Former Dartmouth defensive lineman Alex Schmidt '22 is returning to football and he's coming back to New Hampshire – but not to the Big Green.
Schmidt, who has been working in sports media since closing out his career as a fifth-year senior, will be a graduate assistant coach under Kevin Kelly at New England College. The Pilgrims are scheduled to reintroduce football this fall a half century after dropping the program.
Kelly, who spent the 1991 season on staff at Dartmouth, was head coach at Georgetown from 2006-13, going 8-3 in 2011.
New England College, which will play at the DIII level, is in Henniker, N.H., about one hour southeast of Dartmouth.
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This is kind of fun.
There won't be just one McCorkle serving as an FCS head football coach next fall. There will be two.
Dartmouth coach Sammy McCorkle's cousin Blaine (Samuel Blaine McCorkle IV) will be in his first season as head coach at Northwestern State in Natchitoches, La. (LINK)
Blaine's father, Sam, was one of the Big Green head coach's coaching role models growing up. Blaine's son, by the way, is still another Sammy McCorkle.
The new Northwestern State head coach, like his cousin a special teams player as a collegian, had been head coach at Belhaven University in Jackson, Miss., from 2018 to 2023, winning seven, eight and then nine games the past three years. He has assisted at Delaware, Richmond, Liberty, Tennessee Tech, Chattanooga and UT Martin prior to Belhaven. The Northwestern State appointment returns him to Louisiana, where he was a long-snapper at LSU.
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At the National Football Foundation Annual Awards Dinner on Dec. 5, the organization presented a video slide show "remembering those who passed away in 2023 and played a role in improving the game of college football for future generations."
Buddy Teevens was honored at the 4:23 mark. Those lost over the last year were recognized in alphabetical order including in consecutive order Maxie Baughn, who coached at Cornell, Jerry Berndt who was head coach at Penn (and an assistant at Dartmouth) and Dick Biddle, who coached many times against Dartmouth at Colgate.
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EXTRA POINT
Housecleaning and preparations finished in advance of our company arriving, That Certain Dartmouth '14 and I hiked my local trail yesterday. It speaks to how beautiful it is around here that someone who has worked at some of the most famous national parks in the country still saw beauty from the top of our nearby mountain:
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| Clouds below and blue sky above! (Click for a better look.) |
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