On The Way To Louisville

TigerBlog was walking around Terminal C at Newark Airport yesterday morning in advance of his flight with the field hockey team to Louisville, where the Tigers will open their season in the annual Ivy/ACC Crossover Challenge.

Actually, depending on which team's website you go to, it's either the Ivy/ACC Crossover Challenge of the ACC/Ivy Crossover Challenge.

Whatever you call it, Princeton will be playing Louisville today at 1 and then North Carolina Sunday at 10:30. Penn will also be in Kentucky, playing the same teams on opposite days. 

If you didn't check out the preseason rankings, Louisville is No. 7 and North Carolina is No. 2, despite having won the last two NCAA titles. Don't worry. Princeton will also play the preseason No. 1 (Northwestern), as well as No. 4 Maryland, No. 8 Harvard, No. 9 Rutgers and No. 10 Syracuse. 

Princeton is ranked 15th to start the year. 

Anyway, as TB walked around the terminal before boarding, he was wearing his brand-new Princeton Field Hockey longsleeve t-shirt. This drew the attention of a woman who said that she had two kids who were current Princeton students.

She then mentioned that her husband was a Princeton Lacrosse alum. As she was clearly a few years younger than TB, this meant that there was a near 100 percent change that he would know her husband.

"Who is he?" TB asked.

"Paul Murphy," she said. 

This triggered in TB the piece of his brain that has the Paul Murphy file in it. Murphy was a great player on the early NCAA championship teams as a face-off man and midfield force.

So just how much could TB share without coming across as somewhat strange? 

First he smiled, and then he said "Paul Murphy from Rochester?" This impressed Mrs. Murphy, who smiled. 

TB was then going to mention that Murphy was No. 44, but he thought better of it. He could have kept going from there but decided that was enough. 

Instead, he said that he had just seen him a week earlier at the Friends of Lacrosse golf outing. Murphy is a regular at those outings, and it's always good to see him there.

The moral of the story? There are two, actually. One, wearing Princeton gear is a great icebreaker. Two, sometimes you have to know when to dial back your overwhelming knowledge of something.

Anyway, moving back to the flight to Louisville. TigerBlog's boarding pass put him in Seat 21B. And while he always wants the window, he figured who would trade for the middle? 

Ah, but then it turned out that the plane was a regional jet that had two seats on each side, so 21B was the aisle. And who was dealt 21A? That would be Beth Yeager, back from her year out of school to focus on the Olympics.

Yeager hates the window, ironically. She always wants the aisle. It was the perfect trade.

As they took the nearly two-hour flight to Kentucky, Yeager was working on her homework. As TB looked over her shoulder at her iPad, he could see that her homework involved Chinese. 

"I can't help you with that," TB said. 

For Yeager, a less-than-two-hour flight is nothing. Not after all the international miles she's logged. 

Why go into all this depth? 

The team arrived at Newark Airport around 8:00 for the 9:55 flight. It did what teams do when they travel — went through check-in and security, surveyed the food options, did schoolwork, created social media content and lounged by the gate. 

There was laughing. Lots and lots of laughing.

The flight came in with a sweeping view over the city of Louisville. The rest of the day was spent eating, practicing, hanging out in the hotel.  

Speaking of the hotel, North Carolina is staying where Princeton is. So is the Notre Dame men's soccer team.

As TB has written many times before, moments like this are a huge part of the experience. In fact, when he talks to athletes from years and years ago, they as many times as not tell him that they remember the bus rides — or in this case plane rides  — as much as they do the games themselves. 

It's here that relationships solidify. 

Don't underestimate how much that helps once the games start.