If I’d Been There, I’d Have Rooted For Dartmouth
Bad Sportsmanship, Dartmouth, Games, Tony Reno, Yale
Dartmouth’s water bottle kicking tee.
Cringe-making behavior by the Yale football coach.
Dartmouth arrived at its game against Yale on Oct. 6 with a full complement of players, all in uniform, to go with many sets of shoulder pads, several footballs and a coaching staff. The Big Green were ready for an important, potentially season-defining Ivy League game.
Dartmouth brought it all, minus one key on-field component: a kicking tee.
After combing through equipment bag after equipment bag roughly an hour before the start of the game against the Bulldogs, Dartmouth players and coaches realized that someone – and we’re not naming names – forgot to include that one vital piece of kicking paraphernalia.
(I will say this: No one is ever truly responsible for packing the equipment. Or everyone is responsible. You know what I mean. Again, we’re not naming names.)
So the Big Green did what any team would do in such a pickle: Dartmouth asked Yale, a brother Ivy, if it could spare a tee.
At first, the Yale equipment manager lent the Big Green a substitute tee. About fifteen minutes before kickoff, however, Yale head coach Tony Reno came over to Dartmouth’s sideline and said that the Bulldogs wanted their tee back, recounted Dartmouth kicker R.C. Willenbrock.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. You need a kicking tee to, you know, kick off. So the Big Green improvised.
Willenbrock came upon inspiration in the form of a water bottle, one he cut down to size, taped and molded before testing as a makeshift tee. Success!
Absolutely pathetic.
And Dartmouth deservedly won, after this disgraceful case of bad sportsmanship, 34-14.
Reading this, I profoundly wished I were president of Yale, so I could have fired that coach so fast his head would spin.
No wonder Yale is losing at football. We have a coach who doesn’t even understand why educational institutions like Yale encouraged young men to play competitive games in the first place.
Hat tip to Tristyn Bloom.
