A Boston Globe remembrance of former Dartmouth head coach Joe Yukica, who passed away last week at age 90, begins this way:
He had been an assistant coach under Bob Blackman for five years at Dartmouth College. When he returned in 1978, he told colleagues that there was “a special heaven” on the Big Green campus, where he had retained many friends, including Seaver Peters, the athletic director who had been a neighbor and who had pursued him for the football head coach job seven years earlier.
The writer goes on to juxtapose the "special heaven" reference to the "special hell" Yukica faced when he had to fight for the right to coach the final season on his Dartmouth contract after being fired.
While his Dartmouth tenure had a rocky finish, Yukica departed Boston College with a 68-37 record. The Globe writes about the late coach's very successful tenure at BC:
. . . (H)e took a team that finished 4-6 under Jim Miller to four consecutive winning records, including a 9-2 season that counted victories over Navy, Pitt, and Syracuse. His 1976 team included wins over West Virginia, Army, Navy, Syracuse, and a 14-13 victory over seventh-ranked Texas that stands as a symbol of BC’s return to national football prominence. Future BC schedules, drafted while Mr. Yukica was coach but played after his departure, included Pitt, Stanford, and Tennessee — a measure of the ambitions that Mr. Yukica set in motion.
Find the full Boston Globe story HERE.
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Dartmouth Sports Publicity has a story about Yukica HERE and his obituary appears in the local daily HERE.
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Yesterday's BGA Daily noted that the AFC Championship game pits the teams two retired NFL players from Dartmouth played for against each other. Bragging rights will be at stake when Reggie Williams' Cincinnati Bengals square off against Nick Lowery's Chiefs.
More than bragging rights will be at stake for a couple of Ivy League alums in the NFC championship game. Harvard's Kyle Juszczyk will be at fullback for the San Francisco 49ers and Brown's Michael Hoecht is a defensive tackle for the Los Angeles Rams.
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Why would a story from The Dartmouth headlined, New undergraduate housing on Lyme Road to break ground by end of year (LINK) be this high in BGA Daily when it doesn't have to do with sports? Glad you asked.
First things first. The story notes that the project "lies further from campus than any existing dorms," and is on "a plot of land 30 minutes north of Baker-Berry Library by foot." For the record, Garipay Field is just over a mile from Baker-Berry. You have to walk pretty slowly to take a half hour to get there, but I digress.
Here's why this story is up so high.
Back when I was at the newspaper and the college was preparing to overhaul Hanover Country Club, I wrote a column that angered a few people who loved the course as well as some who were involved in the renovation. I rarely wrote columns but this one time I pitched the idea that the college consider using the money it was spending on reworking HCC to instead build a course off campus (hello Montcalm Golf Club) and make the golf course property the new home of Dartmouth athletics.
Rather than rebuild Memorial Field, I suggested they put it in the natural bowl at the bottom of the old ski jump, with seating built into the hill and plenty of parking and tailgating on site. Given the amount of land available, a track facility could be built nearby, enabling the stands at the new football stadium to be closer to the field for a better fan experience.
Biondi Park at Red Rolfe Field is a wonderful facility but if the college built it and the softball field at the golf course lights and night practices and games would have been possible. Alumni Gym was refurbished after my column but instead of the current rabbit warren of offices and spaces in the current gym, a spanking new, state-of-the-art building could have been situated at HCC. A proper basketball arena could have been designed and built as well as an expansive varsity house not limited by the narrow footprint it now inhabits.
Thompson Arena still has a lot of life left in it but when the time came there would be plenty of room at the old golf course for a new hockey facility along with room for an indoor practice facility and tennis center.
Here's the big bonus. The footprint currently used for the athletic complex would have been the absolute perfect place for new dormitories and even classrooms to be built, and they wouldn't have been "a half-hour walk" from the library.
Oh, and here's the other kicker. While I have written a lot of golf over the year and love the game, I was told by several people involved with Dartmouth golf who were in position to know that for the money spent on HCC the college could have built a new and much better course off campus. I can't vouch for that but I still believe with a little more imagination Dartmouth might have had all the land it needed for a modern athletic complex and, even more importantly, the land it needed – where it is needed – for its dormitory and classroom expansion.
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The Roar Lions blog reminds us the transfer portal flows two ways. Jake Novak's site reports that Malcom Terry, a 5-foot-9, 200-pound running back, is leaving the U.S. Naval Academy to play at Columbia. The Lions had tremendous success with their last FBS transfer as quarterback Joe Green,who spent one season as a medical redshirt at San Diego State, was selected both the Ivy League and ECAC Rookie of the Year after helping Columbia finish 7-3.
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For some reason the NCAA.com has posted a story choosing the top five Harvard players since the move to the FCS in 1982. Harvard fans, your mileage may vary. Find the story HERE.
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I watched the hard-luck Dartmouth men's basketball team lose another close one to Princeton on ESPN+ over the weekend and also checked in on the women's team suffering a humbling loss to the Tigers in New Jersey. It's been a very difficult winter for Dartmouth's ticketed team sports. Here are their records:
Men’s basketball 4-12, 1-4
Women’s basketball 1-16, 0-5
Men’s ice hockey 3-11-2, 2-7-1
Women’s ice hockey 8-13, 2-12
That's a combined mark of 16-52-3, a .243 winning percentage.
In conference action the record is 5-28-1, or a .162 percentage.
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While the basketball and hockey teams are struggling, Dartmouth skiing has claimed no fewer than six spots on the U.S. Olympic team. (LINK)
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EXTRA POINT
I strapped on an N95 mask and made a very, very rare trip to a box store yesterday. Pushing the shopping cart in the parking lot I saw a store employee collecting carts and I was sorely tempted to keep a straight face and tell him, "It's pulling to the left a little bit." I decided to bite my tongue in case he hadn't seen Dr. Rick ad nauseam over the weekend during the NFL games. (But it's true. The cart really was pulling to the left.)
