Sunday, December 18, 2022

Line Notes

Notes regarding a recent offensive lineman and an older former defensive lineman as BGA Daily gets a little traction after a day buried in snow . . .

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The recent offensive lineman is Jake Guidone '21, who will be on the field tomorrow afternoon for UConn when the Huskies take on Marshall in the Myrtle Beach Bowl. From a story in the Hartford Courant about the improvement in the team's offensive line this season (LINK):

On the Huskies’ first possession of the season, as four-touchdown underdogs at Utah State, they controlled the line of scrimmage during a nine-play, 79-yard march, with all but 10 yards on the ground, for a touchdown to take the lead.

“It was absolutely empowering,” said Guidone, who transferred from Dartmouth as a grad student. “To see the things you worked on all through the offseason and in the spring, summer and preseason, especially on the first drive of the first game, when you don’t really know who you are as a team, or as an O-line. We were confident in ourselves going into the game and being able to really prove to people that we were going to be the real deal really hit home for the O-line.”

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The defensive lineman from days gone by is Brent Frei '88, a successful entrepreneur whose bio notes he "took both Onyx Software (ONXS)and Smartsheet (SMAR) from inception through IPO in the software technology space - each achieving in excess of $1B market capitalizations." A feature that appears on the Strategy+Business site about leadership reprises a Frei anecdote from his days in a Dartmouth uniform. From the post (LINK):

Brent Frei is the CEO of TerraClear, a company based near Seattle, Wash., that helps farmers clear their fields of rocks. He played football in high school and at Dartmouth College. “I’ll never forget a game we were playing at Columbia,” he said. “I was on defense and trying to put pressure on the quarterback, but the linemen were practically tackling me, and the refs weren’t doing anything about it. But the coach was riding me, and I told him my valid excuse: ‘They’re holding, and they’re not calling it.’ And he said to me, ‘Well, then we’re going to lose.’ It was the way he said it. We ultimately won the game, but the lesson was that there’s a valid excuse for every failure, but the question is, how do you overcome those valid excuses? Ever since, I’ve said to people I’m working with, ‘There may be a reason why we’re not going to be successful, but how are we going to overcome that?’ ”

Frei looks fit enough to still be playing in this short video about his company from two years ago. 

In a 2014 story in the New York Times about Frei (LINK) speaks to the size of his family farm growing up and gives a clue where his drive comes from:

It was 800 acres. That was a little bit below the threshold for break-even, but Dad kept it going just through sheer willpower. When I started my first company, he and Mom put money in because I couldn’t get anybody to finance it. Fast-forward five years, and the $13,000 they put in was worth $3 million. Now Dad farms about 3,000 acres.

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EXTRA POINT
A couple of winter notes . . .

First, our electricity came back on in mid-afternoon yesterday, not long before our plow guy got here. We were a little surprised he was so late getting to us until he got stuck in our driveway. When I went out to help him free his truck he explained that he'd been stuck a bunch of times already over the previous 12 hours. Although he has a large pickup with extra weight in the bed and special heavy duty snow tires, this was a very heavy, very wet snow, unlike what we usually get. He told me he'd never been stuck before this storm. After helping him get free I headed off to the post office and on the way back spotted him stuck in our nearest neighbor's driveway waiting for his wife to show up with another pickup truck and chain to help pull him out. I went home and got a couple of tools and returned with Mrs. BGA to help out before he finally got free. Yup, it was quite a storm.

The other note is a repeat of something I think I wrote about before.

It was eight degrees below zero this morning when That Certain Dartmouth '14 headed to the airport in Gunnison, Colo., to fly home for the holidays. Nothing terribly unusual about that. Here's the unusual part: She won't have to pay for parking because she walked to the airport. That's right. She lives downtown but the airport is close enough that if you are reasonably fit you can walk there. It was a little cold but c'mon, walking to the airport? That's pretty cool!