Nice Car

Say hello to the new Nissan 370Z belonging to loyal TigerBlog reader and friend Duncan Yin, Class of 1982. 

Pretty nice, right? It also ties directly into a special bonus trivia question after yesterday's quiz. 

Duncan bought his car in the hometown of Princeton legend Dick Kazmaier. In what town did Duncan buy his car? 

You can think about that for a few paragraphs. In the meantime ...

*

The Premier Lacrosse League has reached the final weekend of its regular season. There will be Princeton alums in the playoffs, which will start in two weeks, though which ones remains to be seen. 

This weekend's stop is in Boston, where the host Cannons will play tonight at 6:30 against California and then tomorrow at 7 against Maryland. The other two games this weekend have Carolina and Utah at 9 tonight and then New York and Philadelphia tomorrow at 1. 

New York, with Tiger grad Jake Stevens, is already in the postseason, as are Denver and Carolina. It's likely that Boston (with Coulter Mackesy and Alexander Vardaro) and Philadelphia (with Michael Sowers and Zach Currier) will also be in, and it'll be tough for Utah (with Ryan Ambler, Beau Pederson and the injured Tom Schreiber) to gain a spot. 

Utah, of course, has won the last two PLL titles. 

Meanwhile, there are some individual subplots that will be sorted out this weekend as well. 

Sowers, for instance, currently leads the league in assists (22) and is second in points (38), one behind Connor Shellenberger of the Atlas. Sowers leads Shellenberger, Jeff Teat (also of the Atlas) and Asher Nolting by two assists each. 

Currier enters the weekend as one of two players in the league with at least 10 points and 33 groundballs. The other is longstick midfielder Jake Piseno of the Outlaws.

Currier is tied for 10th in the league in groundballs. The other 10 players with whom he is either tied or behind are all either face-off specialists (seven of those) or longstick midfielders (three of those).

In other words, Currier continues to do what he does better than anyone.  

* 

Duncan bought his car in Maumee, Ohio, which was Kazmaier's hometown. As you know, Kazmaier won the 1952 Heisman Trophy after coming to Princeton from Maumee High School. 

TigerBlog, by the way, has never been a huge car guy. He is on his second straight Honda CR-V, the first of which he bought in 2008. In 17 years, that's two cars, with a combined 420,000 miles on them. They do lack in the frills department, but that's okay.  

*

Talia Schenck of the field hockey team will make her United States U21 debut Monday in Game 1 of the Junior Pan Am Games, which will be held in Asunción, Paraguay, running through Aug. 23.

This is the second edition of the Junior Pan Am Games but the first time field hockey is being included. 

The U.S. is in Pool B for the tournament, along with Guyana, Mexico and Chile. The Americans play Mexico in Game 1 Monday at 6:30 Eastern time.

Pool A has Argentina, Canada, Paraguay and Uruguay. 

You can watch all tournament games HERE.

*

There is already one team back on campus, with more to follow in the coming days. The women's soccer team has started practicing in advance of its season opener, which is — GULP — two weeks from today. 

Princeton will host Rutgers on Aug. 22 (that really is 14 days away?) at 5 pm on Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium. In all, the Tigers will play four games in the month of August, three of which will be at home. 

Game 2 will be Sunday the 24th at Loyola, with home games the following Friday and Sunday against Ohio State and Syracuse. Ohio State reached the Sweet 16 a year ago at the NCAA tournament, while Rutgers fell in the first round. 

Princeton was 14-5 a year ago, winning the Ivy championship and Ivy tournament championship and then falling to UVa in the NCAA opening round. 

Admission to all regular season soccer games is free.  

*

Enjoy your summer weekend. 

Are there really people who like winter better than summer?  

Trivia Thursday

Who's ready for Trivia Thursday? 

They'll all be multiple choice questions, and the answers will be at the end. You'll have to keep your own score, which you can email to TigerBlog at jprice@princeton.edu if you like. 

The Princeton University Honor Code applies here, by the way. 

And with that ... 

