Best Freshman Athlete
In a competition that saw over 2,100 votes, Patrick Caldwell ’17 was named the best freshman athlete at Dartmouth for 2013-14. Caldwell earned 818 votes in all.
In a competition that saw over 2,100 votes, Patrick Caldwell ’17 was named the best freshman athlete at Dartmouth for 2013-14. Caldwell earned 818 votes in all.
Now that the Celebration of Excellence is behind us and most of the spring sports have started their off-season training, I’ve realized that this is the end of many Dartmouth athletes’ careers in sports. These seniors have trained for thousands of hours, taken countless bus rides and airplane trips, eaten an ungodly amount of peanut butter sandwiches and experienced a blur of locker room memories in just four years at the College. I can almost guarantee that if you asked any athlete in the Class of 2014 about the day they officially found out that they would represent the Big Green, they could recount the rush of feelings as if it were yesterday.
I’ve enjoyed being able to share my stories and thoughts through my column this spring — perhaps more so than the editors who quickly became aware of my chronic procrastination. In my mind, Dartmouth athletics have a permanence thatcomforts student-athletes and fans alike. Part of this permanence is the longstanding history of Big Green sports. Football at Dartmouth dates back to 1876. Women’s sports are a more recent development, but several teams have seen remarkable success. This results in generations of alumni who care deeply about their sports and about Dartmouth.
The baseball and softball teams were two of the Big Green’s most successful teams this season. The softball team won its first League title in program history, then advanced to the NCAA Tournament for the first time. The baseball team ended its season with an 8-0 run to place in the Ivy League Championship Series for the eighth year in a row, where the team fell to Columbia University. The rest of the Ancient Eight took note. Four members of the softball team and eight members of the baseball team nabbed All-Ivy honors.
For the third straight year, the coed and women’s sailing teams both qualified for the Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association National Championships. The women’s team will travel to Annapolis, Maryland, this Sunday, with the coed team competing June 3 in the championships co-hosted by the U.S. Naval Academy and St. Mary’s College.
There have been times in my four years at Dartmouth when I’ve envied my friends at powerhouse athletic schools. For them, Saturday football was a ritual. Everybody, regardless of their knowledge of sports, would get swept up in the fervor of college football and attend the game together. Each winter, they watched their school face off in long-established college rivalries, and then follow the team through the NCAA Tournament.
Twice in her life, Tara Simmons ’17 has hit a hole in one. Once, she said, she was at a tournament during competitive play. But the other occurred during a casual round with her brothers, on a course where the hole had a hidden pin location.
To simulate the Arizona heat in the weeks leading up to the NCAA tournament, softball players practiced in wool pants and Under Armour beneath a bright sun. Upon arrival in Tempe, Arizona, they switched to pants made of a lighter material.
During the 2013-14 season, several freshman athletes have played major roles on their respective teams, becoming crucial players and even superstars in their first seasons in Hanover. To commemorate the achievements of Dartmouth athletes and teams this past year, we introduced the first annual Sports Awards.
The Dartmouth men’s heavyweight crew team traveled to Worcester, Massachusetts, last weekend for the Eastern Sprints Regatta, where the Big Green finished 14th overall out of the pool of 18 crews for the Rowe Cup. First varsity eight took 12th place, while the second, third and fourth varsity eights all came in ninth in their divisions.
As an athlete, one of the key factors that determines a game experience is the crowd that is there watching. With a season of very few home matches and a lot of traveling, home court advantage was not something the squash team experienced frequently this year. While memories of our rowdy home matches are some of my most treasured, much of our season is played far from Hanover, away from the cheering excitement of the Dartmouth faithful.
With a runner on first and no outs in the inning, San Diego State sophomore Leia Ruiz sent the 1-2 pitch by Ashley Sissel ’17 deep to center field. Megan Averitt ’15 chased back, but the ball sailed just out of the reach of her glove as the junior crashed into the wall. The ball caromed off the fence towards right fielder Brianna Lohmann ’16. Lohmann tried to replicate her fifth-inning heroics as she came up firing to try to catch sophomore Monica Downey out at the plate, but Downey slid in just under the tag by catcher Alex St. Romain ’14 for the run that ended the Big Green’s season.
With a staggering 628 votes, Kristen Giovanniello ’14 was voted by The Dartmouth’s readership as Dartmouth’s best female athlete of 2013-14.
Correction appended (May 21, 2014): The 2013 women's team finished seventh in the first varsity eight, not last.
This week I sat down with Melissa Matsuoka ’14, a four-year starter for the women’s tennis team, to look back on the highlights of her career, challenges she faced and what lies ahead.
Loyal readers, our tenure as the Rec League Legends is coming to an end. I know, you are sad. We are sad. The only people who probably aren’t sad are the competitors who look good at our expense and the editors who put up with our shenanigans. We have left you with a lot of questions, but the one that we would truly like to address in this column is probably the most important: what’s next in the careers of the Rec League Legends?
For its inaugural appearance in the NCAA softball tournament, Dartmouth (31-17, 18-2) travels to Arizona to compete in the Tempe Regional tournament hosted by No. 4 Arizona State University. The Sun Devils (44-10-1) drew the No. 9 overall seed in the tournament. The University of Michigan and San Diego State University round out the regional competition. The four teams will compete in a double-elimination tournament to advance to the Super Regional round, hosted on the campus of the highest-ranked team to advance from each regional.
I vividly remember watching the women’s basketball team host then-No. 3 Duke University in the 2006 Blue Sky Classic. The heat and noise in sold-out Leede Arena was electric. The gym was alive, and cheers continued throughout the game despite the Big Green’s blowout 77-40 loss.\n When the men’s ice hockey team packs Thompson Arena for its annual home game against Princeton University, students turn out in droves to be part of our favorite tennis ball tradition.\n As NARPs, this is a way we can have a real influence on athletics. Athletes agree that they have more energy when they can feel the support of the crowd, and often play better because of it.
At the Ivy League outdoor Heptagonal Championships at Yale University last weekend, Kaitlin Whitehorn ’16 was everywhere. Running back and forth between the track and the high jump, she competed six times over the course of the weekend. After competing in the 100- and 200-meter preliminaries Saturday, she woke up Sunday with four events ahead of her: the 100- and 200-meter finals, the 4x100-meter relay and the high jump.
Dartmouth’s roots in American cricket tradition extend back to the late 1700s, when one of the earliest recorded games of cricket in the U.S. was believed to be played on the Green. Since then, faculty and students have routinely gathered for casual matches, forming an informal group in the 1990s. In the past couple of years, the Dartmouth College Cricket Club has enjoyed a considerable amount of growth and recognition.