Tuesday, June 11, 2024

That's A Wrap

TigerBlog would like to share with you part of an email he got yesterday, which, by the way, came from someone he's never met:

"Nope. Launching yourself off the pad is an automatic DQ."

Hmmm. If you read yesterday's entry, you get it.

And, giving credit where it's due, TB offers his colleague Chas Dorman's entry on X from yesterday, with the winners of the Princeton Athletics Hunger Games. You can find them at a local spa, getting their $100 treatments:

The winners were men's water polo coach Dusty Litvak, women's basketball assistant coach Lauren Battista, Jessica Muroff from the business office, Chas, CJ Ford from the events staff and grounds crew forman Brad Cabral. 

It was Brad, by the way, who figured out that the key to staying on the jousting pad was to lower your center of gravity as much as possible. TB ran into him yesterday, and he said his body felt it the next day but it was worth it.

So that's a wrap on the Hunger Games, as much fun as it was. 

And, by the way, on the 2023-24 athletic year at Princeton, that is.

As an aside, TigerBlog was talking to men's lacrosse coach Matt Madalon the other day about the rising high school junior class, which turns out to be the Class of 2030. Yikes. The whole Y2K thing was a long, long time ago.

The 2023-24 year ended over the weekend at the NCAA Track and Field Championships. The Tigers sent eight athletes there, and six earned All-American honors.

The list of track and field All-Americans is this:

Shea Greene, javelin, second-team
Siniru Iheoma, discus, second-team
Casey Helm, discus, second-team
Jackson Shorten, steeplechase, second-team
Georgina Scott, long jump, honorable mention
Tessa Mudd, pole vault, honorable mention
Nicholas Bendsten, 5,000, honorable mention

If you're wondering, that group of six athletes consists of five sophomores and two juniors (Iheoma, Bendtsen). 

Shorten, in the steeplechase, ran an 8:29.84. When Princeton's Donn Cabral (no relation to Brad, though both have won on the big stage) won the event in 2012, his NCAA title time was 8:35.44, winning by nearly five seconds.

What does that mean? TigerBlog has no idea. He assumes it has something to do with how conditions differ race to race, or the pace is set differently. 

For instance, two months after the NCAA final, Cabral in 2012 ran an 8:25.91 to finish eighth at the Olympic Games. This was after his Olympic qualifying time had been 8:21.46 and his all-time best of 8:19.14 was set in a college event one month before the NCAAs.

Hey, any reason to talk about Donn Cabral is a good one, right?

The track and field performance brings to an end another athletic year of overwhelming success for Princeton.

The Tigers won 12 Ivy League titles and 15 league championships overall. You want to hear something crazy? 

In the last three years, more than 40 percent of Princeton Athletic seasons ended in a league championship. That's across every team.

Can there possibly be another school in the country that can make that claim? TB wishes there would be an easy way to look that up. 

This success doesn't just happen accidentally. 

TB spoke to Madalon when he was on the sideline of a field at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, evaluating the next generations of lacrosse talent. Multiply that out by every coach at Princeton, who spend their summers on hot, dusty fields, in hot, sweaty gyms or in any other necessary venue, wherever it may be. 

For most of the people here in the department, the summer is a time to relax and take it slow as the new athletic year is still a few months away. 

For the coaches? This is the time of year when recruiting hits its peak. And you can't win if you don't work hard at this time of year too.

You can't take winning for granted. You can't rest on your laurels. You can't assume that you'll win again next year just because you did this year.

It's not a birthright.

And so TB leaves you with this, which he has played for you before. It sums it up perfectly. 

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