1. Which former Princeton quarterback holds the Ivy League record for passing yards in a season with 3,474? 
A) Doug Butler
B) Jason Garrett
C) Chad Kanoff
D) John Lovett

2. The Princeton women's lacrosse record for career goals has been broken three times in the last eight years, by Olivia Hompe and Kyla Sears and then last year by McKenzie Blake. Prior to that, the record had stood since before the Year 2000. Who held it? 
A) Crista Samaras
B) Lisa Rebane
C) Natalie Bocock
D) Emily Goodfellow 

3. Princeton has won a total of 36 Olympic gold medals. Which sport has accounted for the most? 
A) Rowing
B) Swimming
C) Track and Field
D) Fencing

4. Who is the only head coach to be the Ivy League Rookie of the Year, Player of the Year and Coach of the Year, all at Princeton? 
A) Sabrina King
B) Mitch Henderson
C) Jim Barlow
D) Maureen Davies

5) Which of the following players did not score an overtime goal in an NCAA men's lacrosse championship game?
A) Andy Moe
B) Kevin Lowe
C) Jesse Hubbard
D) Ryan Boyle

6) Which current Princeton athlete is NOT the child of a former Ivy League athlete? 
A) Beth Yeager
B) Peter Buonanno
C) Jake Koonin
D) Maia Weintraub

7) Princeton has had five players win Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year in basketball. Of these five, who had the most career points scored?
A) Ellie Mitchell
B) Myles Stephens
C) Lauren Polansky
D) Kareem Maddox
C) Amir Bell

8) When Pat Glory won the 2013 NCAA wrestling championship at 125 pounds, from which Big Ten school was his opponent in the final? 
A) Ohio State
B) Iowa
C) Penn State
D) Purdue 

9) Kenneth Fairman was the first official Director of Athletics at Princeton (and later mayor of Princeton). What did Fairman do during World War II?
A) Tank Commander
B) War Correspondent 
C) Tail Gunner 
D) Infantry

10) Which of the following athletes did NOT win the Roper Trophy as the top senior male athlete? 
A) Bill Bradley
B) Dick Kazmaier
C) Cosmo Iacavazzi
D) Craig Masback

11) While Princeton Stadium was under construction in 1997, Princeton played eight road games and two neutral site games. Which two of these facilities hosted a 1997 Princeton football game?
A) Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.
B) Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia
C) Lions Stadium at the College of New Jersey 
D) Yankee Stadium
E) Kean Alumni Stadium at Kean University

12) Which of the following movies/shows does NOT feature a main character who is referred to as a Princeton athlete? 
A) Meet Me In St. Louis
B) This Side Of Paradise
C) South Pacific
D) The Caine Mutiny

13) Which of the following women was NOT a three-sport letterwinner at Princeton? 
A) Amanda Pfeiffer
B) Amie Knox
C) Karen Konigsberg
D) Demer Holleran

14) Bill Carmody, who went to Union, is the only non-Princeton grad to be the men's basketball team head coach since 1961. Which Princeton alum coached Carmody at Union? 
A) Butch van Breda Kolff
B) Jake McCandless
C) Gary Walters
D) Eddie Donovan

15) Princeton played in the first college football game, against Rutgers in 1869. Football, though, was actually the second varsity sport at Princeton. Which was first? 
A) Rowing
B) Track and Field
C) Tennis
D) Baseball 

And the answers ... 

1. Chad Kanoff (he's also Princeton's career leader and fifth in Ivy history with 7,514)
2. Crista Samaras (who graduated in 1999 with 189 goals)
3. Rowing (6)
4. Jim Barlow (Sabrina was Player of the Year and Coach of the Year)
5. Ryan Boyle (though he did assist on one)
6. Maia Weintraub
7. Myles Stephens (1,346)
8. Purdue (Matt Ramos)
9. Tank Commander (impressive)
10. Dick Kazmaier (though he did win the Heisman Trophy)
11. Giants Stadium and Lions Stadium (Yale at Giants Stadium, Fordham at Lions Stadium)
12. This Side of Paradise (which was never made into a movie)
13. Amanda Pfeiffer (though she was great at two of them — softball and hockey)
14. Gary Walters (who also hired Carmody 20 years later to replace Pete Carril)
15. Baseball (dating to Nov. 22, 1864, when Princeton defeated Williams 27-16)

Peripheral Vision

So this is the "Doonesbury" cartoon that TigerBlog stumbled on in the same issue of the Daily Princetonian in which current Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan wrote a story about the 1978 Princeton-Penn football game. 

It's hardly the funniest entry in the history of the strip. It was the words "peripheral vision" that, well, caught TB's eye (that's not bad, actually).  

If you're a Princeton basketball fan and John McPhee fan, then the term "peripheral vision" conjures up one specific person. 

