Cody, Cindy And The Ivy Softball Tournament

The NCAA lacrosse tournaments begin for Princeton this weekend. 

The women are at Boston College, where they will play Drexel today at 4 in a matchup of at-large teams. The winner gets the host Eagles Sunday at noon.

The men are at seventh-seeded Maryland tomorrow night, with face-off at 7:30. The winner of that one advances to the quarterfinals against the winner of second-seed Duke and Utah. 

You can find more about both teams HERE.

TigerBlog wants to play pickleball with Cindy Cohen.

That's one of his takeaways after listening to Cohen and Cody Chrusciel do seven innings on ESPN+ yesterday of the Ivy League softball tournament, currently being played at Princeton's Strubing Field. They were excellent together, another gem of a broadcast team that is broadcasting Ivy sports these days.

Oh, and how many broadcast teams have ever both had the initials C.C.?

Cody, of course, is the voice of all kinds of events at Princeton — when he's not overseeing the productions that everyone these days take for granted. There's a lot of work that goes into getting the Tigers, and the other league schools, on air.

There are quite a few people who think that ESPN sends a crew to produce all of these games. That is not the case. 

The productions are done in-house. Imagine how many events a year are broadcast here and throughout the league, and then consider how much goes into making that happen. 

And Cindy Cohen? She's one of the greatest coaches Princeton has ever had, which you would know if you read TB's book on the first 50 years of women's athletics here. What? You didn't read it? 

You're in luck. You can buy it HERE. Trust him. It's worth it.

If you are just guessing, you could probably piece it together that Cohen was a softball coach at Princeton. She's the one who led the team to, among other milestones, two Women's College World Series appearances.

She is also a longtime TB favorite. And she doesn't live all that far from him, so maybe they can play pickleball.

It was during yesterday's Princeton-Harvard winners' bracket final game that Cohen mentioned that broadcasting the Ivy tournament is the only thing that could get her to skip pickleball for four straight days. She also said that she wouldn't have minded being a meteorologist, since you can be wrong most of the time and nobody cares.

She also analyzed the games, in a way that only someone who coached for as long as she could can. Mix that with Cody's voice and experience as a Minor League baseball announcer, and, well, you have a great broadcast.

If you're a Princeton fan, you also have had a great start to the tournament. The Tigers defeated Dartmouth 4-0 in Game 1 and then Harvard yesterday 3-1 to reach the final, while Dartmouth rebounded to beat Yale 4-3 in the losers' bracket game, making Yale the first team eliminated. 

That game, by the way, had a wild ending, as Yale, down two, had a runner thrown out at third after a runner crossed the plate for the final out of the game.

The way this leaves things is that Harvard plays Dartmouth today in an elimination game, and then the winner of that plays Princeton in the final. The winner today needs to defeat Princeton twice to win the championship.

For the winner, there is an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. 

Princeton got to the final with two great pitching performances yesterday. Starter Cassidy Shaw took Princeton into the fourth inning with a 3-1 lead, and Brielle Wright took it from there, going the rest of the way without allowing a hit, let alone a run, with three strikeouts and a walk. 

Lauren Sablone, whose three-run shot to win the last game of the regular season last weekend is the reason everyone is in Princeton now, scored Princeton's first run against the Crimson with some small ball, including hustling in for the score on some great baserunning. In fact, Princeton got all three of its runs in the third, with a two-RBI single from Karis Ford as well.

There's a chance of rain today — there's that meteorologist thing again. For now, the Harvard-Dartmouth game is schedule for noon, and Princeton vs. the winner starts tomorrow at noon, with the if necessary game to follow if, well, necessary. 

Should there be rain, everything gets pushed back a day.