National Coaches Day

TigerBlog has no idea how something becomes "National Whatever Day."

It just seems like every day, there's something incredibly random that is being celebrated. National Donut Day. National Baldness Day. National Small Dog Day. Really. Those were actual days.

Do small dogs have a good communications team at work? How'd they get their own day? Who runs the small dog lobby? 

For the record, by the way, TigerBlog prefers small dogs to big dogs. His general rule is the shorter the legs, the cuter the dog. Hey, maybe he should try to sell that to the people behind the small dog movement.

As for National days, TB could look this up for you, but nah. There are some things that are better left mysterious.

Most of the time, these National days are hardly worth noticing, with all due respect to small dogs and their PR agents. 

Yesterday, though, turned out to be something a bit different. It was National Coaches Day.

There are few professions that make an impact on other people, particularly young people, like coaching can, for better and for worse. Forget the coaches who make millions of dollars a year. The vast, vast majority of coaches are making way less than that but are having a major impact on the lives of the people who come to play on their teams.

Pete Carril, Princeton's Hall of Fame former men's basketball coach, used to say that there was nothing better than a great high school coach. As TB has said before, one of Carril's disciples once bemoaned the fact that a player with great potential had instead had a lousy foundation in the fundamentals of the game and would never be able to catch up. His high school coach, he said, should be "taken into the town square and flogged." It sounds like a medieval England thing.

Princeton has put together an incredible history in athletics, dating back to 1864, when the baseball team played Williams in the first intercollegiate game in school history, and to 1869, when Princeton and Rutgers played the first football game. There were no coaches for those teams, only captains, and it wasn't until around 1900 that teams first started to have actual coaches.

Since then, some of the greatest coaches in the history of their sports have coached at Princeton. The list is long, and it's not worth going down it for fear of leaving someone out.

Coach at Princeton is not for everyone. To be successful, you have to buy into what the University and athletic program are all about. There are no athlete dorms. There are no nights in hotels prior to home games. That's not what student-athlete experience means at Princeton.

No, what Princeton means is having a well-rounded educational experience that values both the student experience and the athletic experience. It's about allowing the people who play at Princeton to succeed at the highest level of both.

What TB has always admired most about Princeton's coaches is that they truly believe this. They don't fall back on the idea that they can't compete against other schools with scholarships or different admissions standards. They use Princeton's perceived disadvantages as advantages and use them to find the right athletes for what they're trying to do. The results through the years speak for themselves.

Because of this, it's not for everyone. Would Nick Saban be a better football coach at Princeton than Bob Surace? No, he wouldn't. 

It's not always easy. You have a large roster, and not everyone can play, even if everyone wants to and thinks they should. You have kids from all over the country and in the case of many teams, internationally. You have wildly different personalities. On some teams, the best player is the hardest worker and best leader. On others, the best player hates to practice. It's all such a difficult dynamic to navigate.

In addition to all of this, Princeton's coaches make a lifelong, lasting impact on their athletes. What's most fascinating is that the impact isn't always immediate. 

TB has spoken to many athletes from 10, 20, 30 or even more years ago who want to apologize to their Princeton coach for not understanding what they were doing as it was happening. Only years later did they see the light, and they have been so grateful for the lessons learned.

So yes, happy National Coaches Day a day late to all of Princeton's coaches, current and former. They are an amazing group of people who do amazing work, and they deserve to be saluted.