In fact, in his 1965 classic "A Sense Of Where You Are," McPhee wrote this about Bradley's eyesight:

With both eyes open and looking straight ahead, Bradley sees a hundred and ninety-five degrees on the horizontal and about seventy degrees straight down, or about fifteen and five degrees more, respectively, than what is officially considered perfection. Most surprising, however, is what he can see above him. Focussed horizontally, the typical perfect eye, according to the chart, can see about forty-seven degrees upward. Bradley can see seventy degrees upward.  

Earlier in the story, when he first brought up the subject of peripheral vision, McPhee also wrote this:

People used to say that Bob Cousy, the immortal back-court man of the Boston Celtics, could look due east and enjoy a sunset.  

The original article appeared on Jan. 23, 1965, in the New Yorker and was McPhee's big break with magazine. It was always McPhee's dream to write for the magazine, but his submissions had been rejected consistently in the years since he'd graduated from Princeton (in 1953), a time during which he wrote for, well, Time (the "caught TB's eye" thing was better). 

Back in December of 1964, Princeton and Michigan played each other in the first game of the ECAC Holiday Festival in Madison Square Garden. Michigan was the No. 1-ranked team in the country at the time, and the teams would meet again a few months later in the NCAA Final Four. 

In that game, held in Portland, Ore., Bradley would score 29 points in a loss but come back to score 58 against Wichita State in the third-place game for a Final Four record that stands to this day. The first game, the one in the Garden, saw Bradley score 41 but foul out with four minutes to go as Michigan rallied from 12 down to win 80-78.

That Michigan team was led by Cazzie Russell, with whom Bradley would win the first of his two NBA championships (in 1969-70) with the New York Knicks. The first meeting was well-hyped to say the least, as McPhee wrote about in his article: 

For a couple of days before the game, the sports pages of the New York newspapers were crammed with headlines, articles, and even cartoons comparing Bradley and Russell, asking which was the better player, and looking toward what one paper called the most momentous individual confrontation in ten years of basketball. One additional factor—something that meant relatively little to Bradley—was that the game was to be played in Madison Square Garden. Bradley had never played in the Garden, but, because he mistrusts metropolitan standards, he refused to concede that the mere location of the coming test meant anything at all. When a reporter asked him how he felt about appearing there, he replied, “It’s just like any other place. The baskets are ten feet high.” 

Hey, is there a chance that the writers of the movie "Hoosiers" came up with their iconic scene about how the height of the basket at the state finals was the same as the height of the basket back at Hickory High School? 

The original version of "A Sense Of Where You Are" was a magazine article, as TB said. The extended version became the first of McPhee's more than 30 books. The project was the professional turning point of is career, one that went on to include a Pulitzer Prize and a reputation as one of the greatest American writers ever. 

Now in his 90s, McPhee is still writing. 

As for Bradley, he turned 82 a week ago. The two have stayed very close in the decades since McPhee first wrote about Bradley (TB's classmate). 

You can read the entire original article HERE. 

 

The Football Poll

PRINCETON FOOTBALL 2025 TICKETS 

TigerBlog has a quiz for you today. 

First, though, this weekend marks the first full weekend of the NFL preseason. There are three games Thursday, one of which is Cincinnati at Philadelphia. 

As far as preseason games go, that's not a bad one. Philadelphia is the defending Super Bowl champion, while Cincinnati has a reasonable chance to make that claim a year from now. If nothing else, Cincinnati features former Princeton wide receiver Andrei Iosivas, who enters Year 3 in the NFL with 51 career receptions with 10 career touchdown catches. 

Also speaking of the NFL, Princeton will have a big connection to one of the CBS broadcast teams, as Tom McCarthy and Ross Tucker will be together again on TV. TigerBlog is pretty sure he doesn't have to remind you of their Princeton roots. 

Tracy Wolfson and Amanda Balionis will be CBS sideline reporters (Wolfson is part of the No. 1 team), and both of them got their start covering Princeton games. 

Okay, ready for your quiz? 

TigerBlog will give you a year and a number and you have to tell him what those numbers represent. Here you go:

2006 - six
2013 - five
2016 - five
2018 - two
2021 - one

And the answer is? 

Well, in the last 20 years, Princeton has won five Ivy League football championships. Those years are the ones listed. 

The numbers next to them? That's where Princeton was picked to finish in the league's preseason media poll. 

The league championships Princeton won before that came before the league had official preseason predictions. 

This year's poll was released yesterday, and Princeton was chosen to finish fifth. As you can tell, in three of the last five years that Princeton has won the football title, it was chosen to finish fifth or lower. 

In other words? The poll is fun, and it's always good to be picked high — but it doesn't really matter in the end. 

