Eugene F. "Buddy" Teevens III '79 was Dartmouth's winningest football coach and one of the game's most influential voices on player safety. A history major and standout quarterback, he was named Ivy League Player of the Year in 1978, when he led the Big Green to a conference title. He returned to coach the program he had played for, and over more than two decades he became, as President Sian Leah Beilock put it, "a leader who encouraged people to perform at their best, not just on the football field but in life."

Teevens believed that excellence and well-being go together, and he proved it in the most public way a football coach could. In 2010, he became the first Division I coach to eliminate traditional tackling from practice, a change made to reduce concussions and the risk of long-term brain injury. His teams kept winning. Six years later, the entire Ivy League adopted the same approach. Working with Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering, he helped invent the Mobile Virtual Player, a robotic tackling dummy now used by college and NFL teams to make the game safer for everyone who plays it.

He was a mentor to hundreds of players and a believer in opening the game up, hiring Callie Brownson in 2018, who became the first full-time female Division I football coach. Buddy Teevens died in 2023. Dartmouth named its football stadium in his honor, and the Teevens Center carries his conviction forward: that caring for people and competing at the highest level are not in tension, but part of the same work.