These are heady days
Yale’s success builds on an impressive Ivy League run that began with Cornell reaching the Sweet Sixteen in 2010 and Harvard advancing past the first round in 2013 and 2014. Not only that, observers note that Ivy League teams are no longer relying on the tried and true slowdown formula of intricate passing and backdoor cuts to occasionally take down the giants, but are competing on an equal athletic footing with a physical style of play. “It was the way (Yale) won that I find truly impressive,” said Robin Harris, Ivy League executive director. “I think it’s a huge statement win for the Ivy League.”
Indeed, Ben Cohen, writing in The Wall Street Journal, asserts that, “This is the time to admit something that not even Ivy Leaguers would brag about: They can actually compete at the highest level of college basketball.” Part of the reason, according to Cohen, is that the Ivy League schools are now recruiting a different kind of player than they once did, empowered by generous financial aid packages that permit them to attract top high school players even without offering outright athletic scholarships.
In light of all this, it was perhaps inevitable that the Ivies would finally abandon their resistance to holding a post-season tournament to determine the men’s and women’s conference champions, which receive automatic NCAA tourney bids. The first of these four-team tournaments will be held next March at the Palestra, a basketball mecca in Philadelphia. “This creates a landmark event during March Madness for our basketball student-athletes to anticipate while they are in school and to cherish throughout their lives after graduation,” said Harris when the news was announced earlier this month. The players are “going to find being in a tournament atmosphere very rewarding,” agreed Dartmouth coach Paul Cormier.
Unfortunately for Cormier, he will not be part of that scene, at least with Dartmouth. He was fired about 10 days after the tournament was announced, abruptly ending his second tour of duty at the Dartmouth helm. Athletic Director Harry Sheehy commended Cormier for working “incredibly hard and diligently here,” but with a 55-116 record over the past six seasons, the handwriting was apparently on the wall. “I had a sense that the energy had stalled,” Sheehy told staff writer Tris Wykes, specifying recruiting and player development as areas in need of improvement. In other words, Cormier was failing to keep up with the rest of the Ivies in the one respect that matters — winning.
We’re bound to say amid all the excitement that it’s a little hard to reconcile this new-found Ivy League prowess in basketball with its traditional emphasis on academics. What exactly will a conference tournament contribute to the education of the basketball-playing students involved that they don’t already obtain during the regular season, beyond exposure to a certain amount of manufactured hoopla? And as Dartmouth begins the search for a new men’s coach, one hopes that the successful candidate will be not only a skilled on-court tactician and a dynamic recruiter, but also an inspiring educator — a teacher in the broadest sense.
And there’s something else a little troubling about this new Ivy ascendance. Ivy League graduates have long been regarded as overdogs in life; it’s a game they are generally favored to win, however that term is understood. So it was kind of fun when they were the underdogs at something and could be rooted for on that basis.