Josie Harper, Dartmouth's Athletic Director since 2002, announced yesterday that she is retiring. She is leaving in her wake a multitude of new and improved athletic facilities utilized by, for the most part, drastically underperforming teams.
Just to be clear, the sporting facilities on campus look great these days, in large part due to the vision of Harper. During her tenure, Dartmouth has seen the completion of field hockey's Chase Field, soccer's Burnham Field and the renovation of football's Memorial Field and Floren Varsity House. Baseball's Red Rolfe Field is being completely rebuilt, and nearly every otherathletic facility has been improved since Harper took the Athletic Director post. These renovations have undoubtedly been great for the College and great for the 900 or so Dartmouth undergrads who participate in varsity athletics.
But while being the Athletic Director means caring for your school and your student-athletes, it also entails caring for the fans, the students who seek pride in their school's athletic programs. Maybe it's vain, but I, for one, seek pride through the efforts of the athletic teams I care most about, and I doubt I am alone. I want to love Dartmouth's sports teams, I want to support them with all my heart and I want to be able to brag about my school's success when I go back home to Indiana.
Unfortunately, I have not found this possible while attending Dartmouth, and, seeing that I am a senior, I doubt I ever will gain that sense of pride in Dartmouth sports. The new athletic facilities mean very little to me and those of us who do not participate in varsity sports at Dartmouth, and so I feel obliged to view Harper's legacy through a different lens, the lens of a fan.
On the one hand, Dartmouth has consistently fielded strong ski, soccer, hockey and lacrosse teams. Harper has been able to leave these programs largely untouched and still see success. But I can't go home and brag to my friends about our great ski team. I want to talk about the success Dartmouth is having in the sports that everybody else talks about: basketball and football. Obviously, this is impossible.
Our football team has won seven games in the last four years. Our basketball team has averaged 19 losses a year since 2005. Both programs are moving backward, not forward -- and Harper hired the coaches of both these programs.
This simple exercise in cause and effect is not a glowing review of Harper's performance as Dartmouth's AD. The numbers are difficult to ignore.
Much has been said about head football coach Buddy Teevens '79 and head baskeball coach Terry Dunn, so I'm not going to enter into that fray in this column. It wouldn't be appropriate either, as this is supposed to be about Harper, the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame coach who has been in charge of Dartmouth athletics for the past seven years. But when you are an athletic director and you hire a coach, your reputation and legacy rides on that coach.
Just look at Rick Greenspan, the former AD of Indiana University. Kelvin Sampson was Greenspan's choice for head men's basketball coach, and when Sampson summarily tore the once-storied basketball program to shreds in just two years, Greenspan took the bullet for his mistake and resigned alongside Sampson. And while Teevens and Dunn are not tearing apart their respective programs, they are certainly leading them down the wrong path. The records speak for themselves. Plus, there is something to be said for the fact that, at other schools, football teams previously led by Teevens have done better in the year or two immediately after he leaves.
Thanks to Harper's efforts as athletic director, the next AD will have some of the best athletic facilities in the Ivy League to work with. But the next AD also has some very important decisions to make regarding the direction of certain key sports programs. I hope that he or she keeps in mind that while building new athletic facilities helps both the school and the student-athletes, building winning sports programs helps the school, the student-athletes and the fans, alike.
I may not have had a major sports team to be proud of during my four undergraduate years at Dartmouth, but hopefully by the time I send little legacy Ryan Juniors to Dartmouth, there will be a basketball and football program to cheer for.
