From The Open

In which of these two pictures does Billie Jean King look happier? 

Is it the one with TigerBlog, or the one with the mystery woman on the left? Can anyone identify her? 

TB gives you a hint — She long ago went on record as saying she preferred Amtrak to airplanes. He'll give you a few paragraphs to figure it out. 

The picture of TB with Billie Jean King was taken when she attended a Princeton field hockey game a few years back. The one on the left was taken the other night at the U.S. Open, which is currently being played at the Billie Jean National Tennis Center in NewYork.

Here's the view that field hockey alums Gracie McGowan, Sam Davidson, Ellie Manriquez and Clare Brennan had Wednesday night at Arthur Ashe Stadium. It appears they were pretty far up there:

According to the TV broadcast, if you had a grounds pass, you could sit all the way up in the main stadium without paying extra. 

TigerBlog's U.S. Open tennis experience was back in 1984, when he covered the tournament for the Trenton Times. It remains one of his favorite experiences he's had in all his years in sportswriting. 

He stayed for two weeks at the apartment of his grandparents (may they rest in peace) in Kew Gardens, which is not very far from the tennis center. His seat in the main pressbox was next to a Detroit Free-Press writer named Mitch Albom. 

Meanwhile, the woman in the picture with Billie Jean King is Gladys Knight, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Along with her backup singers — known as the Pips — her biggest hit was "Midnight Train To Georgia." She also sang the great song "You're The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me" and a great rendition of "O Comes All Ye Faithful."

By the way, TB didn't know until yesterday that the three Pips were actually her brother and two of her cousins. 

TigerBlog has watched a lot the U.S. Open, which began a day earlier than ever before, back on Sunday. He continues to think that the best broadcaster of any sport is still John McEnroe. 

Oh, and anytime he hears Cliff Drysdale's Australian tones, it reminds of the time that TB gave Drysdale and Rod Laver a ride in his old VW Rabbit back to their hotel after they played an exhibition match at Jadwin Gym, back in the 1980s. 

This Open has already had a huge Princeton component to it as well. 

One of the bests matches of the tournament so far was the one between Coco Gauff and Ajla Tomljanovic, which Gauff won in three sets 6-4, 6-7, 7-5. It was preceded by a coin toss that featured Princeton Ford Family Director of Athletics John Mack and head men's basketball coach Mitch Henderson. 

This is from the goprincetontigers.com story: 

Princeton was represented by men's tennis head coach Billy Pate, women's tennis head coach Elizabeth Johnson, Ford Family Director of Athletics John Mack '00 and the University's vice president for capital projects Bill Kale at the awards reception. Later that evening, John Mack was joined by Princeton men's basketball head coach Mitch Henderson '98, a regular tennis player at Meadows, to participate in the official coin toss ahead at Arthur Ashe Stadium ahead of the evening's featured match in the U.S. Open between Coco Gauff and Ajla Tomljanovic. 

You can read the entire story HERE.

Henderson, by the way, is an avid tennis player. TigerBlog has played him in squash, tennis and ping pong, for that matter.

You already know he's competitive as anyone. What you forget until you see him on a court is how tall he is, which, along with his athleticism, gives him amazing court coverage.

TB has never played tennis with Bill Pate, but he has played squash against him. That's not a lot of fun either, since Billy's competitive side takes over and he plays somewhat like the Iroquois did when they invented lacrosse. 

The Open continues until a week from Sunday. TB continues to root for Ben Shelton, Frances Tiafoe, Novak Djokovic and Aryna Sabalenka. 

Oh, and remember, there is a women's soccer game Sunday at 11 am on Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium against Syracuse. And the women's rugby team opens its season tomorrow at 1 at LIU.

Goal Story

The Princeton women's soccer team has scored six goals in its history against its next two opponents, Ohio State and Syracuse. 

One of those goals was an own-goal. The remaining five goals belong to just two players. Can you name them? 

Now that's an obscure one. 

TigerBlog will give you a hint: This is from the story on goprincetontigers.com after the last meeting:

Princeton, now 3-0 against Big East teams this season, won its ninth straight game.

This tells you a few things. First, it had to be after the birth of the webpage in the late 1990s. Second, Syracuse was still in the Big East. 

Here's another hint: both players won the Ivy League Player of the Year Award. 

While you mull that over, TB will give you some specifics of the two upcoming games. Ohio State is here tonight at 7, while Syracuse will be here Sunday at 11 am.

