HANOVER — Dartmouth’s football stadium officially bears the name of the program’s all-time winningest coach.

“Every person who comes here to a game, they’re going to walk by the sign, they’re going to see the words ‘Buddy Teevens Stadium’ and in those three words, they’re going to know exactly what we stand for,” Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock said.

A year after Buddy Teevens’ death, a crowd of over 700 family, friends, alumni and players gathered outside the stadium’s main gate Friday evening to dedicate Memorial Field in his honor.

Beilock was one of four speakers at the event, alongside Teevens’ wife, Kirsten, senior linebacker Micah Green and Dartmouth Board of Trustees chair Elizabeth Cahill Lempres.

Teevens, who died on Sept. 19, 2023 from injuries sustained in a Florida bicycle accident several months earlier, won Ivy League player of the year in 1978 as Dartmouth’s starting quarterback, leading the team to a conference title.

He went on to win five more Ivy League titles, including one outright in 1991, across two stints as the team’s head coach. He notched a 117-101-2 record helming Dartmouth, including an 83-70-1 record in Ivy League play, and was named Ivy League Coach of the Year in 2019 and 2021.

“Tough, independent, competitive to the last down, never afraid to stand up for what was right or try things in a new way,” said Beilock, remarking on some of Teevens’ greatest attributes. “And above all, a belief in team and community. In the idea that everyone, no matter who you are, has a role to play.”

Teevens’ third and final act at Dartmouth, which commenced upon his return to Hanover ahead of the 2005 season, might have been his most impressive. His on- and off-field feats are nationally recognized.

A pioneer in player safety, Teevens eliminated full-contact hitting from practices in 2010 in response to concerns over brain trauma suffered while playing football. He worked with the college’s Thayer School of Engineering to create a robotic tackling dummy, which is now used across all levels of football. He also saw the hiring and promotion of Callie Brownson in 2018, who became the first full-time woman coach in NCAA Division I history.

These are just some of the highlights of Teevens’ enduring legacy, one that was ensured with the dedication on Friday. It’s also “a beautiful gesture” he likely would have been “so embarrassed” by, according to Kirsten.

“But the idea is appropriate,” she said. “No place meant more to him and his family.”

Jason Barabas, the director of the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences and a government professor at Dartmouth, first met Teevens, his future coach, in the fall of 1988.

After Dartmouth’s assistant coaches had already come through the Chicagoland area to visit with Barabas and his family, Barabas remembers Teevens just showed up on his doorstep one day. Teevens’ “piercing eyes” left an imprint on the then-high schooler, which made him feel as if he was “looking at a wolf.”

The pitch on Big Green football, the college’s academics, life in Hanover — all of it — worked. Barabas, who graduated in 1993, won three Ivy League titles as a player for Dartmouth, two of which came under Teevens.

Teevens’ ethos that Big Green players will be “a great football player when it’s football time, a great student when it’s academics time and a great person all of the time” has stood the test of time. Barabas lived it, juggling football and his work as a senior honors thesis student in the government department, all of which was made possible by Teevens, who let Barabas occasionally miss practice to attend class sessions.

Barabas now serves as a faculty advisor for the football team in addition to his other work at Dartmouth. It’s a role that is another of Teevens’ innovations, Barabas said, though it often goes unnoticed when stacked with the late coach’s other trailblazing endeavors.

“To be able to say that, ‘By the way, one of our faculty members was a football player under Buddy Teevens,’ is such a poignant exclamation point to how seriously he took academics,” Barabas said. “What I was doing my senior year in college, it became such an important part of my identity, my scholarly world. I was fortunate that I played for a coach that really elevated that and thought it was important.”

Speaking in front of the crowd, Green recalled his surprise during winter workouts his freshman year that the ‘D’ at the 50-yard line was always uniformly shoveled after a snowfall. He joked that he couldn’t believe Teevens, then 65, could do that at his age.

After Teevens’ passing, Green said, the team wondering who was going to shovel the ‘D’ at midfield now. He recalled telling himself that he didn’t see somebody doing it, he’d take the onus upon himself.

“There was one day, snow was coming down pretty hard, and I was coming from winter workouts, and I was like, ‘I got about 45 minutes to class, I’m going to go out and shovel the D,’ ” Green said. “It’s just a reminder that this is my college as well, this is part of my history. I’m going to go and be a part of that and give back to the college (like Teevens).”

Barabas’ and Green’s stories are just two of the hundreds or thousands that Teevens’ former players and teammates could tell. From “a naked bootleg against Princeton” referenced by Kirsten to the seemingly innocuous aspects of everyday life that Teevens harped on, his legacy will live on in these stories.

It’s also immortalized in the Big Green’s cathedral of football, now Buddy Teevens Stadium at Memorial Field, which played host to its first game on Saturday. It was a game that “represented Dartmouth the way Buddy Teevens would want us to represent it,” coach Sammy McCorkle said, ending in a 20-17 victory over Penn in the Big Green’s Ivy League opener.

“It certainly means more to us to be under coach Teevens in the stadium,” Green, who had four tackles against Penn, said on Friday. “We live his legacy. We live his values every single day. But just to have that visualization on top of the stadium, and especially on top of Floren, when we look up in the sky and see coach Teevens’ name up there, we know we’re trying to play for him.”

Alex Cervantes can be reached at acervantes@vnews.com or 603-727-7302.