There was a tie way back when that one of the best days of each year was Ivy League football media day. Each of the eight coaches and the media would gather in Connecticut, either at Lyman Orchards Golf Club or at Yale's golf club. 

Ah, the pressure that came along with that media day. There was no choice but to get the football media guide in time, and oh did you not want to be the only league school that failed in that mission. 

Fortunately, TigerBlog never did, though he cut it close pretty much every year. He'd usually have to detour to the printer to pick up the first few cartons of books.

Once in Connecticut, there were usually Ivy League athletic communications meetings the day before and then the media day. After that was the highlight: a round of golf. 

Or most of a round anyway. The last time TB played at one of the media days, he had his 8-iron slip out of his hands on a follow through off the tee of an elevated par 3 and then watched as it majestically helicoptered into the water trap. That was his club, not the ball, which landed on the green. 

TB just picked it up and never putted. He next played golf 20 or so years later.  

These days, the in-person media day and the media guide are relics, memories of an obsolete time. They might be memories, but they are great memories.  

Media day was also a sure sign that football season might not be right around the corner but that it was certainly on the horizon. In its place now comes the release of the poll, which conjures up some of those same feelings of the coming fall. 

Opening Day for Princeton Football 2025 is Sept. 20, when San Diego comes to Powers Field at Princeton Stadium. The Tigers are at Lafayette the next Saturday, Sept. 27, and then home the following Friday for the Ivy opener against Columbia. 

From there, the sprint through the season will be well underway.  

"Stomp On Heads"

TigerBlog went to the movies yesterday and had a first-time experience.

He now, apparently, qualifies as a senior citizen. How did that happen? 

By the way, the movie he saw was "Bad Shabbos," which was silly but not too silly, though it came really close to being too silly. Had it crossed over the "too silly" line, then it wouldn't have been funny.

How's that for a movie review?

Elsewhere, the news broke last night that Loni Anderson had passed away. 

TigerBlog isn't sure what the cutoff point is age-wise for people to be aware of just how big a star Loni Anderson was at one point. He'd guess it's those who were born at a time that doesn't yet make them eligible for the senior citizen ticket at the movie theater but has them coming close to that day. 

To the rest of you, there was a time when Anderson was as much of a star as anyone. She was married to Burt Reynolds, who was an even bigger star, and they were as big as Hollywood glamour couple as there was. 

Anderson's biggest role was on the woefully underrated TV sitcom "WKRP In Cincinnati," which ran from 1978-82 and was simply hilarious. TigerBlog once wrote this about it:

If you've never seen the show itself, it's hysterical, with a hint of touching on some pretty big issues every now and then, much more so than would have been expected from what sort of billed itself as a campy sitcom. It had great characters - Les Nessman, Johnny Fever, Mr. Carlson, Venus Flytrap, Herb - and it took the whole "Ginger/Mary Ann" concept to another level with Jennifer and Bailey.

Back on Oct. 30, 1978, the show had an episode in which the station manager (Mr. Carlson) plans an elaborate promotion for Thanksgiving, which turns out to be a drop of live turkeys from a helicopter, not realizing that turkeys aren't quite like other birds.

TV Guide ranked the episodes as the 40th funniest episode in history. To show you what a great show "WKRP" was, TB doesn't even have that one in the top five in the show's history, though it is considered an all-time TV classic. 

The Thanksgiving episode of "WKRP" ran during fall break at Princeton in 1978. The Daily Princetonian didn't publish that week, but the next episode ran two separate stories on the football games that Princeton had played in between issues. 

The first was a 24-24 tie against Harvard in which the Crimson had the ball on the Tiger 5 with 30 seconds to go before fumbling and having Princeton's Steve Hart recover it. Ties, by the way, were something that football teams in college could have until 1996. 

If you recall the end of the 1995 season, Princeton won an outright Ivy League title with a 10-10 tie at Dartmouth.  That was the last game played before the introduction of overtime, and Princeton's first game the next season, at Cornell, went to overtime in Ithaca (Cornell won 33-27). 

The second game over break in 1978 was a 21-0 win over Penn. Here is how the Prince story on that game started: 

Last week, newspaper clippings appeared on the Princeton football team's bulletin board which quoted Penn coach Harry Gamble as saying that the Tigers were "pussycats" and star fullback Denis Grosvenor as saying that he looked forward to Saturday's game since he liked to "stomp on heads." Stung by those comments, the Tigers destroyed a flat Quaker squad, 21-0.

Gamble, by the way, was running the wishbone offense at Penn in those years, without a great deal of success. 

