People & Places
ORRVILLE, OHIO. You haven't heard of it? Just a jog up Route 57 in a corner of the Akron-Wooster-Massillon triangle. The home of Smucker's Jelly. Yes, that Orrville. Ken Weinbel, the Dartmouth track coach, wasn't sure where he was the day he drove into Orrville four years ago. Then he saw the big "Home of Smucker's" sign and felt like he was. almost back in his own kitchen. Or at least not so far from home as he had felt a couple of minutes before.
Weinbel was in Orrville to visit Ken Norman, president of the Orrville High student council and captain of the school's football and track teams. It was a fruitful visit. Dartmouth accepted Norman and Norman accepted Dartmouth. It's turned out to be a marvelous marriage.
Norman was one of Ohio's better 220 and 440 runners in 1972. Today, he is one of the nation's best collegians in the 600 and quarter-mile. Over four seasons at Dartmouth, he has been the anchor leg of a mile-relay team that runs faster every time it answers the gun. When the Green presented Weinbel with his 100th coaching victory in track and cross-country at Dartmouth, a 69-49 win over Brown, it was Norman's last opportunity to run in competition on the synthetic surface in Leverone Field House. He wanted it to be one "that no one will forget for a long time."
He did not disappoint. In the 600, his best previous time was a Dartmouth record 1:10.6. Against Brown, he passed the 440 mark in 47.4 seconds (his outdoor record for that distance is 47.3) and finished in 1:09.1. Weinbel couldn't believe it. The time was the fastest ever run by a New England collegian, one-tenth of a second better than Yale's great Wendell Mottley produced 12 years ago.
That was the beginning. The qualifying time for the NCAA indoor championship is 3:16.0. Dartmouth had set a New England record of 3:16.1 against Massachusetts and wanted to get the business of qualification out of the way.
With Norman running a 47.0 anchor, and with added encouragement from the most vocal crowd the field house has mustered, Dartmouth reduced the New England record to 3:14.4. How much faster this team can go is questionable because the tracks for the Heps, IC4A and NCAA meets aren't as conducive to speed as Dartmouth's 220-yard Astroturf thoroughfare.
All of which creates a problem of sorts for Weinbel and the Chamber of Commerce back in Orrville. "I've never been in such good condition this early in the season," says Norman. Says Weinbel, "We've got to make sure he doesn't hit his peak too early." The objective, obviously, is a building process through the spring season to the Olympic trials. As for the Orrville chamber, they should perhaps be checking the landscape along Route 57 and determine if there's an appropriate spot for the "Home of Ken Norman" billboard Move over, Smucker's.
MEET Ron Dove, the stereotype competitor. Two situations flash to mind when thinking of Dove, the junior defenseman on Dartmouth's hockey team. The first was late in the R.P.I, game at Thompson Arena that proved to be a thorough bummer for the Green. The team from Troy, which had looked terrible during the Blue-Green Tournament (losing twice and giving up 17 goals), returned to Thompson looking rather different as Dartmouth was taken apart, 8-3. Dove's frustration erupted with a ten-minute misconduct penalty with eight minutes left to play.
Three weeks later, Cornell visited for Winter Carnival. There were 4,300 folks on hand and Dove looked like a momentary goat, getting a five-minute major early in the second period. Cornell produced two power-play goals to take a 6-4 lead. When he returned to the ice, Dove demonstrated why he's probably the Green's most valuable player.
He dug the puck from a corner and got one of his four assists as Mark Culhane, a freshman center, bagged the first of five straight Dartmouth goals that spelled a 9-7 win over the Ithacans and joins mid-season success stories against Harvard, Clarkson, and Providence in measuring what looks like a run to the ECAC playoffs and toward the upper echelon of the Ivy League standings.
At 5-7, 160 pounds, Dove is hardly an imposing figure on the ice. A product of junior hockey in LaSalle, a town on the southern corner of the island of Montreal, he was a middling player as a sophomore. Now he has come into his own as the spark of this surprising team that may achieve Dartmouth's best record in 25 years. Why? "Confidence," according to Dove, who moves with a glint of perpetual intensity in his eye. "The more you play, the better you play." And Dove has added penalty-killing and power plays to his regular shifts. He has more minutes on the ice this winter than any other Dartmouth player except goalie Jeff Sollows, whom Dove cites as the reason for the Green success.
"We're a young team this year," Dove says (Ken Pettit and Tom Fleming are the only seniors on the squad). "There's a weird feeling on our team. We seem to respond emotionally to the tight situations and play over our heads against teams that are better than Dartmouth. The new arena has helped, too. There's a tremendous pride about playing there. We want to do well and not be disappointing."
