With Big Green Teams
Unusually Early Spring Sends Dartmouth Squads Outdoors Weeks Ahead of Schedule and Lifts Hopes for Good Season
A LOT OF BRIDGES—to vary the figurehave gone under water since the time when your correspondent, as a very marginal member of what Harry Hillman was pleased to call his "Dartmouth Tourist Team," used to travel down the Connecticut Valley to New Haven for a triangular meet with Yale and Pennsylvania. This meet was usually held the first weekend in May, at which time the vagaries of the Hanover spring had usually been such that the track team had hardly been able to stick its collective nose out of doors, much less become conditioned to the bracing air of the north country and the feel of the cinder track. It used to console this correspondent—and others who generally finished as also-rans—that one reason for their lack of success was the rigorous northern climate which did not permit sufficient outdoor training before the contests with the boys from the flat land who had been outdoors for six weeks or more.
All of this note of personal reminiscence is by way of announcing that the Spring has come phenomenally early this year and the teams have been outside since the third week in March, a happy condition unique in Harry Hillman's 32 years in these parts. The track was dry weeks ahead of schedule, the baseball infield is in mid-season condition, the ground has long been ideal for conducting Tommy Dent's genial form of mayhem known as lacrosse, and even the tennis courts have been in shape since early in April. If the various Big Green teams do not sail through their respective seasons with flying colors, it will not be the fault of the weather.
Because of the exigencies of scheduling, none of the seasons have opened as we go to press. If the DCAC could rely every year on this 1945 experience with the weather, they might schedule track meets, baseball games, lacrosse contests, and all manner of sporting events for the middle of April. As it is, the baseball team opens against Princeton in a double-header at Princeton on April 28, the track team initiates its formal activities with the Penn Relays on the same day, and the lacrosse team, although it opened April 14 at Rensselaer (and lost 9-3), doesn't buckle down to a continuous schedule Until April 28. The news for this month is accordingly confined to prognostications (which will not be made) and background studies (which will).