The story ended this way:

Middle guard Pete Funke summed up both the defensive and offensive efforts by using Grosvenor's own words. "We stomped on heads," he said. 

Ah, but the writer decided not to pursue a career in sportswriting. Instead, she went in a totally different direction. 

Her name? Elena Kagan.  

"Haaland Has A Cow-Heart Guy"

Welcome to August. 

You know what that means, right? It means that Princeton Athletics begins its 2025-26 later this month. 

To be exact, that would be three weeks from today, when the women's soccer team hosts Rutgers at 5. 

The rest of the fall teams will also be back on campus to begin practices this month. Yes, it's still summer, and yes, the Princeton campus is still very quiet — but that will all be changing very soon. 

And for Friday, Aug. 1? TigerBlog stays with soccer for today. And some more great writing from longtime friend Sean Gregory. 

You want to read a great paragraph? 

How's this: 

For Ake and others, Haaland’s oddball biohacking habits serve as fodder. He cherishes ice baths. He wears glasses that filter out blue light, which can disrupt sleep, before bed. He sometimes eats cow heart. “For me, to eat as natural and as clean as possible is an important thing,” Haaland says. He gets it from a farm near his home in England. Haaland has a cow-heart guy. 

TigerBlog has read that three times and laughed at the last sentence there. It's probably because when he got to "He sometimes eats cow heart," TB's first thought was "where in the world does he get those?" 

And then there it was: "Haaland has a cow-heart guy." 

If you don't know who Haaland is, he would be Erling Haarland, one of the best soccer players in the world and the subject of a current cover story in Time Magazine, written by Sean Gregory. 

 Known as "Bones" during his Princeton playing days, Gregory was part of the great Class of 1998, which won Ivy League titles its last three years and was part of some of the watershed moments in program history. That five-member class included Gregory, along with Steve Goodrich (who played in the NBA), Mitch Henderson (perhaps his name is familiar still), Darren Hite and the late (and very much missed) James Mastaglio. 

That class played a huge role (along with players like Chris Doyal, Sydney Johnson, Brian Earl and Gabe Lewullis) in winning NCAA games against UCLA and UNLV, moving into the national Top 25 multiple times, beating Penn in the epic Ivy League playoff game and bridging the end of the Pete Carril era and the start of the Bill Carmody era. 

Gregory has gone on to a long career at Time, telling stories about some of the biggest names in sports. His pieces are long and involved, diving deeply into the subject and going way beyond "he scores a lot of goals," as Haaland does. 

Maybe that's why TB likes them so much? They're the kinds of stories he does at Princeton.

Meanwhile, TigerBlog was in an airport in Europe a few years ago and saw a giant poster of Haarland in an apparel store. The poster was probably three times bigger than the one of Julia Roberts at the makeup place next door. 

When he saw the picture, his first thought was "hey, that guy looks like someone else."

Here is Sean's post on X about the story: 

Two of the most valuable feet on the planet are burning. 🔥 Latest @TIME cover is @ErlingHaaland In-depth profile here .. https://t.co/dyEnHOyxT2 pic.twitter.com/WdAMgvD3FJ

— Sean Gregory (@seanmgregory) July 31, 2025

And here is the person TB thinks Haaland resembles:

He does, right? That's former Princeton men's lacrosse All-American defenseman Colin Mulshine, by the way. He's missing the bun, of course. 

TigerBlog ran this comparison by Gregory, and he agreed that there is a resemblance. 

As for the rest of the story, it talks about Haaland's intro to the sport in Norway, his hopes of leading his country to its first World Cup appearance this century, his impact on the fans worldwide and so much more. 

It also mentions how he played Jesse Marsch, a Princeton soccer alum who has coached all over the world, including with Haaland at Red Bull Salzburg. Marsch, by the way, is the head coach of Team Canada now. 

As with every other story Gregory writes, you will come away with a very clear picture of the subject. And you'll be entertained. 

In the meantime, enjoy your summer weekend. 

They are starting to dwindle for this go-round.  

Managing Just Fine

Judging by the responses TigerBlog has received the last two days, he can conclude the following: 

* people who watch WNBA games are also bothered by the number and length of replay reviews and
* the Instagram idea was a good one
* TigerBlog should post more pictures of dogs, cats and Wyatt Madalon

TB will take all that under advisement. 

For today, he asks you this question: Who is the only Princeton athlete ever to reach double figures in career home runs, bat at least .333 for a career and score more than 1,000 career points? 