Ohio State is ranked 25th nationally after last year's trip to the Sweet 16 and off to a 1-1-1 start, with a win over UNC Wilmington (1-0), a tie against Clemson (1-1) and a loss to South Carolina (1-0).

As for Syracuse, the Orange are 3-1, with wins over Charleston Southern, Niagara and Holy Cross and a loss to Canisius. 

Princeton is 0-1-1, with a 1-1 tie against Rutgers and a 2-1 loss to Loyola. It was a bit of a frustrating opening weekend for the Tigers, who outshot its two opponents by a combined 45-11. 

It is also possible that Princeton had its best goal it will have all year. That would be the one that Zoe Markesini scored against Loyola, a rocket from way outside the box. 

Here's a look at Zoe's goals from the award-winning week! pic.twitter.com/WEfoZ621jj

— Princeton WSoccer (@PrincetonWSoc) August 25, 2025

Could that have been any more impressive? It had everything — distance, power and perfect placement. When TB saw it live (on ESPN+ at least), he let out an audible "woa" at the shot. 

Markesini scored both Princeton goals last weekend, a performance that earned her Ivy League Offensive Defensive Player of the Week honors.  

Meanwhile, back at the two women who scored all five goals against this weekend's opponents, those two would be Emily Behncke and Esmeralda Negron, two names that should be familiar to even casual Princeton women's soccer fans. 

The game against Ohio State tonight will be the first ever between the two teams. The game Sunday against Syracuse will be the third in the series, with a pair of 3-1 wins, in 2003 and 2004. 

The own goal, plus single goals from Behncke and Negron, came in the 2003 game at Syracuse. The 2004 game, on old Lourie-Love Field, had two goals from Behncke and one from Negron. 

That 2004 Princeton team reached the NCAA Final Four, making it the only Ivy school ever to reach the Final Four in an NCAA tournament with at least 64 teams. That still stands. 

Those Tigers went 5-0 against Big East teams, with two of those wins against Villanova, in the second game of the season and then again in the NCAA second round. Villanova is still in the Big East.

The other three wins came against Syracuse, Rutgers and Boston College (Sweet 16). None of those three are still in the Big East, with 'Cuse and BC in the ACC and Rutgers in the Big Ten. 

Who would have foreseen any of that back when those games were played 21 years ago?  

That 2004 postseason run drew huge crowds to Lourie-Love, which was just a grass field with wooden stands, no restrooms, no team rooms, no press box and no concession stands. The success of that 2004 team led directly to the construction of the first Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium and, subsequently, its successor.

It's that new facility that will host the two games this weekend. Technically, Thursday isn't a weekend, but hey, close enough. 

Tonight it's Ohio State-Princeton at 7. Sunday it'll be Syracuse-Princeton at 11 am. Admission is free for all regular-season Princeton soccer games.

Photo Day

TigerBlog spent a little more than an hour yesterday in midday at the Jadwin Gym squash courts.

It was, for about 15 years, his normal spot around noon, pretty much every day. He'd go there and play his longtime colleague and friend Craig Sachson in their daily squash match, which, if he had to guess, Craig won probably 55 percent of the time.

It's been a long time since TB played squash — two knee surgeries worth. As TB wandered in and out of Courts 9 and 10, he couldn't help but think back to the glory days of lunchtime squash, often under the watchful eyes of Gail Ramsay and the late, great Bob Callahan. 

So what was the draw yesterday? 

Photo Day. 

It began at 7:30 in the morning with the football team and continued after that with cross country and then field hockey. When it was all over, TB asked photographer Greg Carroccio how many pictures he thought he and partner Ryan Samson took in all. 

His answer was 25,000.

And that doesn't count the number of pictures, probably an equal number or maybe even more, that were taken by the players themselves on their phones during the course of the day. 

For the freshmen, this was the first time they'd put on their game uniforms, which has to be quite a thrill for every one of them. For everyone else, it wasn't that same emotion, but it was a ton of fun for all of them.

There was this: 

And this:

 

And this:  

And this: 

 

And this:  

And, as TB mentioned, 24,996 or so others. 

Would you rather have the serious pose or the fun pose?  

TigerBlog contributed his own photos to the count while he was there with the field hockey team to get some behind-the-scenes content. The views that these photos get exceeds the number of pictures that were snapped.

