Can Our President Take Yours Off The Dribble?

Dartmouth hired a new Director of Athletics yesterday, bringing in Harry Sheehy to run the Big Green program after his ultra-ridiculously successful run as the AD at Williams College.

TigerBlog, as he assumes the rest of the Ivy League does, wishes all the best to Mr. Sheehy in his new position.

To find out more about the Dartmouth situation, TB read the Big Green Alert blog, which gave Green fans all the information they wanted and more.

While on that site, TB stumbled upon what the Big Green Alert considered to be the "Quote of the Day II," which came from Dartmouth president Jim Yong Kim:
"One of the great things is now I'm ready to challenge every single Ivy League president, athletic director and basketball coach to a 3-on-3 and we'll play for our endowment. How is that?"

TB immediately began to think of some of the combinations that such a 3-on-3 tournament could inspire. He also assumes Dr. Kim was talking about the men's coaches (though Princeton would have a huge advantage over any other Ivy school if he actually meant women's coaches, which for Princeton would mean Dartmouth alum Courtney Banghart, one of the best players in Ivy women's history).

For instance, Penn has a fairly formidable pair of AD Steve Bilsky, who was a great player on some great Quaker teams from 1969-71, and head coach Jerome Allen, a two-time Ivy League Player of the Year (1993, 1994). Both men are in the Philadelphia Big 5 Hall of Fame, which is the home of some great, great players.

How about Harvard? Tommy Amaker was a standout point guard at Duke, which would be a pretty good starting point for a 3-on-3 game. The AD at Harvard is Bob Scalise, who was a two-time All-America in lacrosse at Brown who led the nation with 47 goals his junior year. TB has no idea about Scalise’s basketball game, but he’s known plenty of lacrosse players who were strong on the court.

As for the Tigers, AD Gary Walters was also a point guard, he on the 1965 NCAA Final Four team here as a sophomore. Sydney Johnson, the men's coach, was, like Allen, the Ivy League Player of the Year (Johnson in 1997).

Yale AD Tom Beckett played basketball and baseball at Pitt, and head basketball coach James Jones played at Albany.

At Columbia, new head coach Kyle Smith was a basketball player at Hamilton College, and he helped the Continentals go 26-1 his senior year of 1992. AD Dianne Murphy has a strong basketball background as a player and longtime coach.

Cornell's new head coach, Bill Courtney, was a two-time first-team All-Patriot League selection at Bucknell, while AD Andy Noel, though a wrestler, seems like he could probably play a little basketball.

Brown coach Jesse Agel is a Vermont grad. AD Mike Goldberger played football and baseball at Middlebury.

Of the eight presidents, seven list no athletic background in their bios. Of the eight, two (Dr. Kim at Dartmouth and Dr. Skorton at Cornell) are medical doctors, something TB didn't know.

As an aside, TB was a student of Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust when she was an American Civilizations professor at Penn. TB had two of her classes, one on the antebellum South and one on the Civil War era.

Dr. Kim, in addition to having been the director of the HIV/AIDS efforts of the World Health Organization at one point, was also a high school quarterback back in Iowa. Sheehy was a two-time Division III All-America at Williams, and basketball coach Paul Cormier was a four-time letterwinner in basketball and baseball at New Hampshire back in the early 1970s.

If the President-AD-Coach tournament ever happened, TB actually thinks it'd be fairly competitive. It might come down to which president has the best game.

In all seriousness, though, the hiring of Sheehy got TB to thinking about a few things.

First, TB read about it first on the BGA blog and the Ivy League message board. Dartmouth's site said that there would be a press conference announcing who the AD was the next day, but it didn't list Sheehy by name originally.

TB isn't sure how word got around (he's never sure how that works), but it always does.

TB remembers when Roger Hughes was hired as football coach, and the word that Princeton put out was the same as the one Dartmouth just did. By the next morning, word had gotten out to the newspapers about how Hughes was the coach (goprincetontigers.com did not yet exist).

Since then, all announcements have included the name of the hire, saying that, for instance, John Thompson would be introduced as the men's basketball coach at a press conference the next day.

The lesson, again, is that word will always get out, no matter how much you try to prevent it from happening. Of course, looking at the anonymous postings on the Ivy League message board makes you wonder who these people are, since there is often all kinds of inside knowledge on display.

Of course, by today, who cares where the story was first, since everyone now knows who Dartmouth's new AD will be.

Interestingly, Sheehy will be the first new AD in the league since Brown hired Mike Goldberger in 2005. Of the remaining ADs, five of the seven have been in their current positions for at least nine years. Four have been there for more than 10 years; only one current president (Yale's Dr. Levin) has been there for at least 10.

TB never thought to look into the athletic backgrounds of the ADs, but here they are again:

Princeton - Gary Walters (basketball player at Princeton)
Penn - Steve Bilsky (basketball player at Penn)
Harvard - Bob Scalise (lacrosse player at Brown)
Brown - Mike Goldberger (football/baseball player at Middlebury)
Cornell - Andy Noel (wrestler at Franklin & Marshall)
Yale - Tom Beckett (basketball/baseball at Pitt)
Columbia - Dianne Murphy (basketball at Tennessee Tech)
Dartmouth - Harry Sheehy (basketball at Williams)

In other words, five of the eight have basketball backgrounds.

What's that mean? Well, among others, that Dr. Kim's 3-on-3 tournament might be a good idea.