Teevens posthumously receives NCAA Summitt Award

EAGLE TIMES STAFF
Eugene F. “Buddy” Teevens, Dartmouth football’s all-time winningest coach, made it his mission to change lives.

The football players he coached, aspiring coaches he mentored and colleagues he pushed to think differently remember him as an educator, innovator, trailblazer, father figure, incredible competitor and much more. Teevens died in September at 66.

“Coach T was someone who cared, and that encapsulated a lot of different traits within him, and he passed that on to all of us,” said Josh Greene, a long snapper who finished his playing career for the Big Green last fall.

To capture the impact Teevens had on his players, Greene penned a letter for the student newspaper, The Dartmouth, with personal anecdotes and heartfelt memories compiled from current and former players. The letter starts, “Simply put, you were the best of us.”

The letter also underscores how Teevens, a former Dartmouth star quarterback who also played on the Big Green’s NCAA Frozen Four hockey team in 1979, wanted the best for his student-athletes in ways that extended well beyond the football field. It was a mission that drove Teevens every day of his 22 seasons as Dartmouth’s head coach over two stints (1987-91 and 2005-22), during which he went 117-101-2, with five Ivy League titles.

“I think the biggest thing that everyone takes from Buddy is how to become a better human being, how to become a better person,” said Vernon Harris, who played for Teevens from 2012-15. “Football was just his tool to do so.”

To recognize his passion for student-athletes, Teevens will be honored posthumously with the 2024 Pat Summitt Award at the NCAA Convention in Phoenix. Established in 2017, the Summitt Award recognizes an individual in the NCAA’s membership who has demonstrated devotion to the development of student-athletes and has made a positive impact on their lives.

“Coach Teevens embodied all the values of the Pat Summitt Award,” NCAA President Charlie Baker said. “His passion for using college sports as a vehicle to provide his players life-changing lessons and opportunities was truly special. He put the health and well-being of student-athletes at the forefront of everything he did and made a positive impact on countless lives during his career.”

Student-athlete safety was among Teevens’ many noteworthy contributions.

Teevens, a two-time Ivy League Coach of the Year who also spent time at the University of Maine, Tulane and Stanford, became the first college football coach to eliminate full-contact practices throughout the year. The practice was adopted throughout the Ivy League in 2016. Additionally, Teevens’ innovative thinking led Dartmouth’s engineering school to create the Mobile Virtual Player, a robot tackling device used by other college teams and in the NFL. The invention earned him an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” in 2015.

“There’s no finer man that I’ve been associated with in any way,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said. “I’m fortunate to call him a friend, but more importantly to know Buddy as an individual, as a person, as a family man, as someone that I know made a huge impact on so many people, who committed himself, devoted himself to not just college but the game of football, to young people and to making sure everything he touches is better.”

“Buddy was a trailblazer. He was a visionary. More than anyone in college football, he recognized and advocated for player safety, for better practice regimens, for rules that have made the sport of football safer at every level,” said Tim Murphy, head football coach at Harvard and a childhood friend of Teevens’. “He was the most competitive, most honorable and most natural leader that I ever met.”

Teevens also helped advance opportunities for female coaches in football. In 2018, Teevens hired Callie Brownson as an offensive quality-control coach, making her the first known full-time female football coach at a Division I school. Teevens met Brownson — now an assistant coach for the NFL’s Cleveland Browns — in the summer of 2018 at the Manning Passing Academy in Louisiana, which he helped run for more than 20 years.

“He always wanted to bring value to his program and value to his team. And he felt like he had really been missing an opportunity to find better ways to bring value and good people around the team and the players to be better,” Brownson said. “When I think about Buddy, I think of the word courage, because that’s what he was. He was doing the things that nobody else in college football wanted to do because they were scared to do it. But he was doing it because it was the right thing for the game, whether it be not tackling in practice, the hiring of females, the opportunities he provided. … His progressive nature, it took a lot of courage.”

Brownson said Teevens also prioritized recruiting underrepresented populations to Dartmouth because he “knew it would change their life.” He went beyond just getting them to campus, however. To aid in their transition into college and, eventually, into the professional world, Teevens created a program to connect current players at Dartmouth to alums from minority populations. Dartmouth Director of Athletics Mike Harrity lauded the program as just another example of what made Teevens “one of the most authentic, genuine, caring, humble, generous people I’ve ever met.”

“Being a first-generation college student myself, you come into an environment, but you don’t quite know how to navigate it because of your family background or the school that you went to doesn’t prepare you to,” Harrity said. “He leveraged the incredible network of alumni at Dartmouth to help his players with that, all the way down to, ‘How do you write a resume? How do you tie a tie?’ That’s beyond the football field. It’s about how do we set these men up to really catapult the rest of their lives beyond graduation? He was one of the best professors of life that I’ve ever been around in my 25 years of college athletics.”

As an educator, Teevens loved using acronyms with his players. Teevens emphasized to his players the importance of being a STAR (smart, trained, aggressive and relentless) on the field. There was also “A&I,” which stood for adjust and improvise. It aimed to prepare his players to deal with adversity, and it’s something members of the 2023 team referred to often in the wake of his death en route to finishing the season with a storybook ending. The team won its final three games to clinch a share of the Ivy League title.

“Great things in life are not supposed to be easy,” Greene said. “Coach Teevens being a champion so many times over, he taught us that, taught me that, and that’s something I’ll take the rest of my life.”

For many of Teevens’ players, the acronym that carried the most weight was CARE, which stands for consider, accept, respect and educate. Players wore bracelets with this acronym on it, reinforcing that this message, more than any other, represented who Teevens was to so many people.

“It was something that we really preached, something that we really understood. Every day he made sure that we understood where we were as humans and where we needed to be moving forward as people,” Harris said. “He was somebody that really wanted to push the community forward. He really cared about his community. If we can just bring that same care into the world, that’s all we can really ask for to honor him.”