(This article appeared in the 4/5/04 joke issue)In another cost-cutting move by the Dartmouth Athletic Department, the search to find former men's basketball coach Dave Faucher's replacement has been called off. The 4-foot-10 head coach had spent 13 bow-tie wearing years on the Dartmouth bench.
In an unorthodox move, the Big Green has decided to instead buy a DVD copy of the movie Hoosiers to lead the basketball team in the upcoming season.
"Well, it's weird, but we won like three games [actually two] last season," Dartmouth Athletic Director Josie Harper said. "We really can't help but go up."
"Recruiting could be hard because I'm an inanimate object," the DVD said. "But under the right conditions I'm very inspiring. Besides, Dartmouth pretty much sells itself."
The move figures to save Dartmouth some $300 in coaching salary this season -- depending on how much shipping and handling adds to the $12.26 price tag of the DVD -- or 30 percent of Dartmouth's athletic budget this fiscal year.
The exact figure is still in doubt, as Amazon.com needs to determine how much it costs to ship items to hell.
"We were thinking of going VHS," Harper said. "But for men's basketball we were willing to go the extra mile. The deleted scenes really explain the picket fence play, and that's the only play that they run so it's important that we understand it."
The DVD also has French and Spanish subtitles, which figure to expand recruiting beyond the greater Hanover metropolitan area.
Former Penn head coach Fran Dunphy remains optimistic about his ability to outcoach the film from his new home at Princeton.
"Well, it is a good movie, but they were very dependent on the perimeter jump shot," he said. "So long as I'm not as bad as the guy they coached against at the end of movie. I mean, why'd they keep shooting with no shot clock, a lead and 30 seconds left?"
The film will be played on a loop on the sidelines and during practices. School officials are hopeful that recruits will watch the film and go to Dartmouth in an accelerated clap-induced frenzy.
However, the other sports in Dartmouth's athletic smorgasbord are not blessed with such largess, as they were forced to hire VHS editions and sometimes movies taped off TV.
The Dartmouth football team is currently torn between the videos of Remember the Titans or Rudy to deliver the program's first winning season since the peak of the Jay Fiedler era.
The obvious favorite to coach the Big Green soccer team -- The Big Green -- was passed over when it lied on its resume.
"The tagline clearly stated it was the biggest kick of the year," Harper said. "Um, hello, did you see that movie?"
The fat kid from The Big Green does have a coaching appearance in Hanover, as he stars in The Sandlot, the new coach of baseball.
Ladybugs, starring Rodney Dangerfield, was the choice for both men's and women's soccer teams. Dangerfield was well represented as the movie Back to School tangentially touches on swimming and no other film does so.
Still, the Hoosiers DVD that started the trend will be watched closely by other schools -- especially Columbia -- hoping to replicate the Big Green's cheap success.
