ARE WE GOING TO WIN?
Football Coaches Have Their Problems
Dartmouth Freshman Coach
THE AVERAGE person following a football team through a season judges it to be good or bad. This judgment usually depends on the number of games a team wins or loses. If it wins all of its objective games it's a good team, and if it loses some of them or all of them it's a poor team. This type of judgment places heavy responsibility on the coaching staff and team.
Little does one realize how many things are needed to make a Dartmouth season successful, or how few inadequacies leave it a failure in the minds of its followers. Why should this be true? Whose team is it that you'll be watching in the Stadium and the Bowl this fall? "A Dartmouth team." Yes, of course. It is your team. The green jerseys that the players wear do not cover so many cogs in a football machine, they are worn by young sons of Eleazar who are trained and conditioned for football, but who are human. It seems as though we have been watching our teams in recent seasons only as we'd study a clever exhibition of skill. Since this article is addressed to the alumni, I want to explain what the coaches are up against, what their problem is this year. But I want to begin, as I shall end, by leading with an uppercut and saying that no Dartmouth team can win unless its rooters are singing and cheering and are, themselves, up on their toes. There's a new surge of Dartmouth Spirit in the air! Tune in! Have a good time at the big games and give the team your help.
You HAVE been promised the "low-down" on the job the coaches have on their hands. The season just beginning makes a good illustration. After the first three home games, Dartmouth plays six major opponents in a row, the first four of these games being played away from home on successive weekends. Dartmouth, due to its isolation, must travel hundreds of miles to meet these opponents. And Dartmouth players are expected to do something else during the fall beside football. It means leaving Hanover on Friday, playing a game Saturday, and returning Sunday. Three days of intense or lessened excitement. Three days of changed environment, and all the pecularities that affect a person while travelling. The effect on the players is tremendous. Take last season for example, the team left for Philadelphia on Friday, played a hard game with Penn on Saturday, came back with injured players on Sunday, and consequently, due to the physical condition of the players, could not do any active work as a squad until Wednesday. The team practised two days, entrained for Boston Friday, and repeated the same process as the week before. It continued on through the remainder of the season. The situation as far as Dartmouth is concerned is serious due to our comparative isolation, and partially to material.
The question of material is a sore subject. It has been said that Dartmouth always had good material. It is true that we have had our share of good material as evidenced by successful teams of by-gone years, but Dartmouth again is in a peculiar state as regards its abundance of material. Many factors enter in to discourage certain types of players from entering Dartmouth, and we are well rid of that type. Our Selective Process has seemed to promote an entirely different type of man, and to make true President Hopkins' statement to the effect that we have now at Dartmouth the student who is inci- dentally the football player, while sometimes we have had the football player who has incidentally been a student. That statement in itself proves more or less conclusively that Dartmouth is not fostering itinerant football players, but does require that a man do his college work, with football as a side issue. Thus, the intellectual type of boy enters college here, and his activities do not require football to fit in to his scheme of things. There are many athletic activities available and many men who play football have not seen fit to come out for the team, but have chosen some other activity like lacrosse, tennis, baseball, or basketball as their major sport, to the decline of material available for football. I know personally of five instances of members of freshman teams who have stayed away from football after their freshman year. To the alumni body this may seem like sacrilege. There is no compulsion in Dartmouth to play football.
THE INCREASED numbers of students at Dartmouth have also lengthened the number of classes held every afternoon except Saturday. Many men have had courses that have interfered with their football practice, owing to not being able to report until four o'clock in the afternoon. One of our best half-backs last year had a two-hour laboratory course that kept him from practice three days a week. In other words, he actually had just one day of practice on the weeks the team left town. The curriculum demands these things. A man goes to college for an education. When the question arises as to material, remember that not only has the type of undergraduate changed from being strictly football minded, but under our Selective Process many football players of average scholastic ability cannot make the admission grade, or should such a one make the grade, he finds the going just a little too tough later.
Dartmouth can lay claim to few men being flunked out of college during their career as students, but the poor student finds probation staring him in the face if he lets studies slide. Three of last year's best freshman backs have found probation upon them owing to various causes, but, none the less, potent reasons as far as their usefulness on the football squad is concerned. If at spring practice Jack Cannell watched these men, and planned throughout the summer just where he would use them, you can imagine how his plans must be changed to make way for these new conditions. After all, a coach of the varsity must make some use of the best freshman material in sophomore year, and if they are on probation the result is sad.