Clearly, the answer is Will Venable. 

He is not the only player in double figures in home runs for his Princeton career who was a first-team All-Ivy League selection in another sport though. Can you think of another Tiger who did so? 

TB will give you a few paragraphs on that one. 

In the meantime, Venable was a great two-sport star at Princeton before graduating in 2005. He and Chris Young both went from playing basketball and baseball at Princeton to long careers in the Major Leagues, though they just missed out on being teammates at Princeton in either sport, as Young lost his remaining eligibility when he signed a pro baseball contract after his sophomore year of 1999-2000.

As has been the case with Young, TB has always wondered what kind of NBA player Venable would have made. He was a great defender who had decent size for a guard, and he could handle the ball and create his own shot. 

He was also at his best against the best teams, in the toughest spots, most notably at Duke or in the NCAA tournament against Texas. Could he have made it in the NBA? TB isn't sure, but he also knows that it's hard to fault Venable or Young for their decisions to focus on pro baseball. 

Venable hit 81 career home runs, drove in 307 runs and stole 135 bases as a player for the Padres, Rangers and Dodgers. Once he retired, he went into coaching, and he teamed with Young, the Texas general manager, to win the 2023 World Series. 

The other "double figure home runs, first-team All-Ivy selection in another sport" whom TB mentioned? That's Matt Evans, who was a three-time first-team All-Ivy League punter. 

As for Venable, he is now in his first season as the  manager of the Chicago White Sox. It's not an easy spot for your first Major League head man position. 

A year ago, the White Sox went 41-121, which was the fifth worst record in Major League Baseball since 1901. That's a long time ago. 

The 2024 White Sox reached the end of July with 27 wins against 84 losses. Now that it's the end of July a year later, Venable's team has 40 wins against 69 losses. In other words, with no game today, Venable has led the Sox to within one win of last year's total by the end of July. 

Is 40-69 a great record? No, but it's a definite improvement. It's certainly a sign of a young manager who is making an impact.  

The White Sox justed finished hosting the Phillies, which means that it's been manager Venable against play-by-play man Tom McCarthy. This is not their first meeting, since McCarthy was the Princeton men's basketball radio play-by-play man when Venable played. 

TB reached out to McCarthy yesterday to ask him if he'd had a chance to catch up with Venable, and he said yes, he had, and that it had been great to catch up. 

Meanwhile, Venable's task is challenging. TB hopes that the White Sox have patience with him, and he has to imagine they will, especially with the way the team is getting better. 

Step 1 is to show improvement, and that's certainly the case. TB would assume the goal is to avoid 100 losses, which would be an incredible improvement from a year ago. 

To do so, Chicago would need to go 23-30 the rest of the way (if TB's math is correct). That's doable, especially since the White Sox are 7-4 since the All-Star break. And yes, the team did trade away some of its assets to get back prospects, but hey, it's certainly worth keeping an eye on. 

Like so many other former Tigers, Venable is another one who is definitely worth rooting for, as are, now, the White Sox — especially now that the Phillies have left town. 

Things Learned From Instagram

TigerBlog offered a picture of a dog in the driver's seat last week. 

This week, he gives equal time to a cat.  Ah, the things you see on Instagram.

In the case of the cat, that's the feed of Clara Roth from this past weekend, when she apparently moved from Chicago to New Jersey. It's a long drive, so it's not surprising that Roth would want to sit in the passenger seat for part of the ride. 

Roth, if you don't know, was the 2020 winner of the von Kienbusch Award as Princeton's top senior female athlete. She finished her career with 101 points, tied for 10th all-time in program history, despite the fact that she was only able to play as a freshman, sophomore and junior due to the pandemic. 

She led the field hockey team to the 2019 NCAA final while being named a first-team All-American and a Honda Award finalist. She then spent a graduate season at Northwestern, where she won the NCAA title in 2021.

This does beg the question of how many college athletes have ever reached the NCAA championship game with two different schools? TB can think of a few, and he's guessing there will be more and more with all the player movement in college sports going forward. 

And now, TB leaves the rest of your Wednesday to some other things he learned recently simply on Instagram. 

Getting back to Roth and her trip over the weekend, she offered these two:

Okay, if that had been TigerBlog, the entire tray of brownies would have been gone by, oh, 10:30. He would have tried his best, but he would have had no chance of not eating them all. 

As for Ohio, TB has driven across that start several times and Roth's post literally made him laugh out loud. Truer words have never been written, or at least posted on Instagram.

