Sunday, August 21, 2022

Ready, Set, Go

It has been 272 days since Dartmouth walked off the field at Brown Stadium as an Ivy League champion. Since then there was winter conditioning, there were 12 spring football sessions, there were informal sessions for the players here over the summer, and the last few days there have been on field drills and testing. But the quest to win a third consecutive Ivy championship begins today in earnest with the first official practice of the 2022 camp.

There will be a full report from practice on BGA Premium tonight along with a look at Yale as the opponent preview series wraps up. Each preview has run ± 1,500 words and include an introduction followed by sections on The Offense, The Defense, The Special Teams, Coach Says, The Bottom Line, last year's results, this year's schedule and a five-year look at how the program has fared in league, out-of-league and against Dartmouth. Here's a sample look at this year's Harvard preview:

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As noted above, while the first official practice isn't until 2 this afternoon over on Blackman Fields, the team has been involved in pre- preseason drills in the stadium. As players left the field they looked in the camera and gave a videographer for the program their take on who has the best "drip" on the team. (You can Google "drip" if you want but think of it as a cool appearance). Here's what a few players had to say:

By the way, you may notice that Dartmouth football is going to have a TikTok presence. CLICK HERE for a look at it.

Green Alert Take: Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, you name it. You can eat up a lot of time digging through social media for all of this stuff . . . or you could come by BGA Daily for all of your "one stop shopping." ;-)

Green Alert Take II: I know what you are thinking. Enough of the BGA commercials, right? Hopefully with practice starting the stragglers who haven't yet signed up for BGA will wander in and I won't have to bug you anymore.

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A Manchester Union Leader story headlined Student-athletes and mental health: All play puts them at a loss has some thoughts from Mark Hiatt, sports psychology director for Dartmouth Peak Performance. From the story (LINK):

Hiatt said Dartmouth coaches want to be more involved in supporting student mental health, and the school is eager to help coaches. This year, it’s offering a mental health first aid program.

“Coaches deal with their own pressures,” he said. “We don’t expect coaches to be therapists, though sometimes it can feel like they’re in that role, but they have the confidence of (athletes), they get to know these athletes well.

“If they’re starting to see signs that their students are struggling or withdrawn, they can respond and be supporting and help the student get directed to the appropriate resources.”

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Arriving via email during the past week was this video of the Moorestown (NJ) High School football team debuting a new MVP tackling dummy presented to the school in honor of  Herb Hopkins '74, who had coached there. It's one of three MVPs purchased by friends of the 1973 Big Green co-captain to be donated to schools in his honor after he lost his battle with Parkinson's Disease in June of 2021.


 

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Cornell is on the field and head coach David Archer, an offensive lineman for the Big Red before graduating in 2005, stepped up and passed the program's conditioning test, something he said he couldn't have done in the spring. From the story (LINK):

"After 10 years as a head coach, it was important to connect with the players in a different way," Archer said. "I wanted to demonstrate to them that hard work will pay off, and that we're competing against ourselves, not anyone else, as we prepare for the 2022 season."

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Dartmouth has games with Lehigh and at Colgate next year and Fordham in 2024 as it tiptoes a little back into scheduling Patriot League teams. That's of interest with news that Lehigh will be following in Dartmouth's footsteps in building a permanent indoor practice facility. Per a story on the Lehigh website the planned building will have 94,000 square feet of artificial turf. By way of comparison, Dartmouth's Green House has 70,000. Find a story HERE.

Oh yeah, while Dartmouth's website has schedules listed through 2024, a page called FBSchedules has every nonconference game it has been able to uncover through 2028 HERE. (It's not complete a complete but it's a start ;-)

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EXTRA POINT
If you've been following along, you know that we installed a solar tracker in our field several years ago and it has eliminated our electric bill. Even charging an electric car and an electric lawn tractor and being less careful about turning things off, our bill each month is just whatever fees we need to pay.

Unfortunately, without a big battery in our house (something we'd like to install but can't, which is another story) the tracker sends power directly to the grid, and whatever we generate is credited against our usage. We get no bill because we generate more than we use.

Here's the problem. Our power goes out a lot in this little town. Once again yesterday it went out for several hours, not a good thing when I couldn't go with Mrs. BGA to our friends' lakehouse because I was stapled to the computer all day working on BGA opponent previews.

Ah, but after a summer living off the grid a few years ago I wised up and bought THIS lunchbox-sized Jackery "solar generator." With my laptop running down, I unfolded my solar panel beneath the bright sun, attached the battery to it and plugged the laptop into the battery. At the same time the panel was charging the battery it was charging the laptop.

To give the sun time to do its thing I headed out on the hike I had put off in order to dedicate more time to BGA. By the time I got back, the battery was at 100 percent, the laptop had been charged back up to 100 percent and . . . the power had come back on.

It's annoying the power goes out as often as it does here and disappointing we can't have a "whole house" battery, but thanks to my Jackery battery I got my last two opponent previews for BGA Premium finished.

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