Ups and Downs
BROWSING the landscape and the waterfront: The Charles River is as much a home course for Dartmouth crews as the Connecticut River. The Green competes there with greater frequency than it does on the 2,000-meter straightaway bordered by pasture and the Boston & Maine's right-of-way to St. Johnsbury, north of the Hanover campus.
The first races of the season for both the Dartmouth lightweight and heavyweight crews were rowed on the Charles this spring. Both were, for all intents, convincing Dartmouth victories, but only one actually went into the log as a win and the other represented an insidious cornerstone for a season of perplexity.
This was anticipated to be a spring in which Coach Peter Gardner's lightweights equaled or improved upon successive third-place finishes in the Eastern Sprint championships. When the boat, stroked for the third year in a row by Charlie Hoffmann, took the river on April 23 to duel against Harvard and M.I.T. for the Biglin Bowl, the objective was to make it closer than a year ago at the Sprints when Penn, Harvard, Dartmouth and Navy finished in that order - a margin of only 4.6 seconds separating the winner and the fourth-place Middies.
With less than 30 strokes to go on that Saturday morning two months ago, the Massachusetts Avenue bridge was far behind Dartmouth - and so was Harvard. In a picture of absolute unpredictability, Dartmouth was leading by nearly two lengths against the crew that has been its arch-nemesis. It seemed too good to be true. It was.
The water was choppy, the wind was following the shells. Dartmouth's lead translated to about eight seconds when Dave Voss, rowing in the number four seat, caught a crab - a bad one - as his oar blade hit the water on the recovery stroke. The incident brought the Dartmouth shell to a dead stop. By the time the Green reorganized, Harvard had erased the eight seconds, caught the Green in the final 50 meters, and won by a half-second.
It was a demoralizing blow to a crew that knew it was better but had been denied victory by a single flaw in a thousand strokes. Unfortunately, it was the beginning of a season that included a loss to Cornell by one-tenth of a second and a less than lustrous showing at the Sprints (the Green didn't make the final).
For the heavyweights, the Charles River inaugural found good fortune riding in the Green shell. The Dartmouth heavies have beaten numerous crews during the past six years, but they hadn't actually won a cup race since defeating Syracuse and M.I.T. for the Packard Cup in 1971. In the Bill Cup race on the last day of April, the Green charged away from the stake boats and gathered in a half-length victory over Boston University, the pre-race favorite.
It was a deceptive start because the Green followed a course similar to the lightweight route through the rest of the season. But there it was, the first cup victory in six years.
When Dartmouth's lacrosse team beat New Hampshire, 13-12, on May 4, the Green not only won the championship of the precinct but took the first of three quick steps to a place as New England's second-ranked team. The Green showed greater scoring balance than any of its recent predecessors as it operated without high-scoring Jeff Hickey - he had six goals against UNH but injured an ankle and missed three of the final four games - and came through with victories over Brown (first time since 1965) and Harvard (first time since 1970).
The hero against Harvard was a freshman attacker, Tom Boltja, who scored six times and teamed with Steve O'Neill (all-Ivy second team) to blister the Crimson while a defense built around Mike Koch (the MVP and also all-Ivy second team) checked in magnificent fashion. The team's final record was 7-8, but it was clearly the best unit to represent Dartmouth in lacrosse since the Ivy title team of 1965.
The baseball season was Dave DeMarco's season. The captain, who played every inning of every game either on the mound or at first base, won six of his team's 11 games, three with shutouts, including a 3-0 decision over Harvard on the final afternoon. The lefty from Connecticut, who won the Archibald Prize as Dartmouth's outstanding senior student-athlete, was one of the Eastern League's most effective pitchers while also batting .288. In his three EIBL wins, he personally drove in the runs he needed. In his final at bat in the second game of the Harvard double-header - the Crimson quickly discovered that Dartmouth had no other pitchers with comparable effectiveness and had built a 19-0 lead into the last inning - DeMarco parked his fourth home run of the season against a Leverone Field House window.
Elsewhere on the men's scene, sophomore Ed Kama brought the discus championship home from the Heptagonal Meet, and golfer Joe Henley, also a sophomore, earned a berth in the NCAA championship tournament with a season average of 76 strokes per round with a team that had a 7-3 record. In tennis, the Green finished 13-9 (4-5 in the Eastern League) as freshmen John Steel and Scott Hadley joined sophomore Doug Walbridge and Captain Peter Maglathlin, a junior, as the consistent contributors.
In the women's sector, Dartmouth won the first Ivy League championship track meet. Joan Clements and Kerstin Sonnerup were the individual victors for the Green. Sophomores Karen Loeffler and Dawn Hudson plus junior Nancy Denny played the top spots all season on a tennis team that had an 8-2 record, and in lacrosse, Beany Scott was the top scorer (36 goals) while Eleanor Shannon (32 goals), defender Ellen Remsen, and goalie Marge Blaisdell also figured prominently in a 6-6-2 season.
WALTER MALMQUIST, the all-America ski jumper, is the winner of the Alfred Watson Trophy as the outstanding athlete of 1976-77 at Dartmouth. Kirk Randall, assistant coach of both squash and tennis for the past three years, will take over the varsity squash team from John Kenfield who has been head coach of both sports since 1966. Kenfield will continue as tennis coach and have overall responsibility for the men's racquet sports program. Alfred Duclos, a.k.a. Duke, the athletic equipment manager from 1962-75 and a source of service, philosophy, and friendship to Dartmouth athletes for 41 years, was presented the Red Rolfe Award for contribution and dedication to athletics. As Tony Lupien said when Duke retired, "They'll change all the systems and probably make it efficient as hell, but they'll never replace the man."
