Ivy alumni are an entangled web of athletes

Yale Lockdowns -  “Fredman, I just read that a young man named Brenner Short has committed to play lacrosse at Yale. So he will be a member of the Yale Class of 2030. I’m Yale Class of 1982,” said Peter Tracey, runner, lawyer, skuller. “So to Brenner, I’m the equivalent of the Class of 1934 when I was in college. Good Lord. To make it worse, I knew alumni who graduated in the 1920s.” Peter works for the law firm Perkins Coie LLP out of Washington, D.C., and has been running in local races for 40 years. Yale lacrosse won the Division I national championship in 2018 and lost in the final in 2019. Princeton of the Ivy League won the national title in 2001. Cornell won the national championship in 2025, the fourth for the Big Red who also won titles in 1971, 1976 and 1977. The Ivies have no problem recruiting top-of-the-line lacrosse guys who can also clear admissions. Cape field hockey player Erica Waple, Class of 1998, graduated from Yale in 2002, then earned her master’s from NYU in 2007, then graduated from med school at SUNY in 2017. 

Vin Scully - The call on the 1988 Kirk Gibson World Series home run – “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.” The iconic call entered my head when I saw the Cape unified football team, seeded No. 5, defeated No. 1 Indian River 52-44 in the semifinals of the state tournament. Caesar Rodney won the other semifinal 76-58 over McKean. Cape lost to Indian River in the regular season 68-38 and to Caesar Rodney 50-20. The Vikings are turning crooked numbers upside down – math people call it inversion – so why not one more time? The championship game will be played at Delaware State at 4 p.m., Friday, Nov. 28, followed by the Group 3 state title game between Middletown and Salesianum. The Cape unified team is coached by Drew Messick, Theresa McCloy and Tony Palmer. There are 38 players on the roster. Caesar Rodney is coached by Jackson Levins, Chris Friend and Tim Collins. The Riders roster lists 15 players and a manager.  The fire trucks will be idling in Milton, Rehoboth and Lewes, perhaps turning Black Friday into Red Truck Friday at Sesame Street by the Sea. 

Change gonna come - Head coaches of college football skate on thin ice, with their job performance evaluated by athletic administrators and alumni while game-day performances are determined by the chemistry and proficiency of young men crashing into one another in a collision sport that can weird out the most normal of people. James Franklin, Penn State; Brian Kelly, LSU; and Billy Napier, Florida, are celebrated coaches who’ve been fired this season. Division I head coaches fired during the 2025 season in addition to the three mentioned include Kenni Burns, Kent State; Troy Taylor, Stanford; DeShaun Foster, UCLA; Brent Pry, Virginia Tech; Mike Gundy, Oklahoma State; Trent Bray, Oregon State; Sam Pittman, Arkansas; Trent Dilfer, UAB; Jay Norvell, Colorado State; and Hugh Freeze, Auburn. Let’s slide sideways to Division III and add the name of Steve Azzanesi who was relieved of his duties as head coach of the Alvernia University Red Wolves Nov. 16. I know more people who know Steve than any of the other coaches listed above, and Alvernia, near Reading, Pa., has 15 kids from Delaware on its roster. You guessed it, a national search began immediately. Athletic Director Cory Beddick wrote on the football website, “On behalf of Alvernia, I would like to thank Steve for his time and devotion to not only Alvernia football, but to the university as whole. We wish him and his family nothing but the best moving forward." Beddick was head baseball coach at Gettysburg before being hired as director of athletics at Alvernia in May 2025. The final sentence on his Alvernia website biographical sketch reads, “Beddick and his wife, Coleen, are parents to a son, Nolan, and goldendoodle, Lu.” Yep, you had me at goldendoodle! 

Snippets - The Jumbos of Tufts defeated the Johns Hopkins Blue Jays 2-1 in overtime to win the NCAA Division III field hockey national title. Northwestern beat Princeton 2-1 in double overtime to claim its second straight Division I national title. And Shippensburg beat Newberry 3-2 in overtime for the NCAA Division II national championship. McKenna Boyle (Sussex Central) and Emily Bitters (Delmar) are on the Shippensburg roster. Newberry players with a local connection are Emma Westbrook (Sussex Academy), Payton Keeler (Woodbridge) and Parker Keeler (Woodbridge). Maurki James (Cape), running back at Old Dominion, has 256 carries for 224 yards and two touchdowns. The Monarchs are 8-3 (bowl eligible) with one game remaining against Georgia State at home. I watched Fred Thomas host Milford in a middle school boys’ basketball scrimmage Saturday morning. I was practicing my basketball shooting skills (camera). Even the refs use scrimmages for practice and to break in new prospects. Go on now, git!