If you have the chance to watch a team go through this, you'll see just how much joy it brings out. And there's always the "hey, can we come up with one more combination that we haven't had yet" feeling. 

When you think about college athletics from the outside, you think about the games, the championships. If you're like most fans, you probably think mostly about football and basketball, for that matter. 

When you've seen it from the inside, you know that the experience goes way beyond just that. The entirety of what being a college athlete is all about includes so many moments away from competitions, and it is those moments — such as a day like photo day — that elevates the overall experience to something incredibly special. 

And hey, even TB got into the mix yesterday.

From his place as an observer, he was invited into one of the shots with the field hockey team. He was told that he was needed for a video, after which there was a big group picture:

The field hockey team scrimmages today at 5 at home against Monmouth. Every athlete who had his or her picture taken yesterday will now get back to the more serious aspects of being on a college team. 

For 25,000 pictures worth yesterday? 

It was all smiles.  

Lagniappe

Lagniappe.

Did you know that this is a word? TigerBlog didn't. 

What does it mean? According to Mr. Webster: 

a small gift given to a customer by a merchant at the time of a purchase
broadly : something given or obtained gratuitously or by way of good measure; i.e., The waiter added a cup of lobster bisque as a lagniappe to the meal.

Now if you were in a restaurant and a waiter said to you: "Please enjoy this lobster bisque as a lagniappe," what would your response be? Confusion? Would you get a food taster? 

If it sounds like a New York Times crossword puzzle word, it is. Said puzzle has become TB's new, well, he doesn't want to say obsession. It's more like his new hobby. 

He was never into the crossword puzzle until maybe two weeks ago. Two days ago he, for the first time ever, completed the entire Sunday puzzle. 

He does this online, and he has a few rules. First, if he answers a clue but isn't sure if he has it correct, he can look it up — but if he's wrong, that means he's lost. If he's right, he can continue on. Second, no collaboration. 

The Princeton honor code applies here as well. 

Once all the squares are filled in, it either tells you that you won or that you have at least one incorrect square. The problem is that it won't tell you which square or squares might be wrong. 

TigerBlog doesn't charge for this content, so he can't really offer you a Lagniappe. Just know that if he could, it probably wouldn't be the lobster bisque.

Meanwhile, did you see what happened in the football game between UC-Davis and Mercer the other day? And yes, TB realizes how insane it is to be talking about actual college football games already. 

Anyway, Mercer and UC-Davis played in the "11th Annual FCS Kickoff," held in Montgomery, Ala. It was a pretty high-stakes game, even for this time of year, as UC-Davis was ranked seventh and Mercer was ranked 11th in the preseason poll. 

UC-Davis ran out to a 23-3 lead. Mercer roared back, cutting it to 23-17 midway through the fourth quarter and having a first-and-10 at the UC-Davis 48 with 7:46 left.

How would it end?

It wouldn't.  

Instead, lightning and heavy rain decided to show up at that exact moment and then linger the rest of the night. The result was a game that was deemed a no-contest, without even the statistics to count. 

Here was the headline on Mercer's webpage: Weather Wins FCS Kickoff. That's pretty good stuff. 

The "C" in "UC-Davis" stands for California, by the way. How'd you like to have flown all the way to Alabama and play in a game that never finished? And will next year's edition still be the 11th, since this one never actually happened? 

TB brings all of this up because Mercer will be at Princeton to take on the Tigers on Oct. 11. The teams met in Macon, Ga., a year ago.

That game will be Princeton's fourth and Mercer's seventh sixth. Mercer's attempted season opener was on the day of Princeton's first practice.

As TigerBlog was walking into Jadwin yesterday morning, he saw the Tigers at it on Finney/Campbell practice fields. There is a precision to football practices that is almost like a military drill, much more so than other teams simply because of the number of athletes who participate. 

They move from station to station, individual to group, all under the direction of the officers, or, as they are known, coaches. Every play is rehearsed over and over for when it is needed in the season. Every defensive call is ingrained until it is all just muscle memory. 

It is a fascinating dynamic to watch, if you've never done so.

Princeton opens its season against San Diego three weeks from Saturday, with a noon kickoff on Powers Field at Princeton Stadium.  Ticket information is HERE. Remember — there is a new ticketing system this year, so you'll need to familiarize yourself with it. 

San Diego opens its season Saturday at home against Cal-Poly.  

Today is photo day for Princeton football, and a handful of other fall teams. It's part of the preseason, another step towards the opener, which will be here soon enough. 