ANOTHER BIG bugaboo is old man injury. "Charley Horses," sprains, bad knees, shoulders, ankles, and an infinitum raise havoc with the best laid plans of any coach. All of these injuries are not traceable to scrimmage or to contact in games on Saturday, but these injuries are coming from high school and prep school. I think, actually, there has been an increase in the numbers of men who come to college with bad knees and shoulders and carry these injuries right through their college careers. On the freshman and varsity squads we require that men who have had any trouble with knees, shoulders, etc., report these injuries the first day of practice so that we may discover how bad the injury may be, and either tell the man to quit or bandage the injury as it should be bandaged to allow play. In the games and scrimmages, of course, injuries minor and major crop up, and it requires the utmost ingenuity on the part of the coach to keep the best material on the squad in workable condition, but even then the plans go awry.
It has been said often, "why doesn't so and so play? He's on the bench dressed." That may be true, but that same man may be swaddled with bandages underneath his football togs, and sitting with his teammates lending moral support, when the coaches know full well he couldn't walk, to say nothing about running. Injuries are an important problem in any coach's life, and in some instances they stand between winning and losing games.
When one reads of the opening days of practice with 80 men reporting, it is difficult to visualize seven teams of football players of squad ability. So many things enter into a team's requirements. The main factors in any candidate's ability must be those of running, blocking, and tackling. We must find in that group of men as many teams as possible that can do all of those three things well. These teams must be suited temperamentally and physically; they must think as a unit, run as a unit, and coordinate. Some good men are slow runners but dependable blockers and tacklers, and you can work up any kind of a combination you want. But to get the best out of 80 men means that somebody must fall by the wayside, and often times it's some man who works his heart out trying, but just can't make the grade. And it may be some pet star—some men are slow thinkers, some are slow movers, some are small, some are tall, but to get the right, congenial group takes three quarters of a season to discover, and yet our Sunday quarterbacks can tell you all about them three minutes after a game is over.
I have heard in the past few years that Dartmouth has no scoring plays, and also many other things about the scoring ability of our team. It is needless to mention perhaps that there are many conditions entering into this phase of the question. Human beings are subject to frailty of mind in respect to acting quickly in times of stress, and therefore a game may go aglimmering due to this lack of poise. The average team has between 30 and 90 plays to be chosen, depending on the types of formations. Most Dartmouth teams have enough plays to carry them through any game, but some games are not adapted to use more than twenty plays. In others you can use the whole works, and throw in another fifty to spare. The plays are there, but the conditions do not warrant their use. Again, stop and realize, where has Dartmouth been gaining the most ground? Do they gain ground at the same places when they are near the goal line? What condition are the men in? What about the other team's defence? How many yards to go? What down? How much time? Make out for yourself a short list of questions like these, and then take your watch out, and in the space of a few seconds answer those questions, pull a play out of the bag and give a the right answer. Try it some day, and maybe you'll be surprised. It's not at all easy, but it comprises many reasons why football can make an old man out of a young coach.
ONE OF THE hardest things to contend with is morale. To keep the players' attitude alert and attentive, to keep from becoming self satisfied, and stale, to keep interest in the game itself, to keep fun alive. The team this year has broken out with a new spirit. They are, apparently, digging into the source of all Dartmouth tradition, and that is to pick up where the old threads were broken, and to carry on as before. They want to win, actually and truthfully, and so we expect that a big rally will have been held before this publication goes out, which will have stimulated better singing and cheering, and which will have again brought that whispering spirit of long ago, that I have heard many of the alumni say repeatedly "Dartmouth spirit never dies."
If you believe it, believe in this squad of young Dartmouth football players who want to win; in the coaching staff that wants to put men on the field playing a good game for Dartmouth. Get behind and push ahead, don't hold back. When you go to any game this fall, open your mouth and sing, inhale some fresh air and bark a cheer. You'll renew your loyalty, you'll feel better from deep breathing, and after all, it's your team!
Coach Jackson L. Cannell 'l9 Meets Candidates for the '33 Tearn