With all his fire, Dove has provided the spark for a team that, whatever happens in the stretch drive, won't be disappointing. A veritable hawk is this Dove.
CURIOSITY finally caught up with Barbara Sands one day in February. She knew that her father, Roger ('41), had played squash at Dartmouth, but he never made much of the fact. He didn't try to push his youngest of four daughters into sports but found time to teach her some fundamentals at a tennis club in Tacoma, Washington, that had one squash court.
So Barbara browsed the books and discovered that, indeed, Dad had a pretty fair record during two varsity seasons. Years from now, a glance through the book may reveal that Barbara had a rather impressive record with the racquet, too.
She's lucky to be playing at all, in fact, after a fateful adventure in sky-hitching during spring vacation of her freshman year. She wanted to go to Florida and hopped a ride with a private pilot in Boston. They never got out of New England, crashing in a Connecticut field.
It took nearly a year for Barbara's back to mend. As a junior, her major (Chinese) led her to the Far East during the winter term. In her last season, she has demonstrated the skills that make her a favorite to win the women's intercollegiate championship, and she has an edge in that quest since the tournament will be played on the Alumni Gym courts. The only player to beat her this winter is Amy Knox of Princeton, her chief competition in the nationals, and that happened after Sands won the first two games, thought the third would be a cinch, and let Knox get off the hook. The home court should be an asset in the rematch.
VERTICAL mobility. Twenty-five straight wins. Both represent incentive factors that are fundamental to a remarkable success story that has developed in Dartmouth's swimming program. Not the varsity. The junior varsity. Prior to the start of freshman eligibility four years ago, the competitive careers of many Dartmouth swimmers came to a close after freshman year if they weren't quite good enough to make the varsity. It's different today. While Ron Keenhold coaches the varsity, his assistant, Wally Lutkus, works with the distance swimmers and also guides the jayvees, a team that has produced records of 7-1, 9-0, and 9-0 during the past three seasons.
"When a guy has been swimming for 15 years, it's hard suddenly to have to pack it in," says Lutkus. With close to 50 swimmers involved in Dartmouth's varsity and jayvee programs, it's apparent that Keenhold and Lutkus have a great big, happy family making waves in Michael Pool. The only thing that has to be packed in is a daily workout (it's virtually identical, be thee varsity or jayvee) around the booking regimen.
For men like Treff LaFleche and Don Burkhardt, a couple of juniors from Kentucky and Colorado, the jayvee program has extended their competitive experience. They've responded to the opportunity. Not quite fast enough to swim.regularly with the varsity, they've been pillars in the backstroke and freestyle as the jayvee win streak has grown. The chance to move up always has been there and they got it during the 82-31 varsity rout of Yale. Neither scored but both produced their best-ever times.
Burkhardt and LaFleche are two of nine juniors on the jayvee roster. Brad Ferris is the only senior. He swam as a freshman, was out of the scene for two years, and came back this winter. He's not varsity caliber but the program has given him the chance to compete and contribute. And that's what it's all about.
IN MID-SEASON, Dartmouth's basketball team ran a string of seven straight wins, a streak that guaranteed no worse than a break-even season and was the best succession of wins since Rudy LaRusso's gang ruled the Ivy League in 1959. Gary Walters' team used one of the nation's best defenses (63 points per game) and a balanced offense to develop the Ivy's most surprising record. While Larry Cubas, the junior captain, is the scoring leader, the total effort delivered by two seniors Adam Sutton and Bill Healey - has been pivotal.
There was a time when Sutton was regarded as a one-way player: give him the ball and watch him shoot. This winter, Adam has been shooting it less while earning Walters' praise as "our best defensive player, a real killer." Sutton has averaged about 11 points per game but, as he notes, "The awards I won as a sophomore seem insignificant now. It's funny, but I'm realizing that I haven't really learned how to play the game yet."
Healey is a math-whiz forward who is Walters' "zone breaker." He made eight of nine shots (as a team, Dartmouth shot a major college record 74.4 per cent from the floor that night) during a 76-54 romp over Yale. He's neither fast nor quick, nor is he a great leaper. But his jump shot is deadly and he's grasped the Walters' message: hard work pays off.
Coach Weinbel, Ken Norman (center) and Rob Coburn celebrate 3:14.4 mile relay.
Barbara Sands '76 warms up for the women'sintercollegiate squash championship.