And then those 10 weeks will fly by, like they always do.  

Mind The Gap

TigerBlog was walking along the other day when he came upon an interesting sight.

He was walking on a pathway. About 10 yards ahead of him stood a man and woman on one side of the path and another man and woman on the other side. 

They were both walking dogs, one small and one big. As TB approached, the dogs stood in the middle, nose to nose. That's not what dogs usually do, right?  

As TB kept walking towards this group, the dogs continued their stare-down. At that point, TB stopped and bent down, at which point the dogs looked at him. 

And this is what he said to them: 

"Okay, go to your neutral corners and at the bell, come out barking."

And this was the response from the four humans:

" ............ "

Nothing. Not even a smile. Oh well.

TB also saw a young man who was running while wearing a shirt that said: "Mind the Gap." TB laughed out loud at that. 

If you've ever been on a train in England, then you get it. TB stopped him to tell him how much he liked the shirt, and the young man, clearly English, asked if TB had a favorite Premier League team. 

TB said "Bournemouth." Then he realized he could have said "Waterdogs."

That would have confused the Brit. It also wouldn't have been completely true. TB roots for every Premier League team with Princeton alums on it. 

Clearly, the young bloke meant the soccer league in England. TB could have flipped it around to mean the Premier Lacrosse League, whose playoffs began Saturday in Minneapolis.

The Utah Archers feature three Princeton alums (Ryan Ambler, Beau Pederson and Tom Schreiber) and a former Princeton head coach (Chris Bates). The Archers won the PLL title in 2023 and 2024 but did not make the playoffs this year, meaning there will be a new champ.

Will there be Princetonians who win it all? That's to be determined. 

There will, though, be at least one Princeton alum in the final come Sept. 14, when the championship game is held at the home of the Red Bulls in Harrison, N.J. 

Will it be Jake Stevens, a member of the New York Atlas? Or will it be Zach Currier and Michael Sowers, along with Bill Tierney, and the Waterdogs? 

Those two will play in the semifinals this coming Saturday at 3 at Suburu Park in Chester, Pa. The first semifinal will match the California Redwoods (with injured Princeton alum Sam English) and the Denver Outlaws (with no Princetonians).

The Atlas won the Eastern Conference title and earned a first-round bye. The Waterdogs took down the Maryland Whipsnakes 14-12 Saturday to earn their spot int he semifinals. 

Dave Giancola, the ESPN+ announcer for Princeton Football and Princeton Men's Lacrosse, texted TB during the game to ask him if Currier was the only player who ever played for Tierney, Bates and current head coach Matt Madalon.

That's a great question. Currier played for both Bates and Madalon at Princeton and now plays for Tierney. TB can't think of anyone else who has done so. 

Sowers, a finalist for PLL MVP and Attackman of the Year, had four goals and four assists against the Whipsnakes, whom he tortured this season to the tune of 20 points in three games. Sowers now has played in seven career PLL playoff games, with these totals: 22 goals, 15 assists, 37 points. 

Is that good? 

The Waterdogs are 6-1 in playoff games in which he's played, by the way. He was the 2022 PLL Championship Game MVP as well. 

As for Currier, he doesn't have the points totals that Sowers does, but he does have an extraordinary number of groundballs, considering he's not a face-off specialist or a longstick. In eight PLL playoff games, He has 48 GBs, including seven Saturday night. 

He does have 13 points to go with that, on nine goals and four assists. He didn't score Saturday night, as the Waterdogs got all 14 of their goals from three players on attack: Sowers, Kieran McArdle (6) and C.J. Kirst (4).  

If you're looking for tickets for the semifinals, you can find them HERE. 

The Day Of "Excitingment"

Is "excitingment" a word? 

TigerBlog is pretty sure it isn't, though it also didn't come up with the red line underneath to suggest that there was some error there when he accidentally typed it. That can't be right, he thought, and so he deleted it and wrote it again and — voila — the red line underneath magically appeared. 

If ever there is  day each year for "excitingment," it's this day, the first day with an athletic event on the Princeton calendar. The 2025-26 athletic year kicks off at 5 this afternoon on Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium with a women's soccer game between the Tigers and Rutgers.

The game today begins a nine-plus month journey that holds with it unpredictable storylines, from teams that will be heavily favored to win championships and play in the postseason to others for whom their preseasons will bring hope for taking the next step.  

