"A New Ode to Dartmouth Football" continued
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Many of my campus memories involve what I will call “sport at the margins.” At the bonfire I circled gamely and sweated deeply in a turtleneck. During the homecoming game I had difficulty focusing on which player to follow, in spite of years of ambient football instruction with my father and the television. Watching the Harvard game in the crowd, I ascertained that the important plays were actually happening right there in the stands. So many rushes and gains between potential partners! The surges! The sacks!
It proved to be an auspicious pivot: I was dating someone wonderful by the end of that fall.
My most luminous Dartmouth memories connect with classrooms, not playing fields: Professor Raúl Bueno-Chavez drawing a star on the board, then plucking it off and carrying it, a sacred object, to a student who had done something brilliant with the Spanish language. In contrast, my memories of living on campus vibrate with the low-grade anxiety of being unmoored from my family and calculating when I would be expected to return to a fraternity basement. That part of Dartmouth life was a kind of social survival game in spaces largely managed by men. And sure, kind men behaved … kindly in fraternity basements. But anyone who has stood below ground at 1 am on a Saturday knows that the elements of frat basements--I speak particularly of the liquid elements--are a special kind of backwater that somehow, astoundingly, became normalized as part of American college life.
To be clear: frats and football are not the same thing--and in many ways, they may actually be the opposite. Under the leadership of people who care, athletes live out some of the best elements of humanity. As a high school English teacher, I have worked with scores of athletes whose understanding of community, form and strategy all translate readily into noteworthy poetry and essay-writing. Perhaps these experiences with football players--my learnings about the honor and hard work that student-athletes can develop in that particular realm--helped me understand what happened next.
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In October of 2018, a video interview popped up in my Facebook feed: “Meet College Football’s First Female Football Coach.” I had to check it again. First. Female. FOOTBALL. Dartmouth had hired the first full-time Division 1 female coach, Callie Brownson--and her story was the stuff of dreams and college essays. In high school, Callie had been turned away from her Alexandria, Virginia football team, in spite of playing on boys’ teams throughout most of her childhood. She went on to play seven years of professional women’s football and then earn two Olympic gold medals for Team USA Women’s Football. From there, Callie returned to her old high school for coaching and scouting, and then moved on to an internship with the New York Jets. Buddy Teevens had the opportunity to observe Callie interacting with the players--he noted her rapport with them and her signature positivity. He invited her for a coaching internship at Dartmouth; within two weeks Coach Teevens offered Callie a full-time position with Dartmouth’s coaching staff.
I stared at my laptop and watched Callie’s video three more times. I could just barely absorb it all--her honesty, humor and charisma...the fact that it was Dartmouth...the confluence of so many things I cared about. Dartmouth Football had hired the first female member of a Division 1 coaching staff. AT DARTMOUTH COLLEGE.
I had to tell my students. Not surprisingly, these young Philadelphians (no strangers to the plight of the underdog) found much to chew on. In American Literature we had spent the year examining “continuing revelation”: the Quaker idea that truth is revealed not as a static fact, but as something divine that is discerned and adjusted over time. We had also been considering the weight of history--the concept that everyone relates differently to both history and the present based on who they are in the world. As students watched Callie’s video, they noted the changes in her face and voice as she described being told “no” when she wanted to play high school football. They felt that revelation immediately: that moment in Callie’s history weighed down on each one of us. In their journals, football players wrote about their relationships with their fathers; state-ranked swimmers added Callie to their list of female coaching heroes. And for me, as I read their work, the weight of history started shifting perceptibly and permanently. I had found the ballast I needed to begin recalibrating my own relationship with Dartmouth.
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I reached out to Coach Brownson to invite her to Philadelphia for a visit. After some postseason conversation with Coach Teevens, she agreed to join us in February. By that time my eleventh graders had finished The Great Gatsby and could pick their next writing assignment: a literary essay (Is the novel a critique or enactment of White supremacy?), a personal essay (practice for college!), or an introduction to Callie’s presentation. There was just one caveat: the intro writers would need to be willing to stand up and deliver in assembly during her visit.
Nine students chose to write about her.
“In my seventeen years of life I have had many successful moments, but none of them compare to the moments I have had off the field. Coach Brownson has taught many girls, women and even me to not care about the stigma. She has given [us] hope in the fact that you don’t always have to stick to certain stereotypes.”
“Being around football my whole life I have met many people who are knowledgeable about the game, including women, but I have never seen a woman coach. I never really even noticed that there were no women coaches because it is a male-dominated sport, so it has always seemed normal to me. [...] Coach Brownson [...] has changed my views on who can coach football.”
They wrote, they revised, they showed up in the evening to host Callie’s first event on campus. As she met each new group of people--parents, Dartmouth alumni, seventh graders, the entire Upper School faculty and student body--Callie demonstrated the skill and dexterity of someone whose whole life had been pointing toward this moment. After telling a seventh grader in a Yale sweatshirt that she would “let that go for now,” Callie shared a story that seemed tailor-made for middle schoolers: at the Columbia game, while walking the notoriously harrowing, smack-talking gauntlet between the visitor locker room and the stadium, Dartmouth football players formed a circle around Callie--not because she couldn’t handle the chatter, but because they wanted to demonstrate what a team looks like. In middle-school-speak, this action is called “upstanding.”
Watching Callie answer the children's questions, I imagined what Coach Teevens first saw when he hired her a year ago. In his decades of coaching he had surely learned that adversity often cultivates a special kind of brilliance. Now, with Callie’s first coaching season in the books and a set of stats that speak their own story--second in the Ivy League, with a 9-1 record, alongside Coach Brownson’s personal record of 60+ interviews conducted during and after the season--I suspect that Coach Teevens has a renewed sense of the powers of the historical outsider. In the span of one day, I watch as Callie speaks in the precise languages of five different audiences. And they love her. The students kept on writing after her visit: “I have been playing football my whole life, but never knew that someone in coaching could be so well spoken.” And still another: “She is just so cool.”
Callie Brownson didn't change my opinion about football; she has shifted my sense of Dartmouth. I have at times been weighed down by my connection to a place that has long fostered enclaves of masculinity that say, "we are not here for you"--for past and present women, for my daughter visiting campus for the first time, for my son’s emerging vision of how to be male in the world. Coach Teevens has charted what I will cautiously call a hopeful pathway--and in this vision, I am made lighter. I am lifted by Callie’s excellence and authenticity, and held aloft by the men who value her work and thrive in her care. It’s not a sentence I thought I’d ever write, but here it is, now part of my story: I am a Dartmouth football fan.