Class Note 1979
Issue
Mar - Apr 2017
It’s time for another installment of our guest column tradition, which we hope you’ve enjoyed through the years. This one is a home run from Bob Whalen, a great friend of our class, a devoted husband and father and a successful leader of young men at the College. Many thanks, Coach!
“When Stanley Weil and John Currier asked me to ‘step to the plate’ for this Class Notes column, I was honored. Between coaching with Buddy Teevens at the University of Maine in the mid-1980s, learning of a longtime family relationship with Bill Mitchell and becoming close to Cindy and Mike Biondi early in my Dartmouth career, being adopted by the great class of ’79 has meant the world to me and my family. This spring will be my 28th season as Dartmouth’s head baseball coach.
“I have been fortunate to work at such a world-class academic institution that also values athletics. I view my role here as a teacher. A significant part of my responsibility is to recruit deserving young men of high character and prepare them for their personal and professional lives through lessons learned during athletic competition. The values of a superior work ethic, being a great teammate and competing with confidence, poise and integrity are what the coaching staff strives to impart and what we most want our charges to take away from the program upon graduating.
“When I became head coach in 1990 I had many objectives. The two most important from a baseball perspective were to have the program become defined by competitive success (since 2000 we’ve won two Ivy League championships and 11 Red Rolfe Division titles) and to develop players (we’ve had 21 players drafted since 2000, seven of whom currently play professionally). The primary reason for our success is that we’ve been able to consistently attract talented players who are committed to the program and to each other.
“No player has exemplified this more than Kyle Hendricks ’12, a special young man and a great ambassador for both the College and the baseball program. He pitched the championship game against Cornell in 2009, leading us to our first Ivy League title. As great as he was at Dartmouth, it’s still a big jump from our league to pitching the clinching game of the 2016 National League (NL) Championship Series for the Chicago Cubs and then starting Game 7 of the Cubbies’ historic World Series win. Jason Heyward, son of Laura (Benjamin) Heyward, was Kyle’s teammate, making the victory even sweeter from a ’79 perspective! Kyle won the Players Choice award as the top pitcher in the NL and finished third in the Cy Young balloting. It was both fun and rewarding to see him pitch so well on baseball’s biggest stage!”
We leave you with two quick congratulatory notes—to Martha Pollack for being named Cornell University’s 14th president, and to Ted Winterer for being elected mayor of the city of Santa Monica, California, for a two-year term that started last December.
—Stanley Weil, 15 Peck Road, Mt. Kisco, NY 10549; (917) 428-0852; stanno79@gmail.com; John Currier, 82 Carpenter St., Norwich, VT 05055; (802) 649-2577; john.h.currier@dartmouth.edu
“When Stanley Weil and John Currier asked me to ‘step to the plate’ for this Class Notes column, I was honored. Between coaching with Buddy Teevens at the University of Maine in the mid-1980s, learning of a longtime family relationship with Bill Mitchell and becoming close to Cindy and Mike Biondi early in my Dartmouth career, being adopted by the great class of ’79 has meant the world to me and my family. This spring will be my 28th season as Dartmouth’s head baseball coach.
“I have been fortunate to work at such a world-class academic institution that also values athletics. I view my role here as a teacher. A significant part of my responsibility is to recruit deserving young men of high character and prepare them for their personal and professional lives through lessons learned during athletic competition. The values of a superior work ethic, being a great teammate and competing with confidence, poise and integrity are what the coaching staff strives to impart and what we most want our charges to take away from the program upon graduating.
“When I became head coach in 1990 I had many objectives. The two most important from a baseball perspective were to have the program become defined by competitive success (since 2000 we’ve won two Ivy League championships and 11 Red Rolfe Division titles) and to develop players (we’ve had 21 players drafted since 2000, seven of whom currently play professionally). The primary reason for our success is that we’ve been able to consistently attract talented players who are committed to the program and to each other.
“No player has exemplified this more than Kyle Hendricks ’12, a special young man and a great ambassador for both the College and the baseball program. He pitched the championship game against Cornell in 2009, leading us to our first Ivy League title. As great as he was at Dartmouth, it’s still a big jump from our league to pitching the clinching game of the 2016 National League (NL) Championship Series for the Chicago Cubs and then starting Game 7 of the Cubbies’ historic World Series win. Jason Heyward, son of Laura (Benjamin) Heyward, was Kyle’s teammate, making the victory even sweeter from a ’79 perspective! Kyle won the Players Choice award as the top pitcher in the NL and finished third in the Cy Young balloting. It was both fun and rewarding to see him pitch so well on baseball’s biggest stage!”
We leave you with two quick congratulatory notes—to Martha Pollack for being named Cornell University’s 14th president, and to Ted Winterer for being elected mayor of the city of Santa Monica, California, for a two-year term that started last December.
—Stanley Weil, 15 Peck Road, Mt. Kisco, NY 10549; (917) 428-0852; stanno79@gmail.com; John Currier, 82 Carpenter St., Norwich, VT 05055; (802) 649-2577; john.h.currier@dartmouth.edu