There will be honors and awards, injuries and heartbreaks. What new names will pop up to become instant fan favorites? What returnees are ready for a big jump this time around? 

TB has told you this every year, and he'll repeat it now:

At this time of year he always thinks back to when he was still at the newspaper and Trenton State College (now The College of New Jersey) had its kickoff luncheon. The college president at the time was named Harold Eickoff, and he started every one of those luncheons with this: "I predict this is the year that all Trenton State teams will go undefeated."

He obviously wasn't serious. He was more talking about the optimism that this time of year brings, that anything is possible. 

Princeton has 38 varsity teams with approximately 1,000 athletes. Together, they'll compete in approximately 700 events between now and early June, when it all ends with the NCAA track and field outdoor championships. 

What will be the best moment? What will be the top highlight, or the best photo taken?  

There are no answers to any of these questions. You just have to enjoy the ride and see where it takes the Tigers. 

And that ride begins tonight. Like most Princeton sporting events, this one does not require a ticket to ride. 

Rutgers has already played twice this young season and has yet to allow a goal, with a 3-0 win over NJIT and a 2-0 win over Fairfield. The Scarlet Knights have gotten one goal each from five different players so far, and two different goalkeepers have started and played all 90 minutes of their game. 

Their roster also includes 17 players from New Jersey, many from the general Princeton area. There figures to be a good amount of Scarlet in the Roberts Stadium stands. 

As for Princeton, the Tigers are the reigning Ivy League champion and Ivy League tournament champion, as well as the preseason pick to repeat this year. 

TigerBlog saw his colleague Andrew Borders earlier this week. Andrew has been the Office of Athletic Communications contact for women's soccer since 2006 or so, and TB didn't even have to ask him if he happened to be feeling the "excitingment" for the start of the new season. He is. 

This is from his game preview on goprincetontigers.com:

Princeton had seven athletic All-Ivy League honorees last season, but graduation and the pros took five of them. Pietra Tordin, the Ivy League Offensive Player of the Year in 2024, opted to forgo her senior year and head to the NWSL's Portland Thorns while fellow first-teamers Lily Bryant, Heather MacNab and Tyler McCamey graduated. From the second team, Ryann Brown and Kate Toomey graduated, leaving Drew Coomans and Zoe Markesini as the Tigers' lone 2024 All-Ivy returners. Despite the losses to graduation and the pros, Princeton still returns nine of the 14 players who scored a goal last season, a group that accounted for 23 of the team's 40 goals, led by Alexandra Barry, Brooke Dawahare and Isabella Garces with four each.

You can read the rest of it HERE.

And you can see it for yourself at 5, at Roberts Stadium or on ESPN+.

Another athletic year has arrived. Is there anything better?  

"When I'm 64"

The Beatles released the song "When I'm 64" on the "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album in 1967. 

The song itself was written more than a decade earlier, when Paul McCartney was 14 and the band had not yet formed. TigerBlog first heard it only a few years after it was released, and he can remember two things: 1) liking it and 2) thinking 64 was really, really old. 

To be 64? It seemed so far in the future as to be unthinkable. 

Why bring this up now? Well, it's because today, BrotherBlog turns 64.  

Happy birthday BB. Have a great one. Oh, and your brother didn't send you a card again, so he'll have to hope you see this. Ah, he'll call, just to be safe. 

BrotherBlog is a law professor at the University of Washington. He'll probably be at Husky Stadium in nine days for the Washington football opener against Colorado State. 

He's also likely to continue his decades-long tradition of pretending to care when his brother talks about Princeton sports. That's always been pretty nice of him to do. 

*

TigerBlog read the story about the football team's incoming class, which you can see HERE. That group will join the returnees as the team begins practice Saturday. 

TB learned some interesting things by reading through the bios, including:

• there is a placekicker from Florida named Vaughn Lennon who set his county record in the 400 hurdles

• there is a linebacker from California named John Teti who comes from a family with a serious rowing connection, with a mother who won two Olympic gold medals and a father who won one Olympic broze. There's also a Princeton connection, as his father Mike Teti coached here and his uncle Paul, a three-time Olympian, won a national championship at Princeton in the heavyweight boat in 1998

• there is a defensive lineman named Konstantin Paschos whose hometown is Dusseldorf, Germany

• there is a linebacker named DJ Walker, whose father Darwin won a national championship at Tennessee and then played eight years in the NFL, including on the 2004 Eagles team that won the NFC title

• there is a defensive lineman named Ethan Brown whose cousin Carlos Basham Jr. current plays for the Carolina Panthers and whose other cousin Tarell Basham played for the Colts, Jets, Cowboys and Titans

•  there is an offensive lineman named Jayden Hadzovic who has five sisters, and the first name of all five starts with an "A" — Alyssa, Aliza, Ariya, Arijana and Alana

 * 

Being in your 60s is no longer old, by the way. There are times, though, when the generation gap can become glaringly obvious to TigerBlog, and this week has provided further proof of that. 

