It's TAGD 10

TAGD WEBSITE

It probably didn't come as a shock to anyone that Xaivan Lee was named the Ivy League men's basketball Player of the Week.

Lee might have won it on the strength of his game against Old Dominion alone, a game in which he finished with19 points on 8-for-13 shooting, four rebounds, three assists and one steal. Ah, but the follow up was pretty spectacular too.

The sophomore then put up 30 points on 11-for-21 shooting, with six rebounds, four assists and a block. He started his day by hitting a few three-pointers and spent the rest of it driving to the hoop almost at will. Lee is now the third different Princeton player to win the award this year, along with Caden Pierce and Matt Allocco.

In addition to his time with the Canadian U19 team at the World Championships, Lee also spent some time this summer as a worker in the Office of Athletic Communications. As TigerBlog watched Lee get to 30 Saturday, he started to wonder what the highest single-game total ever for a Princeton basketball/OAC student worker was. 

He's pretty sure it was either Maggie Langlas or Kate Thirolf, teammates and 1,000 point scorers in the Class of 2000. One of them, he's pretty sure, had a career best of 27.

And where are they today, more than 20 years later? Maggie is a lawyer. Kate has a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Michigan.

That is what post-Princeton success looks like for Tiger athletes. What you can't see on a resume, though, is how much the athletic experience has prepared them, inspired them, challenged them, taught them and made them who they eventually become.

There are senior athlete exit surveys that are done each year. It would be great to be able to gather similar data 20 years later, after all of these former athletes have the chance to really understand what playing at Princeton did for them. 

Today is Tiger Athletics Give Day. It's the 10th TAGD, a 24-hour fundraising challenge that has been overwhelmingly successful in so many areas.

This is from the TAGD website:

The first nine years of TAGD have been incredible successes, yielding more than 67,000 gifts to-date; last year alone yielded a record $3.9 million in gifts across more than 6,700 donors, demonstrating the investment and commitment of our Princeton Athletics community. The response to our call for support year-over-year has been overwhelming, and every student-athlete has been directly impacted by the money that has been raised. These funds have helped fund initiatives such as locker room upgrades, international and out-of- region team travel and advancements in student-athlete resources, to name a few.

Your generosity has and will continue to provide our Princeton varsity student-athletes greater opportunities to achieve, serve and lead and ensure that our Tiger programs are able to compete at the highest level. We sincerely appreciate everything you do to support Princeton Athletics, and hope you will join us again on Tiger Athletics Give Day and make our tenth year memorable.

All of that is true, but it doesn't tell the whole story. It's what you're investing in with your gift that really matters, and the dollars and gifts are only a part of that. These gifts directly impact the student-athlete experience in ways that provide them with the opportunity to learn about themselves, learn about teamwork, learn about putting aside individual accomplishment to focus on the bigger picture of team success, to find out firsthand what culture means to a successful organization. 

You know it as "Education Through Athletics." 

Your gifts are doing way more than just helping the Tigers win games. They're helping fully develop some of the greatest young people you'll see anywhere - the kids who compete in Princeton uniforms.

You're helping develop them into the people they become for long after they graduate. 

You're helping create Maggie Langlas's and Kate Thirolf's — and the hundreds of others are a credit to what intercollegiate athletics is supposed to be all about. 

Everyone at Princeton Athletics thanks you.