Dog Days in the Toy Department
IN newspaper parlance, you've now arrived at the toy department. In this column we have fun and games, with no need to be concerned about whether the College budget will balance (unless you're one of the coaches whose job has been eliminated as a result of the dollar squeeze), or whether the won-lost record shows more W's than L's (unless your team has more L's).
You'll pardon the author as he labors over the keys, trying to construct positive thoughts in an atmosphere of graying snow and burgeoning mud, recollections of a winter season that was more down than up. Maybe it really is the slush and muck that prompts this moment of melancholy. It's only natural as we sit and ponder the keyboard while the majority of Dartmouth's populace makes tracks. Not even the most imaginative chamber of commerce can do much to make Hanover in mid-March anything save a degree of wind-chill factor better than Buffalo in December. Sorry, Buffalo, but I've seen you in December.
Think positive, you say? Suck it up because Hanover really is heaven on earth. Make the most of it in the dog days. Well, for some the dog days have extended from early December. For others, things progressed. Maybe not to absolute fruition, but at least they went up rather than down.
Let's get the good words up front. Save the sad notes for later on. Let's talk about the drama of the Heptagonal track meet at Cornell and the Eastern Seaboard swim meet in Dartmouth's Karl Michael Pool both settings for Dartmouth championship performances. Let's plant names like Nichols, Norman, Duncan, Coburn, Stebbins, Pollard, Cubas, Beattie, Pettit, Tierney, Young, Clark, Williams, Gaudin, Thomas, and Van Curan (just to hit some of the winners) into your cerebral recesses.
Since we'll spend the rest of this space talking about the performances of these young men and women, it's perhaps opportune to take a few unburied lines to reflect on the hockey season that failed to live up to its billing. A 5-19 campaign, tempered briefly by a three-game win streak in mid- January, was marked at the end by Grant Standbrook's resignation after five years as the Dartmouth hockey coach.
Standbrook's final team, which included only three seniors, was expected to pick up where it left off last year (second place in the Ivy League and a spot in the ECAC playoffs). For assorted reasons, beginning with a schedule that included extended layoffs in December and early January, things never fell into place.
Since early in the season, there were rumors that Standbrook would step down. He made the move within 48 hours of a final loss at Brown, closing a chapter of Dartmouth hockey that included three straight winning records. His successor will inherit a team that retains two-time scoring leader Tom Fleming and Ken Pettit, the fluid center who is captain-elect and most valuable player.
Before we stray from the fact that this indeed, is the toy department (complete with all the frustrations, tears, and occasional joys that are as much a cold reality here as anywhere), let's move on to the brighter side.
Ever since Ken Weinbel took over as Dartmouth's track coach in 1969, the Heptagonal meet has been a bugaboo. For five years, he expected his team to turn the corner and make a dent in the championship ranks. On March 1, before a crowd that annually gives you the feeling that Cornell's Barton Hall is wired wall-to-wall for 50,000 volts, the bugaboo was buried. For the first time since the meet was established in 1948, Dartmouth came away with a pair of champions, including a milerelay quartet that is the Green's best ever.
After Richard Nichols, a lithe junior, had clipped Cornell's Pal Roach in a superb run (1:10.9) for the 600-yard crown, the foursome of Rob Coburn and Joe Duncan (both freshmen), Nichols and his classmate, Ken Norman, charged to victory in the relay,. It didn't matter that the Green's winning time (3:18.9) was a half-second off the meet record. Had they run the same race in Leverone Field House, the Dartmouth four would probably have erased the College mark of 3:18.3 that was set in the final dual meet of this 8-1 season. That meet, against Brown, was also the setting for a Dartmouth high jump record by sophomore Dave Woody.
While Nichols and his friends did their thine in Ithaca, Dartmouth's swimmers had their crowning moment on the home front. The last Eastern Seaboard meet to include more teams than just the Ivies plus Army and Navy (that's the format that will be implemented in 1976) saw Dartmouth take a respectable fourth place behind Princeton, North Carolina State and Harvard, and the reasons were swimmers Mark Stebbins, Ted Pollard and Dave Magnus and divers John Evans and Dan Forsyth.
Stebbins, the junior co-captain, was the Green pillar. Swimming beyond everyone's expectations except his own and Coach Ron Keenhold's, Stebbins charged to victory in both the 50- and 100-yard freestyle races, joining Chris Carstensen '72 in the select group that has produced this difficult sprint double in the Easterns.
Pollard, a sophomore, was equally impressive in winning the 100 backstroke in meet record time and taking fourth in the 200 back. Magnus took second and third places in the two breaststroke events. In the diving Forsyth had his best performance of the year to finish fourth in the one-meter event; Evans (fifth on the one-meter board) was third in the three-meter diving and should be the East's best next year. The Easterns put the finishing touches on a dual season of 7-4 and set the stage for the NCAA meet where Evans and Forsyth appeared the best bets to break into the point column.