TB has been at field hockey practice this week in advance of the coming season, and he learned something extraordinary there. None of the players he spoke to knew who ... get ready ... Barry Manilow was. 

How in the world is that possible? He even sang a few bars of "I Write The Songs," and ... nothing. 

Oh well. Sometimes you do feel old, and not physically. 

After each practice, the team will gather in a circle to stretch. On game days, when they do this, they go around the circle and talk about what their favorite part of the game had been. 

Yesterday, the question was "what is your favorite kind of music." There seems to be a lot of love these days among the current college generation for country, the Zach Bryan kind, with some other interesting answers mixed in, including "Yacht Rock" and "Show Tunes."

*

One player who wasn't there at practice yesterday was Talia Schenck, who was flying back from Paraguay, and the Junior Pan Am Games. Schenck's travels took her from Asuncion to Lima (the one in Peru) and then back to Newark. 

That's nearly 14 hours of flying time, if you're keeping score. 

Perhaps she kept her silver medal with her, instead of checking it. Schenck, with her United States U21 teammates, won the first four games of the tournament before falling 3-0 to Argentina in the final. 

Schenck had four goals in Paraguay.  

* 

Tomorrow is Opening Day for Princeton Athletics for 2024-25, as the women's soccer team hosts Rutgers at 5 on Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium. Admission is free.

Princeton was picked to finish first in the Ivy League's preseason poll, with nine of the 16 first-place votes. The Tigers won the league championship and then the tournament championship last season.  

 

One Month Out

There is a spot on the road that leads to TigerBlog's house where the speed limit dips from 40 to 25. 

There's also one of those electronic signs that flashes your speed at you. This one also comes with a little message for you.

For instance, if you pass the sign at 25 or lower, the messages says "Thank You!!" If you go past at 26-35, it says "Slow Down." If you go faster than 35, then it says "Too Fast." 

This has all led TigerBlog to wonder if there's another message that would come up if he passed the sign at 46 or higher. He'd try it and see, except for the small matter of the curve in the road that would make it not really worth finding out the answer. 

Anyway, Princeton football ...

TigerBlog saw this post on X yesterday:

“Siri, what’s the scariest thing a Pop Warner football player could imagine in 1991?” pic.twitter.com/Lg8Cm7aITe

— Ross Tucker (@RossTuckerNFL) August 19, 2025 

At that point, Ross Tucker was a Reading boy, a decade away from becoming an All-Ivy League lineman at Princeton and then an NFL offensive lineman for nearly 10 more years. Tucker was on the field blocking for the Dallas Cowboys on the play where Emmitt Smith broke the NFL record for career rushing yards. 

Ross is a big man with a big heart, a big smile and a big personality. If you've been paying attention, you know that he has gone on from his playing days to become one of football's best media figures, for both the NFL and college football. 

And also for his "Tuckspreads" videos, the ones where he showcases for his nearly 300,000 X followers what his press box food options are on his gamedays. 

What letter grade do you think my first Tuckspreads video of the season should get? pic.twitter.com/9EK99ynu5M

— Ross Tucker (@RossTuckerNFL) August 14, 2025

By the way, while Ross was busy making the Heisman pose as a Pop Warner player, TigerBlog was covering Princeton football during his newspaper days. He remembers the 1991 season for the big season that the very underrated quarterback Chad Roghair had, including when he became the second Princeton QB ever to throw a touchdown pass of at least 90 yards. 

Quick trivia break: That list has now grown to four Princeton quarterbacks with a 90-plus yard TD pass. Can you name the other three? TB will give you until the end for that. 

TB's biggest memory of that year, though, was Princeton's 59-37 win at Brown. In that game, Tiger wide receiver Michael Lerch caught nine passes from Roghair for 370 yards and four touchdowns (one was the 90-yarder).  

