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.
At Cornell
It Princeton Stadium has its critics, so does Cornell. Not the press box at Schoellkopf Field, which is actually quite nice.
It’s the drive to Ithaca that bothers a lot of people.
I’m not one of them. I’ll take the lonely drive on Interstate 88 and up and down winding, two-lane highway 79 through little towns like Greene and Whitney Point any day over trying to make the left exit off I76 at Penn and ending up with an unwanted tour of West Philadelphia after missing a turn and ending up in a Rubik’s cube of one-way streets. Ditto with dodging double-parked cars and busses on Broadway while driving to Columbia.
The press box at Cornell is actually perched atop a multilevel parking garage that also overlooks the Big Red’s soon-to-be-demolished baseball field. It always feels a little curious climbing up the garage steps to find the elevator to the press box.
While it is is one of the newer press boxes in the Ivy League, it looks pretty strange across the way from the beautiful arched Crescent home stands. That’s because while the press box once towered over the small section of visitor’s bleachers those stands, once on the verge of being condemned, have since been torn down.
Cornell’s statisticians, like those at Columbia, are in the second row of the box but, perhaps reflecting the difference between laid-back Ithaca and Manhattan, the next shouting you hear there will be the first.
Granted, Cornell is a “you can’t get there from here” location, but I shorten the trip by staying in a little town an hour or so this side of Ithaca.
Not only does it have a great ‘50s-themed diner, but the cost of a room is a bargain. It’s $63 dollars with a credit card but only $60 if you pay cash. What’s not to like?
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EXTRA POINT
Barring something strange happening, I'll be back home later today and your regularly scheduled BGA Daily programming will resume tomorrow.
