Sunday, August 30, 2015

You'll Get A Kick Out Of This

High school senior and Dartmouth commit Davis Brief of Warwick, N.Y., has been ranked, "the top combo prospect in the northeast for the class of 2016 and one of the top specialists nationally for his class," according to Special Teams Solutions. Find his STS bio HERE and the Sept. 1 punter rankings that have him first HERE.
Speaking of special teams standouts, Pete and Charlie Gogolak, who pioneered soccer-style kicking and forever changed kicking in the 1960s, are this year's co-recipients of the National Football Foundation & College Hall of Fame (NFF) Outstanding Contribution to Amateur Football Award. Pete kicked at Cornell and Charlie at Princeton. Find a story HERE.

Here's what you may not know.

A third brother, John Gogolak, kicked at Dartmouth, where he was a classmate of Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens '79. Unfortunately for John, there was a fellow by the name of Nick Lowery '78 ahead of him and he never lettered for the Big Green.

If you have the patience to scroll around on the page, you can read an interesting AP story about the Gogolaks and see a picture of 8-year-old John kicking a ball on a Google News page from the March 20, 1966 Reading Eagle HERE.
The Tennesseean has a thorough story about the STRIVR virtual reality system being used at Vanderbilt, Dartmouth and a handful of other colleges as well as several NFL teams. Derek Mason, the Vandy coach who knew STRIVR founder Derek Belch when he coached at Stanford, offered a thought that really gets to the heart of what STRIVR does. He said:
It’s one thing to see it on film from a bird’s eye view. But to watch it live inside the play, they can see what their techniques were and if their alignments were correct and see the pace of the play ...
Having worn the headset, I think Mason used the perfect word. It does put you inside the play.

Something from the story I did not know even with all the reading I've done about the system. STRIVR stands for :
Sports Training in Virtual Reality
Speaking of high-tech equipment being used by Dartmouth football, a friend shared an SBNation commentary (?) on the MVP motorized tackling dummy that appears under the headline:
Dartmouth's invincible football robot is good but probably capable of evil
I'm back out at practice this morning. Check in with BGA Premium tonight for coverage of the first day in full pads. And once more, with feeling ;-) . . .

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