Next up there is former men's lacrosse player Austin deButts, someone TB hasn't spoken to in a few years. Ah, but he feels like knows a bit more about what's going on with Austin these days: 

Apparently congratulations are in order. 

Now over to the football team and to senior defensive back Solomon Williams, who has played in every game the last two years. Williams is doing work on his senior thesis in the Dominican Republic this summer.

And the subject? 

Hmmm. Do individual birds cooperate and respond to other birds with whom they are closely associated? 

TB guesses he'll have to wait until Williams' thesis is done. Or at least until football practice starts, when he can ask him. 

Speaking of summer research and academic work, the next stop on this Instagram tour is Ecuador, where rising junior men's lacrosse player Colin Vickrey is working for a hospital. Vickrey is, not surprisingly,  a pre-med student. 

Earlier this summer Colin posted a picture with a random dog behind him. This past weekend he posted another one, this time facing out at the mountains while he holds a lacrosse stick. 

And the dog is a different one.  

TB texted Colin to find out what he was doing there and who the dogs were. This was his response: 

Yes I am in Ecuador right now working for a hospital. It’s one of the IIP’s that Princeton has to offer. It’s been an unreal experience. The dog I posted a couple weeks ago was a stray but the recent one was a dog that stays at the conservatory refuge that I stayed at over the weekend.  I’m doing a couple things. Firstly is that I’ve gone to 12 remote community’s to provide healthcare. These communities have been anywhere from deep in the Amazon to indigenous communities 13,000 feet up. Another thing is my project which has been about two things, the caravanas and the hospital. I’ve spent a lot of time in the hospital shadowing doctors and surgeons and now will be presenting ways to improve/increase efficiency in the hospital and caravanas. Currently sitting in on an eye surgery as we speak. The dog’s name is Suca, she is a beautiful dog.

That's a summer well spent. 

TB could keep going all day with this. There's certainly no shortage of Instagram feeds to choose from, right? 

He'll close with this gem of Whitney and Wyatt Madalon, the two youngest of men's head lacrosse coach Matt Madalon (along with older daughter Waverly). If you ever need to be cheered up, check out the videos that Madalon's wife Ashley posts. 

To The Video Review

How long did the last 2.3 seconds of the first half of Sunday's WNBA game between Golden State and Connecticut take? 

Hint - it was longer than 2.3 seconds. 

If you said five minutes, you'd be wrong. If you said seven minutes, eight minutes, even nine minutes, you'd be wrong. No, the correct answer is 10 minutes. 

And that's just ridiculous. 

Why? Because the officials were reviewing whether or not there had been a foul on a three-point attempt by Golden State's Kate Martin. It was a judgement call by the refs, like a million others through the decades in which the sport of basketball has been played. 

In the new world of video review, in the name of "getting it right," this led to a huge delay as the officials poured over the replay to determine if there had been a foul. Keep in mind that the Sun were up by 16 at the time. 

TigerBlog has watched a great deal of the WNBA this summer. He enjoys the games more than he does the NBA games, which have become mostly three-point contests. He especially like the more, if you'll forgive him for using this term, "Princetonian" aspects of the women's game, with its emphasis on moving without the ball and finding the open person. 

He was one of the many who started to watch the league last year, when Caitlin Clark arrived. Now he has continued to watch, even with Clark hurt — partly because of Kaitlyn Chen and partly because of the games themselves. 

Chen is a Princeton alum who is the only three-time Ivy tournament Most Outstanding Player in any sport who went on to win an NCAA title last year with UConn as a grad student. She's now in the WNBA on the Valkyries, and you can see through the TV just how much joy she has to be around the game still. It's the same joy she brought every night as a Tiger. 

Because he's watched so many WNBA games, TB can tell you that the use of replay in the WNBA has gone way off the rails. Earlier in the game — or it might have been the Indiana-Chicago game that followed; there have been so many TB has lost track — there was a long review to see if the shot clock had expired before a foul was committed. 

It's a tough situation, with the idea of, yes, getting calls correct versus the way these replays completely destroy the rhythm of the game. There are too many of them and they take too long. 

And, perhaps worst of all, these long delays often happen on the kinds of plays that have little to no impact on the outcome of the game. The game has endured just fine with a missed call here and there. All games have.  

TigerBlog sees this through the eyes of a fan and through his role on the NCAA men's lacrosse rules committee. He was part of the committee when it first brought review to men's lacrosse, and he can say that there has been as much discussion about video review the last three years than any other subject (other than the face-off).

