Start Your Engines

When TigerBlog first broke into the newspaper business, he was covering local high school football.

Every Friday night and Saturday afternoon, he'd cover a game, and every time it ended, he'd get the same quotes from the coaches: 

* "They have a great team over there."
* "Our kids played hard."
* "Their kids played hard."
* "He runs a great program."

It didn't matter if the score was 21-20 or 56-0. It didn't matter if you won or lost. Every coach always said the same things, over and over and over. Eventually, TB stopped interviewing coaches.

Since that start, TB has been fortunate to be around some coaches who gave great quotes, funny quotes, off-beat quotes, eccentric quotes. What you don't usually get are honest quotes.

When Princeton was picked as a unanimous preseason favorite in the 1998 Ivy League men's basketball poll, Bill Carmody's simple response was "we should be." That was honest.

A few years earlier, Pete Carril was asked about his team's success in defending a high-scoring Dartmouth team. His quote: "They have guardable players, and we guarded them." Again, honest.

The problem with honesty is that it calls out someone, some team or some issue, and coaches never want to give the other team something to motivate them. That's why honesty stands out.

To that end, you really have to hand it to North Carolina women's soccer coach Anson Dorrance for his comments on whether or not he wants Stanford and Cal to join the ACC. Did you see what he said? 

Women’s Soccer HC Anson Dorrance acknowledges that adding Stanford and Cal to the ACC would be a “wonderful feather in the cap of our commissioner, but for us, with boots on the ground, no. This is going to be horrible for us. Our budgets aren’t extraordinary as it is, and now we would try to add in flights across the country to play these two schools, which will be incredibly expensive and then the fact that now we're exposing the whole country – not that Stanford and Cal don't have a national recruiting platform, of course they do – but if you put those two schools in the ACC, it's going to be so easy for them to recruit nationally. So, it'll just benefit them in my opinion, not us. We've built the best women's soccer conference in the country, and there's no way I want to share the glory of our conference with two schools that could do a very good job recruiting against us, and so basically I want Cal and Stanford to die on the vine. I look forward to seeing Stanford, which is a very difficult school to recruit against, I would look forward to them basically having it be so difficult for them to recruit the elite soccer player and then we would be in a position to obviously gain those kids and put the ACC in an even stronger position.”

Now that's really honest. Maybe a bit too honest? Of course, when you've won as many NCAA titles as Dorrance has (21 of them), you can say things like that. Geno Auriemma with UConn women's basketball is the same, to his great credit.

One of the greatest moments in Princeton women's athletic history came with Dorrance on the losing end, when Sean Driscoll's Princeton team defeated UNC 2-1 in overtime in the round-of-16 of the 2017 NCAA tournament. 

Driscoll and his Tigers open their 2023 season tonight at 7:30 on Mylsik Field at Roberts Stadium when they host Monmouth. In addition to being the women's soccer opener, it's also the first of more than 600 events for the 2023-24 athletic year at Princeton.

Each year is its own animal, with more unlikely storylines than likely ones that will play out during the next nine-plus months. Who is the athlete who makes the biggest jump? What freshmen will make immediate impacts? Which teams will be the ones who make history? 

Come May, who will win the Roper Trophy and von Kienbusch Award? What will be the biggest game of the year? What will be the biggest heartbreak? 

Each year at Princeton has had more than its share of wins, championships, big moments, historical performances. As TB always says, it's not something to ever take for granted. It's not Princeton's right to win the way it traditionally has, and there have been some down years, at least by Princeton standards.

On opening night, though, anything is possible. 

Princeton's 1,000 athletes across 38 sports are all at the starting line tonight. It's time for the opening kickoff.

It's why you work in college athletics.