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Baseball (24-15, 16-4 Ivy) -- With a silly .800 win percentage in the Ivy League, Dartmouth's diamond runners have dominated like few teams seen within the Big Green sports bubble in a long time. Beyond just winning, though, the team has put up numbers that most of us wish we could achieve in a video game (Santomauro is toying with a .400 batting average for the third year in a row? Really?). Whalen's warriors have humiliated the rest of the Ancient Eight this year, and yesterday's Ivy League championship is a deserved culmination to a memorable season.
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Rugby -- No, it's not a varsity team, but rugby operates like one, and to much more successful ends than most Dartmouth squads. In fact, the only difference between rugby and football is that rugby can't spend 20 grand of the College's money every week to go embarrass the Big Green legacy at another away game. After a respectable performance at nationals against a ridiculously manly, virtuous and eventually title-winning Brigham Young team, the DRFC earned a No. 5 national ranking. Dartmouth proved that it deserved the ranking the next weekend in the Ivy League championship, beating its first two opponents by a ludicrous combined score of 213-0, and then winning the championship against former rival Harvard, 62-13 -- while playing a man down for half of the game. Dartmouth's ruggers have proved, once and for all, that the mediocre Northeast can't contain them anymore.
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Golf -- Dartmouth's polo-clad putters have stormed into the Big Green sports spotlight with an intensity that -- well -- is as intense as a sport like golf can get. The team came out of nowhere to apparate into a third-place finish at the Ivy League championships last weekend, led by the strikingly lanky Peter Williamson '12. Williamson won an epic three-hole playoff against Eric Salazar of Princeton to become the first Big Green golfer to win the individual Ivy League championship since 1995. Tragically, the team's heroism has gone largely unnoticed on campus. So if you see a golfer, at least throw him a high five or something -- he deserves it.
Most Disappointing Teams This Season
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Women's Lacrosse (8-7, 5-2 Ivy) -- Don't get me wrong, the women's lacrosse team had anything but a bad season this spring. The team's games were highlighted by outstanding individual performances, and the team ended the season with a winning record. But the lady laxies' season was nothing if not heartbreaking. The women lost two games by one goal in overtime to two teams that were, at the time, each ranked No. 2 in the country -- Maryland and the University of Pennsylvania. They lost their footing against a surprisingly strong Princeton team, and just simply fizzled toward the end of the season, dropping entirely winnable games to Boston University and Syracuse. A season that started with an excited intake of breath ended with a sad, disappointed sigh. On the bright side, the team graduated only two seniors, and will maintain talent like attacker Kat Collins '11, who bullies defenders like they are first-graders at recess, and goalie Julie Wadland '10, who, as a rising senior, is already more decorated than a TDX-mas basement. Let's hope our favorite weapon-wielding ladies can return to form next season.
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Men's (4-17, 0-7 Ivy) and Women's Tennis (8-14, 2-5 Ivy) -- Not much to say here. The men's team went from a young, promising team just waiting for its chance at the spotlight to a team that couldn't manage a single win in the Ancient Eight. The women, meanwhile, sank from the winningest team in Dartmouth women's tennis history to post just two wins in the Ivies, good enough for only a mediocre fifth-place finish. Sure, both tennis teams lost a lot of good players when the Class of 2008 graduated, but they've also been led by young talent that has not yet stepped up to lead these teams back to the top.
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Men's Lacrosse (4-11, 1-5 Ivy) -- This team has no business residing on the bottom of this list or the bottom of the Ivy League standings, considering its wealth of talent. And yet men's lacrosse continues to bafflingly under-perform. This is a team that fields seven high school All-Americans in the 2010 class alone, a team with a 100-goal scorer, with perennial All-Ivy and All-American players. And still it managed just one win in the Ivies this year. At least head coach Bill Wilson, college lacrosse's league leader in underutilizing talent, may have finally miscoached his last game at Dartmouth. After years of just barely achieving enough mediocrity to keep his job, Wilson has just ousted men's basketball coach Terry Dunn as the biggest pariah in town. Something needs to change to allow our boys to get one of Dartmouth's most tradition-laden teams back on the right track.
