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Buddy Teevens, who had extra victories than any coach in Dartmouth College soccer historical past, and who turned a nationally acknowledged innovator in participant security when he eradicated tackling throughout practices to restrict the incidence of concussions, died on Tuesday in Boston. He was 66.
His loss of life, at a hospital, was introduced by Dartmouth on its web site. The trigger was issues of the accidents he sustained in a bicycling accident six months in the past.
Mr. Teevens was bicycling together with his spouse, Kirsten (Anderson) Teevens, on March 16 in St. Augustine, Fla., close to one in every of their houses, when he was hit by a pickup truck. He suffered spinal wire harm, and his proper leg was amputated. He was not sporting a helmet, based on a police report.
When Mr. Teevens was a pupil at Dartmouth, he led the Big Green to the Ivy League championship as quarterback in 1978. And over 22 seasons because the staff’s soccer coach, he had a report of 117-101-2 and guided it to 5 convention titles, most not too long ago in 2021.
In 2010, with concussive trauma to soccer gamers changing into a well being disaster within the sport, Mr. Teevens eradicated tackling in practices, in recognition of analysis that confirmed most concussions didn’t happen throughout video games.
Contrary to considerations from Mr. Teevens’s friends that gamers would lose their edge if there was no tackling in follow, he stated, they sharpened their expertise.
“It hasn’t hurt our level of play,” he informed The New York Times in 2016. “It’s actually made us a better team.”
Concussions fell to a handful. Missed tackles dropped. And the Big Green went 6-4 in 2010, an unlimited enchancment over its information of 0-10 in 2008 and 2-8 in 2009.
Mr. Teevens augmented the ban on tackling in 2015 with the Mobile Virtual Player, a remote-controlled robotic tackling dummy that he developed with Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering.
The robotic dummy can transfer at practically 20 miles an hour and may mimic a participant by weaving, chopping, and stopping and beginning on a area. It lets coaches educate correct tackling methods with out exposing gamers to bodily contact with different gamers.
“When I came up with the idea, my staff thought I was nuts,” Mr. Teevens informed N.F.L.com in 2016.
Soon, nevertheless, about half the groups within the N.F.L. have been utilizing the system. Mr. Teevens, who’s one in every of 5 holders of the patent on the “mobile device which simulates player movement,” was chairman of MVP Robotics, the maker of the robotic dummy, which gained an award from the N.FL. in 2017 for innovation in athlete security and efficiency.
Eugene Francis Teevens III was born on Oct. 1, 1956, in Pembroke, Mass., a suburb of Boston. His father, Eugene Francis Teevens II, was a supervisor of Pittsburgh Plate Glass and a graduate of Dartmouth. His mom, Mary (Horn) Teevens, was a homemaker.
He was Dartmouth’s quarterback from 1975 to 1978, when the staff’s 6-1 convention report earned it the Ivy League title. He additionally performed ice hockey. He graduated in 1979 with a bachelor’s diploma in historical past.
He started his teaching profession because the offensive backfield coach at DePauw University in Indiana and later was named offensive coordinator at Boston University. He turned the top coach at the University of Maine in 1985, however after two seasons, when the varsity had a 13-9 report, he returned to Dartmouth as its head coach.
He left after 5 profitable seasons, which included two Ivy League titles, to educate at Tulane University in New Orleans. But his 11-45 report there led to his dismissal in 1996. He spent the following 5 seasons as an assistant at the University of Illinois and the University of Florida.
He returned to go teaching at Stanford in 2002, however he had no extra success there than he had at Tulane: The staff went 10-23 in three seasons, and he was fired. In early 2005, Dartmouth rehired him as head coach.
He had dropping information in every of his first 5 seasons again with the Big Green. But with higher recruiting, stronger assistant coaches and the ban on tackling, Dartmouth had solely two dropping seasons in its final 11 years underneath Mr. Teevens. He stated that ending tackling in follow helped him recruit, as a result of mother and father have been anxious about their sons getting hit an excessive amount of.
His marketing campaign to ban tackling was copied by the remainder of the Ivy League through the common season. But the opposite faculties nonetheless allowed tackling throughout spring and preseason practices.
Terry O’Neil, the founding father of Practice Like Pros, a gaggle that advocates lowering collisions in youth soccer, stated that Mr. Teevens’s ban on tackling made him one thing of a unicorn.
“He’s the only coach in pro or college football — some high school coaches have followed his lead — to never tackle at any time in the full calendar,” Mr. O’Neil stated by cellphone, referring to Division I schools. “It’s an extraordinary regimen.”
But there was at least one faculty coach whose anti-tackling rule preceded Mr. Teevens’s. In 64 years of faculty teaching, together with 60 at Saint John’s University, a Division III faculty in Collegeville, Minn., John Gagliardi didn’t enable tackling in practices. He additionally gained extra video games than any faculty coach.
Mr. Teevens was additionally identified for hiring two girls who’ve gone on to jobs within the N.F.L. In 2018, Callie Brownson turned the primary full-time assistant in Division I faculty soccer when she was employed as Dartmouth’s offensive high quality management coach. When she left, Mr. Teevens employed Jennifer King to exchange her. Ms. Brownson is now the assistant huge receivers coach for the Cleveland Browns, and Ms. King is the assistant operating backs coach of the Washington Commanders.
“He gave me my first big chance to chase a dream I had forever,” Ms. Brownson, stated in a tribute to Mr. Teevens on the Dartmouth soccer web site, including that “he chose to do the right thing, and it changed my life forever.”
Mr. Teevens is survived by his mom; his spouse; his daughter, Lindsay Knittle; his son, Eugene IV; 4 grandchildren; his sisters, Deborah Teevens-Gangl, Moira Nobili and Tara Manne; and his brothers, Scott, Shaun, Christopher, Kevin and Tim.
In 2016, after the Ivy League voted on a tackling ban, Mr. Teevens testified at a listening to on concussions in youth sports activities held by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
“Unless we change the way we coach,” he stated, “we won’t have a sport to coach.”
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