Happy Summer Friday

Welp, is it too soon to start counting down how many weeks there are until the first Princeton Athletic event of the 2024-25 season?

No? In that case, the first event is six weeks from tonight. That would be August 23, when the women's soccer team hosts Miami (Fla.) at 7 pm on Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium. 

This is not to be confused with the Miami in Ohio, which will be at Princeton in September for field hockey. 

In the meantime, it's still July, so enjoy the summer weekend.

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TigerBlog wrote the other day about the amazing lineage that is the history of the Princeton men's basketball program. 

The women's tennis program doesn't quite have the same connection between each of its own head coaches. What it does have is an extraordinarily successful tradition in is own right, dating to the first days of the program, which in fact were also the birth of women's athletics at Princeton.

The first women's tennis coach was named Eve Kraft. She took the position in 1971 after Merrily Dean Baker, who had been hired to get women's athletics off the ground at the age of 28, made her an offer she couldn't refuse: coach the team and get paid nothing.

Kraft jumped at the chance and then put together a three-year record of 26-0, with three Middle States championships mixed in. That's a pretty high bar, no? 

Nobody else has gone 26-0, of course, though Kraft's replacement, Ann Marie Hicks, did go 5-0 in 1974 as Kraft's replacement. The succession of coaches, the ones who actually began to get paid, might not have had the same perfect records, but they do have something else in common: They all won championships.

The new Princeton women's tennis head coach is Elizabeth Begley, hired this week to take over for Jamea Jackson, who left for Arizona State after winning Ivy League titles in both of the seasons she coached at Princeton. Begley already has two Ivy titles under her belt, as she was an assistant coach at Princeton under Laura Granville in the 2016 and 2018 championship seasons.

In between then and now, she spent time as an assistant at USC and Loyola Marymount. 

For more on Begley's hire, click HERE.

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TigerBlog will never understand how a Major League Baseball manager could lift a pitcher who has a no-hitter going through seven innings. That's what happened yesterday when Pittsburgh rookie Paul Skenes threw seven hitless innings against Milwaukee and was pulled after throwing 99 pitches.

Pittsburgh won the game 1-0, but 1) Skenes didn't get a chance to finish his no-no and 2) the bullpen allowed a hit in the eighth. 

Imagine being a manager who tried to take Nolan Ryan out of a game in which he had allowed no runs through seven innings. Yeah, wasn't happening. 

And guess what. Starting pitchers didn't break down back then the way they do now. Oh well.

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While the topic is baseball, how about Princeton's Jake Koonin? He's playing in the New England Collegiate Baseball League this summer, and he's sort of been on a tear of late. Actually, of late, as in the entire season.

Koonin, who plays for the Keene SwampBats, is second in the NECBL in batting at .405, and he leads the league with eight home runs in 84 at-bats. In addition, his 21 RBI are third in the league, one behind the two players who lead the league.

Koonin was a second-team All-Ivy League selection this past season, his sophomore year at Princeton, where he hit .319 with 52 hits in 44 games.

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The Opening Ceremonies of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris are two weeks from tomorrow. Princeton has 26 total Olympians, of which 13 are Americans and 13 are from a total of nine other countries. 

The 26 Princeton athletes will be the most the school has ever sent to one Olympic Games.

You'll be able to follow all of the Princetonians in Paris right here and through goprincetontigers.com and the Princeton Athletics social media channels.

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And with that, enjoy your weekend. The six weeks between now and opening day will go fast, but not that fast.