Monday, The Day Of Rest

Today is TigerBlog No. 947.

That would mean that No. 1,000 is 53 business days away, or, let's see, 10 weeks and three days, which makes it May 17, a Thursday.

What should TB do for the occasion? Business as usual? Gala 1,000th celebration? A week of the best of TB?

None of that is the point today, though.

TB was thinking this morning about how at most places, today is the beginning of the work week, while around here it doesn't quite have a Monday feel to it.

TB was thinking about writing about the great songs that are about Mondays, and then he thought that he'd done that before, and so he did a quick search and found out that he had, back on April 20, 2009, when he mentioned these songs:

* "Manic Monday," by the Bangles
* "Monday, Monday," by the Mamas and the Papas
* "Rainy Days and Mondays," by the Carpenters
* "Come Monday," by Jimmy Buffett
* "I Don't Like Mondays," by the Boomtown Rats - TB has a version by Bon Jovi as well

Anyway, it got TB thinking that the more TB's he written, the harder it is to come up with something that he hasn't at least touched upon before.

Oh well, that's what the search function is for, right?

Meanwhile, back at Jadwin today, it feels like a holiday rather than a work day.

And why is that?

Because of what went on in Princeton athletics this past weekend.

There was home men's lacrosse. There was home women's lacrosse. There was home men's basketball, Friday and Saturday. There was the Ivy League swimming and diving championships Thursday through Saturday. There was the EIWA wrestling championships Saturday and yesterday. There was home men's volleyball. There was home men's tennis.

Now if that doesn't seem like a lot, consider that the wrestling and basketball were in the same facility, which shares parking with the pool.

Consider that the men's lacrosse game was on ESPNU. Against an opponent (Johns Hopkins) that traditionally has drawn more fans to campus than any other.

Consider that there were enough away events that it took people from several areas off campus for the weekend.

Consider that there could have been home men's hockey in the ECAC playoffs, which Princeton would also have figured out a way to host.

If you attended any of these events this weekend, you probably didn't think anything was out of the ordinary. It was one event that went off without a hitch while another event was doing the same nearby.

If anything, you might have been annoyed that Lot 21 was filled and that you had to walk a little, but that was the only negative - and there was nothing athletics could do about that.

The amount of work that went into this weekend's events would have been extraordinary, had it not been for the fact that TB has seen it before. And it's not TB who did the work.

It's everyone else who works here.

On the subject of things that TB has written before, the people who made all this happen are the people who never get any of the credit. They are:

Equipment staff - Clif Perry, Gary Audet, Gary Mosley
Grounds crew - Brad Cabral, Garfield Brown, Jay Hulick, Jeff Madill, Paul Merrow, Elysee Nicolas and Jim Ogden
Ticket office - Stephanie Sutton, Clare Baxter, Dee Vertucci
Event staff - Karen Malec, Mike Doto, Dave Santoro, Sean Morey
Pool - Kaitlin Naudts
Business office who do a lot at events people - Jon Kurian, Ryan Yurko
Marketing/OAC/IT - Yariv Amir, Craig Sachson, Andrew Borders, Kristy McNeil, Diana Chamorro, Greg Paczkowski, Dan Joyce

TB is afraid that he's left people out, and for that he's sorry.

Still, the people above did a ton of work this weekend, without ever being in the spotlight, and with a lot riding on it if they didn't do a good job.

And for all those people, TB would like to single out one, and that's Karen Malec.

You've probably never noticed her at events here, which is fine with her. And yet almost none of what happened here this weekend would have gone off without a hitch the way it did without her work.

TB's lasting memory of this weekend will be when he walked into the gym Saturday night to find Karen climbing out from under a table, having retrieved from the pool the shot clocks that water polo uses in practice, because the two in Jadwin couldn't be synced, resulting in a delay of the opening tip for basketball.

When TB saw Karen come out from plugging in the clocks, all he could do was shake his head.

She didn't have enough to do this weekend?