I’m camping at a lake in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom this week and, through the wonders of “scheduled” BGA Daily posting while I’m off grid, thought to give you a brief look behind the curtain at what I’ve found covering games at each of Dartmouth’s 2022 road opponents.
Today at Yale
For a lot of people, Yale Bowl, Harvard Stadium and Franklin Field are the signature facilities for Ivy League football. Interestingly, apart from Brown, they might be the three most, uh, lacking press boxes in the Ivies.
It would be natural to think that’s because they are three of the oldest stadiums in the country, but Harvard and Yale’s boxes are after-market models and Penn’s was, let's say discontinued. (At Franklin Field the press sits in a cordoned-off section of the stands under the second deck.)
Yale’s long, concrete press box kind of feels like a bunker.
There’s no glass, which can be a problem if it’s raining and the wind is blowing in. Still, it’s better than Harvard Stadium, which last fall needed to have some poor fellow with a squeegee on a long stick going from one end to the other so the media could see through the drops on the glass. And it’s better than Brown Stadium used to be before they replaced the old plexiglass windows that had become more and more opaque with age.
The Yale box was replaced not all that long ago after the previous edition burned down. The joke for the longest time was that the late Dartmouth SID Kathy Slattery Phillips burned it down.
As it turned out, “Slats” actually was a hero of the new box.
One year during pregame for a TV broadcast of a Yale-Dartmouth game the play-by-play person wasn’t feeling well. After meeting with him, Kathy was convinced he was dealing with something significantly more serious than an upset stomach. The mother in her kicked in and she convinced the fellow that he absolutely had to go to the hospital, which he did. He was diagnosed with a serious heart issue while a substitute play-by-play caller did the game.
Slats is no longer with us but, thankfully, the talented broadcaster whose life she may have is still hard at work and even doing the occasional Dartmouth game.
