time All-Ivy League First Team representative. The Panthers used a good amount of money and draft capital at the offensive tackle position in the offseason, so Kaskey may be destined for another year on the practice squad.”
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If you are of a certain age you'll remember the name of Sonny Sixkiller, who set 15 passing records at the University of Washington in the early '70s, fittingly wearing the number six.
Sixkiller had two sons who attended Dartmouth including Casey '00. From a 2020 Dartmouth Alumni Magazine story about Casey and Jesse Sixkiller '06 (LINK):
As the sons of legendary University of Washington quarterback Sonny Sixkiller, the brothers made their way to Dartmouth serendipitously. Casey had heard of the College through a high school football coach but applied only because he literally bumped into then Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg in his Seattle high school corridor.
Casey Sixkiller did not end up playing football at Dartmouth but he did put his football background to good use working on Rick Adams' crew that broadcast the games on the radio. Today he's a candidate for mayor of Seattle.
Find a story about the mayoral race HERE and his website featuring a photo of Casey as a toddler with a football and his famous dad HERE.
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EXTRA POINT
It's one of those "uphill both ways" stories that I've told our kids more than once. Where they could bring their iPhone and a little speaker to college for musical entertainment, when we were young we had to all but fill a car with waist-high stereo speakers, a tuner, a turntable and heavy boxes of LPs just to accomplish the same thing.
We can debate the relative merits of vinyl vs. digital but one thing is certain. Most of this generation has never had to deal with the annoyance of a damaged record and a stuck needle playing the same refrain over and over and over again until it's moved into a new track.
Or have they?
For the third day in a row, my early morning hike today was a wet one. As is usually the case, I had my iPod Touch with me and was listening to a podcast called Brave Little State, produced by Vermont Public Radio.
I was about halfway through my hike when the rain picked up so much that everything got soaked, including the iPod Touch in the pocket of my shorts. It's never happened before but this time when the Apple device got wet it started acting just like a turntable. It repeated the same partial phrase three, four, five times before playing normally for 30 seconds and then did the same thing again. After about the third or fourth time it happened I pulled the Touch out of my pocket, held it in my hand with the screen facing downward and was able to listen to the rest of the podcast without incident. It was a bit of an annoyance but also a throwback to days gone by that made me smile.
Speaking of throwbacks, the Touch started misbehaving during an anecdote in the podcast episode The Rise And Fall Of Vermont's One-Room Schoolhouses that made me smile when I got home and listened to the segment without the technical problem. It included the replaying of an oral history recording of a teacher from one of the old one-room schools. She rented a room from a family with five kids in the school, which was a half mile from their house. Turns out when there was deep snow, the oldest boy in the family would ride a horse the half mile to the school to start a fire to warm the room. Before heading inside he'd sent the horse on its way back home. Once it got back, child No. 2 would mount up and ride it to school. Or maybe it was the teacher. I don't remember the order, but eventually the horse would have made enough round trips to cart everyone to the schoolhouse.
I have no idea if it was uphill both ways ;-)
