A Groundswell of Group Giving Honors Buddy Teevens
Football alumni, classes, and friends rally to advance the late coach’s legacy.
“Coach T gave more to us—to his players and to Dartmouth—than we could ever give back,” says Pete Chapman ’91 TU’98, a co-captain on the first of five Ivy Championship football teams coached by Buddy Teevens. “To a person, that’s how everybody on the team feels. He’s a massive shared bright spot in our lives.”
Inspired by the selflessness, enthusiasm, and can-do attitude of the legendary coach, hundreds of alumni and friends in the Dartmouth community have come together to make a series of group gifts honoring Teevens, who coached the Big Green football team for more than 20 seasons.
For the thousands of alumni who played with or for him, followed Big Green football, or met him at any of the hundreds of Dartmouth events he attended, Teevens was more than a football coach. He was the face of Dartmouth athletics, maybe the embodiment of Dartmouth itself, possessing a bottomless well of enthusiastic generosity.
Each of the group gifts honoring Teevens is supporting one of these three broad initiatives:
The Kirsten and Eugene F. “Buddy” Teevens ’79 Center for Peak Performance will offer elements of Dartmouth Peak Performance, which has been available to varsity athletes for a decade, to all students, with an emphasis on leadership development, mental wellness, nutrition, and performance. The center will also support research and innovation in sports data, analytics, and performance, and advance student-athletes’ professional development, including assistance securing internships and employment.
The Kirsten and Eugene F. “Buddy” Teevens ’79 Scholarship Fund will honor the Teevens family for the culture of inclusivity they fostered. Gifts of all sizes are welcomed to the fund. Each undergraduate receiving financial aid through the fund will be a Teevens Scholar.
A suite of investments in the football program—including named coaching endowments, renovations to facilities, and gifts to the Friends of Dartmouth Football—will ensure the continued strength of Big Green football.
In addition to these three initiatives, Dartmouth recently rededicated its football stadium to honor Teevens, renaming it Buddy Teevens Stadium at Memorial Field. All these accolades and honors will expand awareness of Teevens’s character and his impact on Dartmouth, says Chris Jenny ’77, a close friend and co-chair of the Buddy Teevens ’79 Legacy Committee.
“There will be a wall at the stadium that tells Buddy’s story, and every Teevens Scholar will have a personal connection with his family for as long as possible. And the Teevens Center will benefit so many students,” says Jenny. “I believe there’s another dimension that is just as important, and that’s the storytelling. Alums, professors, students in other sports, townspeople, doctors at Dartmouth-Hitchcock—everyone has a Buddy Teevens story, and people in Hanover and in the Dartmouth community will be telling these stories for a long, long time.”
Here is a summary of six group gifts honoring Buddy Teevens:
The 1990 Ivy League Champions Big Green Football Team
The seniors on the 1990 Big Green football team were Teevens’s first recruiting class. In their first year, the varsity team went 2-8. Three seasons later, they were Ivy Champions. Members of the team are now raising $1 million for the Teevens Center.
Chapman and Rich Joyce ’91, co-captains of the championship team, were approached by a generous teammate who offered to backstop a $1 million pledge to honor Teevens in the team’s name. Working with the Dartmouth Advancement Division, they pulled together an up-to-date list of team members and then emailed a request for a gift to remember their coach.
“In six days, literally in six days, over 80 of the 110 players on our roster had pledged a gift, had made an in memoriam gift, or had previously given,” says Chapman. “That level of participation was completely unsurprising, but incredible at the same time.”
Joyce adds, “Long after we graduated, Buddy continued to make us proud of him with all the positive things he was doing for not just the program, but for the school and for football. Whether you’re talking about his focus on player safety or hiring women as coaches, he always did the right thing.”
Football Players and Friends of Football in the Class of 1988
Unlike members of the 1990 championship team, football players in the Class of 1988 had Teevens as their coach for only a single season. Nevertheless, class members are rallying to raise $2 million for the Teevens Center to honor Coach T’s inspirational leadership, which continues to impact their lives.
“When he first became head coach, he was maybe 30 years old,” says Ish McLaughlin ’88. “You would think his mindset would be, ‘I’ve got to win to make sure I’m here at 31.’ But no, he cared about the complete person. He cared about our character. He was just a different kind of person than any of us had probably ever met.”
Brett Matthews ’88, a co-captain, emphasizes that although team members in the Class of 1988 played under Teevens for just one season, their friendship blossomed over the year, and he and his teammates only grew to appreciate Teevens’s comprehensive approach to preparing student-athletes for life.
