Right off the bat (pun totally intended), congrats to the Dartmouth baseball team on winning the Ivy League title two weekends ago. After coming so close to the crown last season, the Big Green romped through the Ivy League schedule this year with superb hitting, and capped the year off with a convincing rout of Cornell to win the title series, two games to one.
Head coach Bob Whalen deserves some props for getting his team prepared for this year. For all the criticism he received from the press the last few years, he certainly responded well. The Big Green will likely face a top seed in the NCAA regionals, but who says Dartmouth can't pull off an upset with the way the team has been hitting and pitching down the stretch?
On to the focus of this column: What was with Bill Wilson resigning as the head coach of the men's lacrosse team? He gave no reason in an interview with The Dartmouth, and the athletic department, predictably, has been mum on the situation. It's an honorable thing for Wilson to call it quits if he felt that his coaching was contributing to the team's woes (the Big Green's 4-11 record this season was its worst in 10 years). To be fair, too, Dartmouth was hit hard this year by the injuries of defender Casey Hingtgen '10 and first team All-Ivy attackman Ari Sussman '10, arguably two of the best players on the team.
But this year's setbacks can't overshadow the Big Green's larger troubles under Wilson. Before Wilson came in, Dartmouth won its first Ivy League championship in about 40 years under former coach Rick Sowell, and automatically qualified for the NCAA tournament (side note: if you haven't seen the goal by goalie Andrew Goldstein '05 against Syracuse, go check it out online as it's one of the sicker plays I've seen in a lacrosse game.) That title was a major accomplishment for the Dartmouth program that historically had been second fiddle to teams such as Princeton and Cornell in the conference.
Since Wilson took the helm for the 2003-2004 season when Sowell left to coach at St. John's University in New York, the Big Green hasn't been able to maintain its spot as a top Ivy squad. The Big Green had two solid seasons to start off the Wilson era, and almost made it back to the NCAA tourney in 2005 as an at-large team. Those years, Wilson was coaching the players that Sowell had actually recruited to Hanover. A couple of players, Ben Grinnell '05 and Pat Keeley '05, even got invites to try out for the U.S. National Team. It never hurts to have talent like that (ask Doc Rivers).
But it seems the trouble started for the Big Green once Wilson started filling the rosters with the players he recruited. I'm not saying that Dartmouth doesn't have some legit talent -- we certainly do (see, for example, Hingtgen and Sussman). Inside Lacrosse, a major publication in the lacrosse world, even gave Wilson props on at least one occasion for pulling in a top recruiting class.
Yet the Big Green has struggled mightily in the past three years. In that span, Dartmouth has won just five Ivy League games out of a potential 18 contests. What's the cause of all this?
I've heard some people lament that Wilson doesn't recruit in the right places -- instead of hotspots like Long Island and metropolitan Baltimore, he looks for talent in places like Texas and California. I don't necessarily buy that argument, since it's rooted in a view that lacrosse is totally an East Coast sport. This was true in the 1990s, but it doesn't hold as much water since lacrosse has spread rapidly across the nation.
I think the issue came down to Wilson not being able to coach his own players up to their potential. Oftentimes, the team's offense did not appear to be dynamic, and was not potent enough to overcome high-scoring teams like Cornell.
Also, in the last four years Dartmouth has lacked a firm No. 1 goaltender. Instead, it seemed like there was a new face in net every season. To me, these are things that held the team back and hurt Dartmouth's chances of remaining a top contender in the Ivy League.
Now I could be totally off the mark, and Wilson's resignation could have been motivated by some completely unknown factor. But I give Wilson a huge amount of credit if he decided to leave based on the team's recent performance. Clearly I'm a fan of lacrosse, and I'm hoping the athletic department finds a new coach who can rejuvenate the program.
Enough venting from me. Go enjoy Green Key.
