New year and new team. Dartmouth kicked off preparations for the 2023 campaign with its first team meeting of the winter conditioning season. Only about three months until spring football ;-)
First team meeting of the year ✅#TheWoods pic.twitter.com/V1SKaJlWsx
— Dartmouth Football (@DartmouthFTBL) January 3, 2023
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They don't always come this way but Dartmouth isn't afraid to throw its hat in the ring for bright, accomplished players.
Virginia Tech signee Tavorian Copeland is a 6-foot-4, 193-pound linebacker from Appomattox, Va., who won the Watkins Award, which honors the nation's Top African-American High School Football Player. From a story about the anticipated neuroscience major (LINK):
Copeland received several notable offers for his academics in addition to excelling on the football field, reporting offers from Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale. He also received in-state attention from Virginia and William & Mary, earning scholarship offers from both universities.
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In the aftermath of the injury to Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills, Randall Balmer, the Dartmouth professor and author of Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America, has written an op-ed Op-Ed for the Los Angeles Times headlined: Is there something about Americans that makes us football addicts? He writes (LINK):
Violence accounts for much of the appeal of the game . . .
Green Alert Take: Not for all of us.
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The Manchester Union Leader has a story with Kevin Kwaku, a Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center cardiologist, describing what can cause cardiac arrest in football and other sports. (LINK)
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TigerBlog has a touching piece about the passing of Dr. Jeff Bechler, a member of the Dartmouth Class of 1982 who had been the longtime Princeton Athletics orthopedist, with thoughts from and about his father Tom Bechler '56, a two-year letterman on the Big Green football team. (LINK)
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EXTRA POINT
Christmas and New Year's are in the rear-view mirror. The ornaments are packed up, the tree is gone and noise in the morning is no longer a problem because no one is sleeping late anymore. All that being the case, the power switch was flicked on for Robo the robotic vacuum cleaner. As we speak this morning it's hard at work scooting under the couch and end tables, sucking up errant evergreen needles, golden retriever fur that might have blown under furniture and any other detritus left behind during its 10 days or so on sabbatical. Welcome back, old friend.
