No Service

TigerBlog was in an all-day meeting this past Tuesday. It was held off-campus, in the basement of a building, in a room all the way in the back.

As TB walked closer and closer to the meeting, he went from five bars to four to three to two to one and then ultimately to the dreaded "no service" where the bars on his phone should be.

It was a weird feeling, not being able to automatically access things like text messages or emails or even to play Words With Friends.

TB recently read a story about how more than 50% of American adults begin to feel anxious when they don't have immediate access to their smart phones. TB isn't quite on that level, though it is a weird feeling to be out of the loop.

When TB was in Costa Rica in June, he spent three full days without any cell phone access, and he has to be honest - that was definitely weird.  

Anyway, every now and then, there'd be a break in the meeting, and TB and everyone else would walk outside, trying to find the spot where the bars would reemerge.

Interestingly, they didn't show up in the exact same spot each time. In fact, sometimes TB had to walk away outside, about 50 yards from the building itself, to get even one bar, when other times he had two or three before even reaching the door on the main floor.

When he'd finally get reception, it would take a few seconds, and then the waiting text messages would come through, even though they'd been sent a few hours earlier. Of course, when you send a text message, you expect some sort of rapid response, so TB assumed that the people who sent the messages were annoyed that he wasn't getting back to them sooner.

He also was able to check his email.

TB's email is weird. If he had to give percentages to them, it'd be 15% business, 15% personal and 70% junk.

Actually, maybe that's not so unusual.

TB doesn't understand the "unsubscribe" thing perfectly either. Do they want you to hit "unsubscribe" to know that your email is a real email address and therefore be able to sell it to other lists, or are you really unsubscribed?

And where did all these emails come from in the first place?

One group of emails that TB gets all the time are the transactional emails of Princeton athletes.

Each Princeton athlete has to be added to official roster as a way of assuring eligibility, and that roster then spits out that names of all the athletes to communications, as well as the equipment staff, athletic medicine staffs and anyone else who needs to keep track of who is on what team.

The same is true if athletes leave teams, as emails are sent regarding those moves as well.

Most of the time, TB simply deletes them, because there are so many athletes in so many sports, whereas he is only the sport contact for one of those sports.

Last week, though, four emails came across in a short time that really caught TB's attention. In fact, he considers this to be the most intriguing storyline for Princeton Athletics heading into the 2012-13 athletic year.

As an aside, he thought that Donn Cabral's attempt to compete in three seasons at Princeton and then reach the Olympics would be the big storyline from last year, and look how that turned out.

Anyway, the four emails said that Julia Reinprecht, Katie Reinprecht, Kathleen Sharkey and Michelle Cesan had been added to the field hockey roster.

The four took last year off to prepare for the Olympics with the U.S. national team through the pre-Olympic qualifying (Pan Am Games) and preparation. When the roster was cut down, the two Reinprechts were active players (who played huge roles in London, by the way), while Cesan was an alternate.

Now the four are back together at Princeton, rejoining the team that still won the league and went to the NCAA tournament a year ago.

And so now the big question is just how good Princeton field hockey can be this year, with two Olympians, an Olympic alternate, another national team member, the returning players from last year's team and a freshman class that is supposed to be very, very strong.

Can Princeton be NCAA champion for the first time, after so many Ivy titles and Final Fours and even two championship game losses?

Or will the pieces not fit together?

It could be asking a lot for the four returnees to blend back into a college team after their experience a year ago, especially the two who played basically every minute of every game in the Olympics. What will it be like for them to go from that level back to the college game?

Princeton opens its season a week from today, with a trip to Duke (ranked fifth) and Wake Forest (ranked 13th).

The Tigers? They're ranked fourth, behind Maryland, North Carolina and Old Dominion.

The schedule is dotted with teams in the Top 10. Princeton, though ranked fourth, received seven of the 43 first-place votes.

The 2012 Tigers will be playing on a new field, Bedford Field. The completion of the Class of 1952 Stadium project is still a year away, which means that Bedford will have temporary bleachers this year, instead of the full set that will be there next year, running up to the ones on the Class of 1952 side.

In the meantime, the temporary ones should still draw huge crowds to see this team.

It's one that will be well-worth watching.

It should be a fascinating year.