The Dartmouth
February 29, 2009
I’ve made a terrible mistake. When we agreed to do this column, I thought that basketball had been all but eliminated from any chance of winning an Ivy League title. But I’ve now been informed of the athletic arithmetic and realized that basketball is entering one of the most important weekends in its history. Makes my life a bit a harder here. I hope those brilliant editors at The Dartmouth capped Knapp’s pronoun usage or something to give me a fighting chance.
Honestly, on any other Friday I would be at this basketball game against Cornell from start to finish. But as someone who played hockey for most of his childhood and an avid fan of the game, I’m still torn between the Dartmouth-Cornell game and the Dartmouth-Princeton matchup down the road in Thompson Arena.
So why on Earth would someone go to the Princeton hockey game over the Cornell basketball game on Friday? Here’s some reasons: some good, some bad, some pointless.
First is tradition. I mentioned this in my last column (didn’t you read it? It was on Monday, in the Sports Weekly … okay, forget it) that the Dartmouth-Princeton hockey game includes one of the few enduring Big Green sports rituals — the tennis balls.
For the uninitiated amongst you, every year when the Big Green plays the Tigers in Hanover, the fans unleash a barrage of tennis balls onto the ice after Dartmouth’s first goal of the game. It’s one of the coolest things you’ll see at a Dartmouth sporting event, with students tossing bouncy green balls, all in unison, onto the ice. Everyone goes nuts, the cleaning crew is forced to come in to gather all the balls, and Dartmouth gets handed a bogus two-minute penalty. Just please, find a good place to hide the tennis balls as you walk in — the College has tried to crack down on this (even moving this game to Thanksgiving break two years ago). You only get four chances to do this as an undergrad — make them count.
Second, the basketball game pits two of the top teams in the Ivy League against one another, with Cornell holding the top spot and Dartmouth sitting in a three-way tie for second place. But in the grand scheme of Division I basketball, Ivy League teams stink, and they’re only ever competitive against one another.
The Dartmouth-Princeton hockey game, on the other hand, features two of the best teams in the nation battling for playoff position as the season draws to a close. The Tigers are No. 6 in the nation in the latest USCHO.com poll, while the Big Green just recently fell out of the top 20, and Dartmouth needs to win its last two games to secure a first-round bye in the ECAC Hockey League playoffs (which determines the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament). High-quality hockey and a potential upset by Dartmouth versus mediocre basketball?
Next is something I’ll dub the “disappointment factor.” Dartmouth basketball lost a double-overtime heartbreaker to Cornell in Ithaca, N.Y., a few weeks ago, and now the Big Red comes to Hanover trying to secure a season sweep over the Big Green. I know Cornell is on the road, but I have this sinking feeling that the Big Red team is out to prove a point that it is the unquestioned power in the League, and will be too much for the Big Green to overcome.
Sure, we’ve won a fair share of games, but a lot of them have been close and against some really bad teams (e.g. Brown, who Cornell demolished by 40 points last week). If Dartmouth loses — and I think we will — the season is over right then and there. Do you really want to put a damper on your night like that? Hockey has a much better chance of winning, considering we already killed the Tigers 4-0 at Princeton. Optimism abounds.
To be honest — it’s way too hard to compete with the compelling storyline running through the basketball games this weekend. But the Princeton hockey game is a special occasion in the realm of Dartmouth sports, and no true fan should pass that up. At the very least, go to the hockey game, throw the tennis balls, and then if the basketball game is close, go to Leede and watch the end.
Toe to Toe: Knapp versus Rose (Knapp)
By Michael KnappThe Dartmouth
February 29, 2009
“Fifty years. That’s all you need to know.”
Those were the words of Dartmouth men’s basketball captain Jarrett Mathis ‘09 when I posed the question to him that my editors asked me to ttake on in this column. Indeed, maybe it is all you need to know when deciding what athletic event to attend this weekend. After sweeping its contests last weekend, our beloved Big Green sits at second place in the Ivy League standings, and within a stone’s throw of a conference championship. The Ivy League, of course, does not hold a conference basketball tournament (which I have already written about extensively), and therefore the conference champion gets an automatic bid to March’s big dance — the NCAA tournament.
The last time Dartmouth won the Ivy League championship was 1959, and it then lost in the opening round of the NCAA tournament to the University of West Virginia. The year before, however, in 1958, Dartmouth beat traditional powerhouse the University of Connecticut (and Manhattan College) before losing to Temple University in the Elite Eight. This column is not a history lesson in the glory days of Dartmouth basketball, but in order to truly appreciate what (knock on wood) could happen this weekend, we need to understand just how rarely these opportunities come about.
Jordan will tell you all to go to the Dartmouth men’s hockey game, and if you do, you surely won’t be disappointed. The Big Green skaters have long been an ECAC powerhouse, and will frequently play competitive games against top-notch opponents. This is exactly the reason, however, that you should choose to go to the basketball game. Important hockey games are a dime a dozen in Hanover, but a basketball game of this magnitude has not been played in the “603-646” in well, 50 years.
This article is not supposed to argue which team is better, or argue which sport I like more or anything like that. The point is simply to debate which game Dartmouth students “should” go see. Let’s go support a program that has been down on its luck the last few years and regularly competes in a conference that has been absolutely ruled by three powers (Cornell, Penn, Princeton) for the last 20 years. Let’s go out and watch a team put it all on the line for a spot in the national limelight — the games that all basketball players grow up wanting to play. The NCAA tournament is the biggest playoff in all of college sports, and simply making the field of 64 would put Dartmouth on the national map in a way that would bury admissions office employees in envelopes (remember when George Mason made the Final Four? Applications to the school increased by 20 percent the next year, and campus tour sizes tripled!)
A trip to the NCAA tournament would not only increase Dartmouth’s national appeal, but also help out the entire athletic department. Every team at Dartmouth would benefit from the basketball team’s success, because the visibility of the athletic department would be so dramatically increased. Premier high school athletes who intend to go to school at Dartmouth often play multiple sports and follow all sorts of college sports. Simply seeing the name “Dartmouth” on thousands of brackets on the television and over the Internet does more for publicity than a hundred sport-specific recruiters.
Even if you don’t want to go watch the basketball game for the history of it all, or for the “good of the College,” then at least go for this reason: it will be one hell of a game. The team is really playing with a sense of purpose, and even if the Big Green does not make the tournament, it is worth it to see the graduating seniors play in their last games at home. These seniors — Alex Barnett ‘09, Jarrett Mathis ‘09, Dan Biber ‘09, Marlon Sanders ‘09 and Kurt Graeber ‘09 — should be honored for seeing the Dartmouth basketball program through some of its darkest hours early in their careers, to maybe playing in the most important games the recent history of the program.
The only way Dartmouth sports fans can go wrong this weekend is not to go to either game. That being said, it has been 50 years, and that’s all you should need to know.
No comments:
Post a Comment