Traveling Tigres

To start your Tuesday, here is some fairly wholesome content. 

In fact, you might call it some All-American content, All-American in the Cambridge Dictionary sense of the term: Considered to be typical of the U.S., and respected and approved of by Americans. Wholesome. Healthy. Hard-working.

Of course, the flag is a dead giveaway that the whole "American" part isn't exactly accurate in this case, but you get the idea:

Those are three Princeton field hockey freshmen, from left: Lydia Bills, Ottilie Sykes and Ella Cashman. Clearly, they are English, coming from the King's School of Chester (Bills), the Repton School (Sykes) and the Tiffin School for Girls (Cashman).

In all, the Tiger field hockey team has 21 players this year, and seven of them are from England. They were probably all disappointed Sunday morning, and it had nothing to do with field hockey.

The English women's soccer team, known as the Lionesses, reached the final of the Women's World Cup, only to fall 1-0 to Spain in Sunday's championship game. If you watched it, you know that the Spanish were by far the better team that day, with uncanny passing that led to a huge edge in possession time and very few chances for the English. 

In fact, it could easily have been 3-0 had England goalkeeper Mary Eaps not just gotten her hand on a shot that she deflected off the post just before the end of the half and not stopped a penalty kick in the second half. 

Two days before that game, TigerBlog walked out of Jadwin Gym Friday afternoon with Princeton women's head basketball coach Carla Berube and assistant coach Lauren Battista when they informed TB that the team was heading off on a European trip the next morning. Their first stop? Barcelona. 

TB was there this past October on the men's lacrosse team's trip, which also included a stop in Andorra. The women's basketball players are going from Barcelona to Greece for the second part of their week.

Of course, the Tigers were in Barcelona during the final and for the aftermath of the Spanish win. Was it craziness, TB asked the two coaches?

Nope. It was nothing. You couldn't even tell that anything had happened, Berube said. How is that possible? It's because, as TB learned when he was there and Berube reminded him, Barcelona is in Catalonia, which has its own version of the language and would love to be an independent nation.

Still, a bunch of the Spanish women play for Barcelona. TB expected some sort of celebration there, no? The rest of the country appeared to be all in on it. This is from an AP story he saw:

The celebrations were not comparable to those after the men's World Cup title, but the gatherings to support the women's team were still significant. There were viewing parties organized by local officials in more than 100 cities across Spain. In Madrid, fans watched the final in bars throughout the city and at an arena where a big screen was set up for nearly 7,000 people who signed up in advance for free tickets.

Oh, and the woman who scored the goal for Spain? Olga Carmona? She found out after the game that her father had passed away. If you saw her reaction to the goal, it was to honor the mother of a friend of hers, who also recently passed away.

As for the women's basketball team, there are three games on the schedule during the trip. There are also tourist and educational opportunities, and the women already have done two of the things that the men's lacrosse team did: visit La Sagrada Familia and do a bike tour through the city. 

If you recall from what TB wrote last fall, he'd never been to Barcelona before and he isn't usually a city guy, but Barcelona is a special place.

The foreign trip, which teams are allowed to take once every four years, allowed the Tigers to come back to campus a bit early for some extra practice time. It also is a great bonding experience for a team, especially one that already has such a winning culture in place.

The women's basketball Twitter feed is a great place to keep up with their travels.