When Adam Sutton returned to the Dartmouth basketball lineup after being idle for six weeks with a broken foot, the Green was supposed to really turn on the jets. Sutton lasted less than three games before reinjuring the foot. He missed the last ten games of the season, but in his absence Larry Cubas, Jim Beattie, and Bill Healey provided the coordination in Marcus Jackson's emphasis on team play, and Dartmouth won four times to finish with an 8-18 record.
Cubas was at his best in the stretch. He had 81 points in his last three games, including 36 in the final win over Columbia, to finish as the Green scoring leader (16.6) and become the third Dartmouth player in four years (Sutton and Bill Raynor were the others) to be named the Ivy League sophomore-of-the-year. He also won a berth on the All-Ivy second team while Beattie, the rebound leader who joins Cubas as co-captain of next years team, earned honorable mention. Healey missed All-Ivy recognition, but was a fundamental strength in a comeback season as he scored in double figures in 22 straight games.
Dartmouth never has had more than one representative in the NCAA wrestling tournament - until this year. It might have been four, but Captain Jim Conterato lost a 3-2 decision in the 190-pound bout for the New England title. While the Green captain wrapped up a fine career, Rick Clark (158), sophomore Kevin Young (167) and heavyweight Reggie Williams moved into the NCAA action. Alas, they were upended in opening match decisions. Williams and Young were both All-Ivy first team selections and Clark and Young won New England titles.
With senior Alpine ace Laurent Gaudin racing to a crucial place in the slalom (despite the fact that he was coping with increasing pain that he thought was indigestion but turned out to be appendicitis), Dartmouth wrapped up the Eastern intercollegiate ski crown - for the 14th time in 24 years - at the Middlebury Carnival.
In a season that has seen much of Coach Jim Page's team come and go to national and international competition, Dartmouth had its share of success, winning its own carnival with an overwhelming Alpine effort and keeping things going through the Middlebury races. Jumpers Arne Nielsen and Chris Berggrav, plus cross-country racers Ed Waters and Jim Crawford (who picked up the slack when Captain Chris Nice departed for European racing after the Dartmouth Carnival) carried the Nordic load, while Peter Anderson teamed with Gaudin to lead the Alpine surge. The NCAA meet, won by Colorado and dominated by Norwegian skiers, was a disappointment for Dartmouth which finished eighth with Gaudin (making a two-week recovery) getting tenth place in the slalom.
If the Dartmouth men could look back at the winter (there were barely three weeks of good snow), so could Pam Reed's women. The Dartmouth coeds, led by Ann Van Curan and Anne Thomas, won the Dartmouth and Middlebury carnivals and then nailed down the Eastern Division One championship. Thomas won three carnival cross-country races and was second in the Easterns, while Van Curan was at or near the top of every Alpine race she entered. Likewise Mary Heller in cross-country racing.
January seemed like the longest 31 days in history because most of Dartmouth's performances came up short. Into February and things picked up, and one of the sports that picked up most was squash. Led by Sandy Tierney, who progressed to the point of being one of the Ivy League's top six players, the Green won its last three matches, finished 5-6 overall, and could look at five losses at the hands of the nation's top-ranked teams.
In gymnastics, Dartmouth finished with a 7-3 record, placed fourth in the New England meet and, for the fourth straight year, took second in the Ivy League meet (won again by Cornell). Greg Hakanen won the Ivy title in the horizontal bars while Jack Nicholson, Nick Pishvanov, and Joe Hoffman performed consistently.
Dartmouth's fencing team compiled a 2-6 record, but Mark Manson (sabre) and Bill Greenbaum (foil) led the Green to seventh place among 12 teams in the New England championships. On the women's scene, squash posted a 9-4 record (the most wins by a Dartmouth varsity team male or female this season), while basketball (2-5) and gymnastics (2-7) felt growing pains as freshmen (it sounds better than freshwomen) dominated the rosters. In swimming, Dartmouth's women won three of four meets and placed tenth among 24 teams in the New England meet.
On the jayvee-freshman scene, six teams competed and all had winning records. Heading the list was jayvee swimming, which was perfect (9-0) and has won 16 straight over two seasons. Frosh basketball and hockey produced identical 11-6 records, while freshman squash posted a 5- 4 mark and the jayvee track team won three of four meets.
There are many names to look forward to in 1975-76, especially in basketball and hockey. Sterling Edmonds (leader in virtually all departments), Doug Murphy, Frank McNerney and Dave Flores are comers in basketball, and Paul Sawyer, Mark McGowan, Doug Bradley and Andy Cutler were freshmen hockey pacesetters.
In a capsule, that's the winter season. We started off feeling low and came away with renewed spirits. Whatever the records, it's been interesting. Long at times, and periodically frustrating. But find another toy department that is any different.
Sophomore Dave Woody clears the bar at 6-8'A to set the Dartmouth high jump record-This event, against Brown in Leverone Field House, capped an 8-1 season in track.