You can read those numbers again if you like. No other Princeton player has ever come close to matching that number of receiving yards in a game, with Derek Graham's 278 yards against Yale in 1981 in second and then Jesper Horsted's 246 against Harvard in 2017 third.  

Why is today a good day to talk Princeton Football? 

That's because it's Aug. 20, and opening day is Sept. 20, when San Diego will be at Powers Field at Princeton Stadium. Kickoff is at noon.

That's one month away. You can get ticket information HERE.

Bob Surace enters the 2025 season with 81 career wins as Tiger head coach. The record is 89, held by Bill Roper for only the last 95 years. 

Roper coached at Princeton in three different stints, from 1906-08, 1910-11 and then again 1919-30. In all the years since, no other Princeton head coach had reached 80 until Surace. 

The San Diego game will be followed by a short trip to Lafayette and then the Ivy opener against Columbia. By then, the season will be off and running. 

For now, there is exactly one month until it begins. Practice will be starting soon. Summer will be winding down.  

Trivia answer: The first to do so was Doug Butler, whose 95-yard pass to Derek Graham (most of those 95 came after the catch) came against Penn in the classic 28-27 Quaker win in 1983. Since Roghair's toss to Lerch, there has also been another 95-yarder, from John Lovett to Isaiah Barnes in 2016 against Cornell and the one that will never be broken, the 99-yard Matt Verbit-to-Clinton Wu connection in 2003, also against Brown.

Mr. And Mrs. Diaz-Bonilla

So yesterday TigerBlog referred to the "American goal" as the one that the American field hockey team at the Junior Am Games was defending. 

Is that not correct? Should he have said that it was the "Uruguayan goal," the one the Uruguayans were trying desperately to reach for the tying goal that would not come in what ended as a 2-1 USA win in the semifinals. 

He asks this question because he got this email yesterday:

"The team that is attempting to score should have its name attached to that goal. The team that is defending should not."

TB still thinks he's right. He even asked his colleague Andrew Borders, whose opinion he will definitely trust, and he agrees with TB.  

Anyway, the Junior Pan Am final will be held tonight in Asuncion, Paraguay, where the U.S. U21 team will take on its counterpart from Argentina at 6:45 Eastern for the gold medal. The loser is already assured silver. 

Neither team has ever won gold at the Junior Pan Am Games. For that matter, no team ever has, since this is only the second edition of the Junior Pan Am Games and the first that has included field hockey.  

Argentina, by the way, is an international field hockey powerhouse, with gold medals in eight of the 10 Pan Am Games tournaments and three silver and three bronze in the Olympic Games. 

The U.S. U21 women's team includes Princeton's Talia Schenck, who has scored four goals in four games to date in Paraguay, leaving her tied for fourth overall in the tournament. Schenck will fly back home after the final and be back at practice at Bedford Field in advance of the Sept. 5 opener at home against Old Dominion.

Schenck will be a senior at Princeton, which means she was a freshman in 2022. One of her teammates on that team was Sammy Popper, a member of the Class of 2022. 

Popper was two-time first-team All-Ivy League selection at Princeton, as well as the Ivy Rookie of the Year in 2019, when she helped the Tigers to the NCAA finals. 

She then spent a graduate season at Maryland, where she was a second-team All-Big Ten selection. 

If you've been paying attention, you know that TigerBlog has dipped into Instagram for some ideas of what to write about during this summer. He spent some time on the field hockey team Instagram this weekend because of Schenck's play in Paraguay.

Oh, and he'd like to thank Teryn Brill Galloway from USA Field Hockey for all of her help with photos and videos during this tournament and any others where Princeton has had players on the national teams. It's made it much easier to bring content to the Tiger field hockey fan base. 

TB won't be devoting all of today to what he saw on the app this weekend — only to Sammy Popper, who is no longer Sammy Popper. 

This past weekend, Popper became Sammy Diaz-Bonilla, in real life and on her Instagram page. This happened with her marriage to Daniel Diaz-Bonilla. 

If the groom's name is familiar, that's because he was also an All-Ivy League athlete at Princeton, on the men's soccer team. 

Mrs. Diaz-Bonilla outscored Mr. Diaz-Bonilla 29-11 during their Princeton careers, and that doesn't even count the 10 goals she scored at Maryland. It's not exactly like the marriage of Kat Sharkey, another former Princeton field hockey player, to Tom Schreiber, a soon-to-be lacrosse Hall of Famer. 

