Getting Oriented

TigerBlog's Corn Flakes this morning were shared with a story about the 25th anniversary of Ewing High School's 1983 Central Jersey Group II football championship and how the members of the team are being saluted at the Blue Devils' game this weekend.

TB covered that championship game for the same newspaper he was reading this morning, and he remembered some of the key details of the game:
* it was cold
* it was at Colonia, who was heavily favored
* Ewing won 3-0
* the kid who kicked the field goal was also a defensive lineman (TB is pretty sure on this one)
* the game ended with 36 seconds remaining due to an altercation of some sort; according to this morning's paper, it was a brawl that the Colonia side started, which is sort of how TB remembers it
* the Notre Dame High School coaching staff sat in the stands behind the Ewing bench offering support - and a few plays; the ND head coach then is the ND head coach now (Chappy Moore)

Twenty-five years have gone by since that game? A quarter century? It doesn't seem that long ago. And how about going that far from now into the future? TigerBlog, 25 years from now, will be, uh, not young.

Put in some further context, the current Princeton freshman class (of 2014, by the way) was about seven years or so away from being born back when Ewing beat Colonia that day.

The Class of 2014 is completing a week of orientation activities in advance of tomorrow's first day of classes (which, by the way, could almost overlap with fall break at some other schools).

For those members of the class who are athletes, today offers Freshman Student-Athlete Orientation, a completely fascinating event for TigerBlog.

As he does every year, TB will sit in the event, look at the more than 200 faces there and think ahead 44 months to the 2014 Princeton Varsity Club senior-athlete award banquet, where a handful of those athletes will be honored with the major departmental awards, including the Roper Trophy and von Kienbusch Awards as the top male and female athletes.

And of course, not everyone will have an award-winning experience. Some will battle injuries. Others will decide not to continue with their athletic careers.

Still, if past performance is any indication of future whatever-those-commercials-say, then more than half of the kids in McCosh 50 today will win at least one Ivy League championship. Most will compete in NCAA or other national championship events, and some will even win them.

The overwhelming majority will have a great experience here. They will come away with great athletic memories of competing for Princeton University, and they will have lifelong friendships as a result, friendships that are just now starting out on a path that will last for decades and take them from where they are now through weddings, babies, careers, grandchildren and all the rest of it.

TigerBlog is lucky to see two completely different sides of the athletic world from such close proximity - the youth sports world and the Division I world.

It wasn't that long ago that the current 14ers were playing youth sports, among the hundreds of thousands who were doing the same thing at the time. And, those same 14ers were going through elementary school, middle school, eventually high school.

The freshmen are part of an extraordinarily lucky few, those who were good enough in their lives on both their athletic and academic plane to have the intersection of the two land them on this campus.

For every young athlete who wanted to play Division I, only a very, very, very few could. For everyone who wanted to attend Princeton University, only a very, very, very, very, very, very few could.

The athletes in the Class of 2014 have achieved both. They are to be congratulated - and cautioned not to waste this golden opportunity.

The woods are filled with those who will never have that chance.