Like many Dartmouth students, I entered into an NCAA March Madness pool this season. In a shocking moment, both of my teams made it to the national championship game (this is generally a rare occurrence, but not when the teams are two No. 1 seeds), giving me the opportunity for my first correct national champion since 2001, when I picked Duke to win it all (I have picked the correct champion twice so far in my life, and both times have been No. 1 seeds). My fellow sports columnist Rob Esposito '07 has Florida over UNC in the final (my 14-year-old brother had UNC in the final too, so congrats to Rob), so depending on who won last night, only one sports columnist now reigns supreme (I took the man-child Greg Oden of THE Ohio State University). I only hope for Mr. Esposito's sake that Florida wins, if only to save him the distinction of finishing behind Kyle Owusu '07, Allie Levine '07, and Chris Ward '07 in "Kyle, Rob, Allie and Chris' March Madness Pool." Note to amateur sports columnists everywhere: when you are involved in a pool in part named after yourself, you better make sure your predictions are decent, especially when those predictions are readily available on the Internet.
This, like many weekends, featured some strange occurrences in the world of Dartmouth sports. Saturday saw Dartmouth softball sweep two games against the Lions of Columbia, each by a 1-0 score. Back-to-back shutouts are pretty impressive, but the effort of winning two games by such close margins must have taken a toll on the Lady Green, since they came back on Sunday and lost by a 25-4 margin, a 23-run swing in just one day.
Saturday also featured a curiously lopsided women's lacrosse game which ended in a 17-5 Dartmouth triumph over the Brown Bears. Not only was it my first women's lacrosse game while at Dartmouth (I have yet to go a men's lacrosse game, so please no accusations of sexism), but junior Kate Labrum scored the first two goals of the game for the Green despite only having two goals in the rest of her Dartmouth career. The game was a tad boring, not due to any lack of effort by the Dartmouth players, but because the suspense tends to get lost after one team takes a 10-goal lead.
While it appears that Dartmouth sports teams had a fairly successful weekend, I noticed something that troubled me. Our women's tennis team lost Saturday (not necessarily the troubling part), but they are the No. 63 team in the FILA NCAA Division 1 Rankings. There are actually two different aspects to this that are troubling. Aspect No. 1 is that the rankings are in fact sponsored by FILA (a company that I forgot even existed). Corporate sponsorship is everywhere, but I would have expected a little more effort to avoid it from college tennis. In the spirit of Dikembe Mutombo, I wag my finger at the NCAA (and the Intercollegiate Tennis Association) for contributing to excessive sponsorship even at less-popular collegiate sports.
The second, and certainly more troubling aspect of the FILA NCAA Division 1 Rankings (I use its full name deliberately) is that there are in fact, 80 teams currently listed! 80 TEAMS??? Assuming there are about as many Division 1 tennis schools are there are basketball schools (finding information on collegiate tennis is surprisingly difficult), that means that about one-fourth of all collegiate tennis teams make the national rankings. Most major sports have a top-25, and for hockey it is only either 15 or 20 (there are far fewer Division 1 hockey teams). Is it really necessary to have national rankings with 80 teams? It is a good thing more people do not know about these tennis rankings, otherwise the Intercollegiate Tennis Association might be derided for it. After all, once you get to 80 teams, why not go further? Why not 100? 150? You could even rank every team if you wanted to have some fun. Only then we could determine what school has the worst tennis team and mock them substantially.
Even though it's the first week of the baseball season, I decided to save everyone from another Opening Day column. Enjoy the first few days of baseball season, and if you see a kid walking around campus in Red Sox gear, just be nice and smile. It's probably me.