In that case, the bride outscored the groom 107-106 while Tigers.  

The wedding this past weekend certainly looked like a blast from the dozens and dozens of pictures that came across Princeton field hockey Instagram. There was certainly a large turnout of former teammates of both. Considering they were field hockey teammates, that meant flying in from all corners of the world. And there they were, all together again.

That part is always great to see. It's the next step in the lifelong friendships that are made at Princeton, a joyous, festive step at that.

Good luck and congratulations to the newlyweds. 

TigerBlog wishes them only the best.  

Game Week

Welcome to Game Week No. 1.

In case you haven't been paying attention, the first athletic event of the 2025-26 academic year is Friday at 5, when the women's soccer team hosts Rutgers. The second will be Sunday, when the women are at Loyola.  

In a normal year of athletic scheduling, there will only be two or three more weeks between now and June without a Princeton athletic event. There won't be any between now and December. 

The easiest way to know if you're cut out for working in college athletics is to ask yourself if you are excited at this time of year or dreading it. This will be TigerBlog's 37th season covering Princeton (five at the newspaper and now his 32nd here), and this time of year is still exciting. 

TigerBlog has no idea how it works in other professions. Do the workload and the subject matter change as the seasons change like they do in college athletics? 

TB has always been part of a world where the time of year dictates where he is focused. Even when he was really young, beginning when he six years old, his world was school, school, school and then eight weeks of sleepaway camp. 

While he's on the subject, the camp he attended from when he was six until he was 10 was called Camp Toledo, in High Falls, N.Y. He wrote about Camp Toledo here six years ago, including this sentence: 

"TigerBlog has a lot of fond, idyllic, Wonder Years-type memories of his summer camp days."

That entry drew 20 comments, almost all of which were the same. The poster went to Camp Toledo and talked about being there 50, 60 or 70 years ago. One commenter even said that the songs from Color War are forever stuck in his or her brain, just like they are for TB. 

Did they include their names? Nope. They were all anonymous. If you post about Toledo, leave your name. 

That rant over, this is around the time of the summer when the eight weeks would be ending and it would be time to head home, in advance of another school year. Late August has always been a time for gearing up to start the cycle all over again. 

For a few Princetonians, the late summer (is it late summer?) has meant continuing to compete internationally, even as the first game week has arrived. 

Ben Syer, the head coach of the men's hockey team, served as the associate head coach for the United States U18 team that won the Hlinka Gretzky Cup. Where was the tournament held? That would be Trencin, Slovakia.

The U.S. team went 2-1 in its group, with only a loss to Sweden. The Americans then took down Canada 4-3 in a shootout in the semifinal and then Sweden 5-3 in the gold medal game. 

It was the second win for Team USA in the 34 years of the tournament. The other was in 2003. 

The Junior Pan Am Games field hockey tournaments have reached the medal round in Asuncion, Paraguay, a mere 6,922 miles away from Trencin. The U.S. men's team is coached by Princeton assistant Pat Harris, and his team will play in the bronze medal game today at 4:30 this afternoon against Chile after a tough 1-0 loss to Canada in the semifinals.

Talia Schenck, a rising senior on the Princeton women's team, is part of the USA U21 national team, that one who is also competing in Asuncion. The Americans defeated Uruguay 2-1 last night in Semifinal No. 2, advancing to the championship game against Argentina (tomorrow at 6:45 pm Eastern).

The picture above, by the way, is of Harris and Schenck. With her four goals, Schenck is tied for the fourth leading goal scorer in the tournament. 

That the final matches these two teams is hardly a surprise. Between them, they have won all four of their games and outscored their opponents by a combined 50-2, with the lone goals yesterday, with the U.S. win over Uruguay and when Argentina defeated Chile 4-1 in the other semifinal.  

It wasn't exactly smooth last night for the Americans, who went up 2-0, had a goal early in the fourth disallowed to keep it 2-0 and then had Uruguay quickly counter, turning a 3-0 game into a 2-1 game with 12 minutes left. From there the ball was in the U.S. end pretty much the rest of the time, but Uruguay couldn't tie it — despite outshooting the Americans 11-7. 

The win last night guaranteed Schenck and the Americans no worse than a silver medal. 

When the game ends tomorrow, she'll be flying home to join her Princeton teammates, who are early on in practice ahead of their Sept. 5 opener. 

For this week, it's women's soccer only. It's Game Week, and those are exciting words to type.