TB's approach during his time on the committee has always been to consider what rule you'd want in place in overtime of the NCAA championship game and work from there. So yes, you want to be able to use video to make sure that there is no asterisk next to the winner. 

The trickle down, though, is always inevitable. It goes from that — wanting to avoid any illegitimacy to your national champ — to looking for tiny microscopic evidence of something in the middle of the second quarter of a WNBA regular season game. 

Different sports have different challenges, of course. In sports where scoring is at a premium, such as hockey, soccer, and field hockey, calls at any time can be game-changing. 

That's why it doesn't bother TB as much to see delays in those sports, because of how big the impact of adding or deleting one scoring chance can be. In a perfect world, these reviews would be pretty quick, even though that's not usually the case. 

The other issue is judgement calls, like the foul at the end of the first half Sunday. It was a judgement call by the refs. Should that be reviewable? 

That opens a huge can of worms. You don't want to expand the number of replays there are, since they do shut down the game.

On the other hand, what are you supposed to tell the officials? You can see if the ball went out off of Team A but not call the foul that Team B obviously committed in the process? 

TB is sure he'll be having further conversations this coming year as replay in men's college lacrosse continues to evolve. 

As for the WNBA? 

More Kaitlyn Chen. Fewer replays.  

Kerry Grundlingh, 2004-25

TigerBlog woke up yesterday to gray skies — only he didn't realize how gray they actually were. 

That didn't come into focus until the text message from his colleague Chas Dorman. A member of the women's open rowing team had been killed in a cycling accident, with more information to follow.

What? How? And more importantly, why? 

As he thinks about it, the answers to the first two don't really matter, as he thinks about it. The third one? There is no answer, not one that would make any sense anyway.  

Kerry Grundlingh was killed in an accident near her hometown of Johannesburg, South Africa. The rising Princeton junior was just short of two weeks past her 21st birthday. 

Grundlingh was a member of the first varsity 8 that won the Ivy League championship this past spring. She also represented South Africa on its national age-group teams several times. 

"The world has lost an amazing young woman with the passing of Kerry Grundlingh," said head coach Lori Dauphiny. "She was an exceptional rower and student-athlete, and that is just the beginning of who Kerry was as a person. She leaves a legacy of her life lived as a tremendous daughter, sister, friend and teammate who constantly gave the best of herself for the betterment of others in each and every daily interaction. All of us in the Princeton Rowing community send our deepest and heartfelt sympathies to Kerry's parents, Debbie and Francois, as well as her brother, James, and all of her family and friends around the globe." 

There will be a memorial for her on campus this coming fall. 

"This is a shocking tragedy for the Grundlingh family, our Princeton Rowing community and all at Princeton University," said Ford Family Director of Athletics John Mack '00. "Kerry embraced everything that being a Princeton student-athlete entails as she competed on the water and thrived in the classroom. Most importantly, Kerry developed impactful relationships with friends and teammates across campus and around the world. The hearts of everyone associated with Princeton Athletics are with Kerry's family and friends, her teammates and coaches, and everyone who had the honor of knowing Kerry as we all grieve together." 

TigerBlog wrote only last week, with the hiring of Matt Smith as the head men's lightweight coach, about the togetherness and closeness of the rowing programs at the boathouse. That culture has sustained Princeton Rowing for decades, through wins and championships and medals on the intercollegiate and international levels. 

Now it will have to sustain those who knew Kerry, who competed with her, who loved her. It won't be easy, but at least they will have each other. 

TigerBlog never had a chance to meet Kerry. He's read quite a bit about her since he got the news, and he's looked at the photos of her that were posted with the story on goprincetontigers.com (which you can read HERE).

What do they show? 

There are only two kinds of faces that she makes. One is the intensity of competition. The other is smiling. 

This isn't the first time that Princeton has lost a current athlete. Mercifully, the number is quite low. 

Of course, whenever it happens, it's a gut punch. Or whatever is beyond a gut punch. 

TB remembers being called into then Director of Athletics Gary Walters' office in 2004 when Walters told him about the death of swimmer Alan Ebersole. As Gary said the words, TB was struck in a state of disbelief and horror, with a great emptiness that was punctured only by the idea that no, this couldn't be true, not with a young athlete and student in the prime of life. 

It's the same feeling that TB had yesterday when he saw the news about Kerry. 

And that's nothing compared to what her parents and brother and teammates must be going through right now. It's unimaginable. 

What? How? It doesn't matter. 

Why? 

There is no way to even begin to understand. 

Rest in peace Kerry.