A Rebirth on the Plain

By Daniel F. Linsalata | Friday, May 5, 2006

2003 was a tough recruiting year for the Dartmouth Swimming and Diving teams. In October of the previous year, the Athletic Department, citing the need to make substantial budget cuts, eliminated the entire program. Many of the 2002 recruits who had been admitted early withdrew from the College; students rallied in front of Parkhurst, demanding someone’s, anyone’s head on a platter; the team—the entire team—went up for sale on eBay. How does one recruit athletes to a program in such disarray?

Several years prior, unbeknownst to the Dartmouth community, Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg, in what will politely be written off as severe lapse of judgment, sent a letter to the President of Swarthmore College, commending him for eliminating the school’s football program. In the letter, he described athletics as “antithetical” to the mission of any college. When the letter leaked to the public in 2004, following a number of painful football seasons under then-Coach John Lyons, fans, students, and alumni alike immediately blamed the College administration for the athletic teams’ ongoing poor performance. Talk of a malicious administration agenda to scuttle sports programs arose in some corners. Others assumed Dartmouth would simply never shake President James Freedman’s “creative loner” legacy.

But then, like the Whos in Whoville staring down the Parkhurst Grinch on Christmas Day, something miraculous happened. Instead of abandoning ship, alumni ramped up their support across the board for programs. Against all odds, Buddy Teevens ’79, the last Dartmouth football coach to win an Ivy League title, agreed to return to Hanover. But most of all, Dartmouth teams started winning. Prodigiously.

Let’s look at the bare facts first. Since 2000, men’s cross-country has won five Ivy League Championships. Men’s soccer has won two. Men’s lacrosse has one. Men’s ice hockey pulled in their first ever East Coast Athletic Conference this year. The alpine ski team boasts five consecutive NCAA slalom champions. Women’s basketball has won two consecutive league titles. Women’s lacrosse won four straight. Women’s ice hockey, three, with a bounty of Olympic medals along the way. And in the same time period, Indian teams have appeared in forty-five NCAA tournaments. Dartmouth finished 34th in the U.S. Sports Academy Directors’ Cup this year, a measure of across-the-board success of a school’s athletic program. Notre Dame won. Yale was the next best Ivy, at 53rd. That school on the Charles failed to crack the top 100.

So then what happened? Wasn’t the elimination of the swim team a harbinger of things to come for the rest of the programs? Evidently not. In the immediate, it roused the passions of alumni and supporters, who, in the face of a doomsday scenario unthinkable in Whoville, came up with two million dollars in under six months to ensure the future of the program, a reflection of their unwavering and unquestioning commitment. It only came to light later that, in the end, Athletic Director Josie Harper had made the correct decision, of sorts, by cutting the program. Given the (admittedly misguided) budget priorities of the College at the time, approximately $200,000 had to be slashed from the athletic budget. Nickel-and-diming all thirty-four varsity programs—the only viable alternative to the total elimination of a single program—would have doomed all teams to decades of uncompetitive mediocrity. Unfortunately, only the grim reality of having a team pulled out from beneath them could incite the immediate and overwhelming reaction exhibited by students and alumni—albeit with great efficacy.

And similarly with the Furstenberg debacle, rather than pulling support from all sports and abandoning hope, faithful alumni recognized the dire plight of athletics at the College and generously opened their wallets to whichever team came calling, even amidst violent demands for Furstenberg’s firing,

The College—in what may or may not be an act of repentance, but certainly appears as such—responded in kind by committing more than $50 million to building new athletic facilities and upgrading existing ones. Lacrosse, field hockey, soccer, and football each have or will receive new turf fields with stands and lighting for night games. A new varsity house overlooking Red Rolfe and Memorial Fields is under construction, expanding office space for coaches, conditioning facilities for athletes, and other amenities. More than half of the this building will be devoted to the football team under the stewardship of Buddy Teevens, considered by many the only man capable of transforming the team in the way that fans from all corners of the girdled earth are expecting. Alumni Gym, forever the centerpiece of the athletic complex on South Campus, has received a complete interior renovation, and now houses a fully-overhauled swimming pool, and a fitness center befitting the finest institution in the Ivy League. These improvements, and the money to fund them, ironically, would never have been possible were it not for the selfless outpouring of passion and support from alumni and friends in the wake of two of the most difficult athletic PR scandals in the nascent century.

Sadly, until the football and men’s basketball teams start winning on a regular basis, the staggering success of all the Indians’ other squads is likely to remain overlooked. However, the fact remains that, after a dearth of success of any type during the Freedman years, Dartmouth athletics are tasting sweet victory with a frequency unheard of on the Hanover plain since the 1950s.

A Rebirth on the Plain

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