Season's Greetings

TigerBlog was in the supermarket the other day to get four items, one of which was a box of pasta.

MotherBlog used to tell TB that there were several things in the world that were all the same, especially aspirin, toothpaste and pasta. Armed with that belief, TB always chuckles when he sees the wide variety available for all three products and when he considers how he developed his own personal preferences for all of them, despite his mother's observation several decades ago.

For pasta, TB likes shells, rotini, bow ties, ziti, rigatoni and many others. His favorite, though, is a basic spaghetti or linguine.

As an aside, there's an exchange in the show "The Odd Couple" where Felix and Oscar argue whether there is a difference between spaghetti and linguine, which ends with:
"Eat your spaghetti."
"I thought it was linguine."
"It's garbage now."

Anyway, after TB grabbed the spaghetti - or was it linguine? - he walked down to the end of the aisle to head to the checkout line, only the end of the aisle was blocked by a shopping cart and a woman who was diligently studying pasta sauces. So TB stood there for a second or two, hoping that the woman would move her cart.

Except that the woman never looked up. This went on for what seemed like forever, or maybe more than five seconds, before TB said "excuse me." Still, the woman didn't budge. Eventually, she was jostled out of her own little world to see TB standing there, and she moved.

If TB has a main pet peeve, it's this: people who are unaware that there is a world around them. It happens with people who push carts in supermarkets, and it especially happens with people who drive 25 miles per hour on a 45 mph, one-lane road or who don't put their blinker on before making a right turn where TB is waiting to make a left or who slow down and look for their turn when they have no idea where they are.

Hey, people, there's a whole world going on around you.

Another pet peeve TB has is when Princeton athletes wear gear from other schools, something he saw this morning when a group of women athletes came out of the pool one of them had on a Michigan State sweatshirt.

It could have been a swimmer, diver or water polo player, and TB isn't looking to single anyone out. Plus, since Princeton's deal with Nike took effect, the number of times this happens has plummeted.

TB walks into Jadwin many winter mornings when athletes come out of the pool with wet hair, and he's always wondered why swimming and diving are winter sports.

For some reason, he thought even harder about this today than normal, to the point where he wrote down the 14 sports that are primarily winter sports:
m/w swimming and diving
m/w basketball
m/w hockey
m/w squash
m/w indoor track and field
m/w fencing
wrestling
m volleyball

Those 14 teams represent eight sports, of which six (basketball, fencing, wrestling, volleyball, swimming/diving, track/field) compete at the Summer Olympics. Of the remaining two, one is at the Winter Games (hockey) and one isn't an Olympic sport (squash).

It got TB thinking about how sports ended up being contested in the season's that they currently are.

Football, for instance, was played in the fall from its earliest days.

Lacrosse, on the other hand, debuted in 1881 - in June 1881 to be exact. The first three seasons featured more games in October and November than in the spring, but since then, it's been all spring games.

Why the change? TB has no idea, and there's nothing that he's seen written about the decision to move to the spring. If he had to guess, he'd say it's because of how football dominated the autumn, both in interest and in players (almost all early lacrosse players also played football).

The same might explain why rowing became primarily a spring sport. As an aside, the earliest regattas were in July each year in the 1870s and 1880s.

TB understands the obvious, that the winter sports here are winter sports because they are played indoors. The fall and spring sports, with a few exceptions, are played outdoors, and so playing them in the winter wouldn't work.

Still, some of the seasons don't make much sense.

TigerBlog would move swimming and diving to the spring, if for no other reason than not sending all these kids out into the cold winter with wet hair.

TB grew up by the Jersey Shore, where soccer was played on the high school level by boys in the fall and by girls in the spring. He's pretty sure this has since changed, to accommodate the state tournament and such.

It's interesting that both soccer teams play on the intercollegiate level in the same season, as they share the same facility on probably every college campus. On the one hand, it leads to doubleheaders, which fans seem to like, but it also leads to sharing facilities for practice time, game schedules and such.

Of course, Jim Barlow, the men's soccer coach, has told TB that in his perfect world, college soccer would be somewhat like the English Premiere League, with one game a week for a 20- or 25-week or so stretch that started in the fall and ended in the spring, taking some time off in the heart of winter.

And then there's baseball and softball. TB would move them from the spring to the fall, because 1) the sport would be so much better in the nicer fall weather and 2) it would end around the same time as Major League Baseball. Currently, baseball/softball is the only one of the so-called four major sports in this country where the college season is at a different time of year from the professional season.

Of course, none of this will ever happen. The tradition of playing these sports in the seasons they're played in now is too ingrained for the entire college sporting world to change.

Still, it's okay every now and then to look at the status quo and ask "why?"