Winning in the Rain
ON a dreary Saturday in mid-October the rain was falling, and it appeared that the roof was doing likewise to Tom Griffith's soccer team.
Pennsylvania was visiting Chase Field. It was halftime and the invading force held a 3-1 lead. Griffith clearly had hoped for a better start to the Ivy League campaign. His team was playing pretty well, but the finishing touches on the scoring opportunities were missing - just as they had been missing in three of four non-league games prior to Penn's arrival.
Then, as the rains continued and across the way Dartmouth's football team prepared to make Penn its 100 th Ivy League victim.in this 20th season of formal combat, things fell together for Griffith's legions. Steve Papai, the stringbean cocaptain, scored twice to tie the game, and Arne Nielsen, better known as a ski jumper than a soccer player, looped a 40-yard kick that bounced off the Penn goalie's hands to win the game in overtime.
It was the early season high point for a team that Griffith took over in 1974, one that he calls "a tight-knit group, one that makes coaching easier." Talk to the players and they'll tell you to a man that it's this bespectacled, six-foot four-inch one-time goalie at North Carolina who really makes everything click.
"He may not always agree with you but you say what's on your mind, he listens, and you're both glad you mentioned it," says Scott Specht, a senior forward. "It's easy for a player-coach communications gap to develop, but this is never the case with Coach Griffith. He makes us want to play for him. He's good natured but he knows when to get tough."
Griffith earned a reputation as a most capable strategist during a decade of coaching since he graduated from North Carolina in 1964. When he arrived at Dartmouth, he inherited a team that showed promise in 1973 but finished with a 2-9-1 record. He hadn't been on campus more than a week when Frank Gallo, the All-Ivy scoring leader in '73, broke his leg in a summer game and was sidelined for the season.
A 3-7-1 record last fall, despite the absence of Gallo, included a 3-3-1 record in the Ivy, and Gallo's return prompts thoughts of better things this fall. With an abundance of returning players, including All-Ivy selections Papai and Bruce Bokor (the diminutive forward who has a hand in most of the Green scoring), and Steve Alford, Griffith has one of those problems that any coach would relish: where to put everyone?
For sure, Dartmouth isn't about to run away with the league because the improvement should serve only to pull the Green into a more competitive posture with the perennial strongboys (Brown, Cornell, Penn) in one of the nation's toughest soccer circuits. There's another consideration for Griff to ponder: freshmen. They're eligible for the varsity this fall for the first time, and already several of them have contributed in a fashion that folks had been hoping for.
The two goalies, Lyman Missimer and Scott Blackmun, are both freshmen, and three other first-year performers, Tom Ryan, Tim Ehrsam and Dave Wilson, also have worked their way into the starting lineup. "They give us some speed that we've been looking for," says Griffith, "and the goalies have done a solid job so far."
Griffith has pegged a great deal of his team's performance on a positive start. Wins over Middlebury and Penn are steps in that direction, and the fact that three of the toughest teams remaining on the schedule (Brown, Connecticut, Cornell) will play on Dartmouth's home ground might ease matters in the days ahead.
