In The Pool

Back when TigerBlog worked at the paper, his daily routine often went like this:
* wake up around 11
* eat breakfast
* watch TV for a little while
* go to Rider and swim
* eat a huge lunch

TigerBlog can't remember where he first learned to swim. He does remember taking JLS (Junior Lifesaving) at Camp Toledo back when he was eight or nine or so in a course that included treading water in blue jeans for a minute.

TB was never a fast swimmer, and his high school didn't have a swim team. In fact, it was a rarity for a team by the Shore to have a swim team back then, and TB was a bit shocked at how basically every school in the Mercer County/Bucks County area had a swim team and a pool when he first started covering high schools.

In fact, back then, swimming was one of the sports TB covered the most, and he began to develop a pretty good understanding of the nuances of the sport, from how training worked to what coaches had to do to put swimmers into the right spots to maximize points during championship meets.

When he went from covering high schools to colleges, TB didn't cover as much swimming anymore. Still, he went to occasional meets and did get to know the local swimming coaches, which is how he ended up in the pool at Rider three or four days a week for two or three years or so.

As exercise goes, it's hard to beat swimming laps. TB would go up and back in the pool, time after time, eventually working up to 100 laps. His major problem was that he was never good at flip turns, so TB invented his own semi-flip turn, which looked a bit awkward but got the job done.

Since TB has been working at Princeton, he hasn't been in DeNunzio Pool that often, choosing instead to play basketball or squash primarily for exercise. DeNunzio is the deepest pool he's ever been in, with nothing that could be called a shallow area as it is, TB believes, at least 10 feet deep everywhere.

It's also a beautiful pool. Even more than 20 years after it opened, the pool has a great aesthetic quality to it, and improvements in recent years have featured the history of the two swimming and diving programs throughout the building.

For those who don't make it in to DeNunzio, that history can be found for the men and for the women on a pair of information central pages on goprincetontigers.com.

The pages highlight two programs that have been great histories - and presents, and both teams are consistently ranked in the national Top 25.

The men's program has won six of the last nine Ivy League championships, including two straight and four of five. The women have won nine of the last 11.

The 2011 Ivy League women's championships will be held Feb. 24-26 at DeNunzio, while the men's championships are a week later at Harvard.

This past weekend gave a bit of a glimpse into what those championships might just hold, as the annual HYP event was held at Yale, whose pool resembles the Coliseum in Rome.

On the men's side, Princeton defeated Yale and lost to Harvard in a close matchup. If history has anything to say about it, the Ivy champ will be either Princeton or Harvard, as it has been every year since 1993, when Yale and Harvard tied for the crown. In fact, the last time a team other than Harvard or Princeton won an outright men's title was 1971, when Penn did so.

The women's event was all Princeton, as the Tigers won all 16 individual events and took both team meets by huge margins. This came in the first HYP meet since the graduation of Alicia Aemisegger, a 13-time All-America, and Courtney Kilkuts, one of the very greatest swimmers in program history who was overshadowed by Aemisegger for four years.

Harvard's win on the men's side and Princeton's on the women's would set them up as favorites in a month, but it's hardly set in stone for either. A great deal can happen in a championship swimming meet, when swimmers who are primed for that day and turn, say, a sixth-place finish into a third can make all the difference.

Princeton swimming and diving has had a great deal of stability in its program through the years with the presence of women's head coach Susan Teeter, men's head coach Rob Orr and diving coach Greg Gunn.

This stability has helped the programs maintain their high level of success, and the goal of each year starts with an Ivy League championship and sending as many swimmers as possible to the NCAA meet.

This year will be no different.