“We’re making this gift to honor Coach Teevens not only for his coaching but also his overall philosophy toward growing people holistically both from the performance side and the human character side of each individual,” says Matthews. “It’s not just football players contributing to this effort. Classmates who weren’t football players but had that experience of knowing him have really leaned in to contribute to this gift and honor Buddy’s legacy.”
Four Presidents of the Friends of Dartmouth Football
The four most recent presidents of the Friends of Dartmouth Football—Byron Anderson ’76, Brian Conroy ’86, Bob Downey ’58, and Jenny—all worked closely with Teevens to ensure that Dartmouth could compete against its Ivy League peers. Now in honor of Teevens, the four have committed $2 million to renovate the football team’s locker room.
Jenny says Teevens was the driving force behind several infrastructure investments supporting the football program, such as construction of Floren Varsity House and upgrades to the stadium, including installation of the turf field and lights.
“Buddy was always committed to excellence, and that included excellence in facilities,” says Jenny. “In all sports to some degree, and in football particularly, infrastructure is the backbone of excellence. He knew you would not find a championship-caliber program that has 40-year-old facilities.”
Conroy agrees that investing in facilities, and particularly the locker room, will strengthen the program and help attract sought-after recruits.
“If you’re a football player, the locker room is your oasis. It’s where you prep for games, chat with your teammates, pick each other up,” he says. “I was a walk-on. I wasn't recruited, never started a single game. But through my lifelong association with Dartmouth football, I have a brotherhood of people who experienced the same thing, worked hard for the same goals, and no one paid much attention to who was starting and who wasn't because we were all teammates. And a lot of that bonding took place in the locker room.”
The Sphinx Foundation
The Sphinx Foundation is the charitable giving vehicle for the nearly 1,700 alumni who were members of the Sphinx Senior Society—and Teevens was a member. The foundation is supporting the Teevens Center’s internship programs, beginning with a $100,000 commitment from the foundation itself and another $150,000 in gifts to date from Sphinx alumni.
“Over the years, we’ve had many prominent football players come through our membership, many of whom either played with or for Buddy. When Buddy passed, there was a lot of momentum within the organization for honoring him and all that he did for Dartmouth,” says Tom Slosberg ’90 TU’99. “We landed on an area that’s near and dear to our heart and is also a priority for President Beilock: internships and the transition of varsity athletes and other students interested in athletics to the workplace. We’re hoping we can inspire some non-traditional internships. We all know about traditional internships in fields such as consulting and finance, and those are great. But if students want to work at a nonprofit or in an industry that typically doesn’t have funding for internships, this gift will help them overcome that barrier.”
Slosberg says the Teevens Center’s support in facilitating internships across a variety of industries, some of which may be overlooked by current students due to difficulty or the time needed to access them, will be especially valuable to students participating on a Big Green team. The time commitment required to compete in athletics may prevent many students from researching and pursuing these types of internships.
The Class of 1979
Members of the Class of 1979 are raising $100,000 to support a Teevens Scholar. Trustee Emerita Peggy Epstein Tanner ’79 says directing a gift to the endowment for the scholarship fund makes perfect sense to her classmates, given Teevens’s focus on preparing students for lives of meaning and impact.
“Buddy was so much more than wins and losses,” she says. “He cared deeply about his players and taught them values that would help them succeed in life and make them better citizens of the world.”
Tanner, who has participated in multiple Dartmouth fundraising activities, says reaching out to classmates for this class gift has been “one of easiest asks I’ve ever made.”
“Our class has always been known for its high rate of participation. We are a close-knit family, and we do whatever we can to support and care for each other,” she says. “Buddy was a big part of the glue that held us together. We miss him and want to do whatever we can to help preserve his legacy.”
The Class of 1978
Several members of the Class of 1978 were members of the football team with Teevens, including Dave Casper, Charlie Denison, and Curt Oberg, special assistant to the football team's head coach, who are spearheading an effort to secure $150,000 in gifts for the Teevens Center internship program. With commitments coming from classmates who played football or who are fans of the program, they are nearing their target.
Denison says Teevens’s tragic cycling accident occurred as he and some classmates were already in conversation with Mike Harrity, the Haldeman Family Director of Athletics and Recreation, about making a gift to expand internship opportunities for athletes.
“When Buddy had his accident, we got together and agreed to rally in his honor,” he says. “Both Dave and I have had interns in our businesses that Buddy directed our way. So, this seemed like a natural fit.”
Casper says the knowledge and leadership skills developed during an internship align with the character strengths that Teevens modelled.
“Buddy was a true inspiration to the team. Charlie and I were both on defense, but when Buddy was on the field, among all of us there was a level of confidence in how he spoke and how he ran the plays that was really special.”