Spring Is Here

Spring is here!!!!

Hey, what's a few exclamation points between friends? If there is a day that deserves them, it's when spring arrives. 

Already the days are getting longer. The temperatures are rising. TigerBlog spoke to someone yesterday who said that he wasn't quite ready to put his snowblower away, but TB assured him he could. 

Probably.

You can tell it must be spring, since the schedule for the weekend includes the Ivy League openers for baseball and softball. TB will get back to that in a few moments. 

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First, there is still a little bit of winter to go. And there was still one very special moment for a Princeton wrestler — in the City of Brotherly Love, no less.

The NCAA wrestling championships are being held at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia. Princeton's Luke Stout, the No. 11 seed at 197, won his first match yesterday, defeating Mickey O'Malley of Drexel 4-3. That win vaulted him into the second round last night, where his opponent was the sixth seed, Mac Something of Pitt.

Mac what? Mac Stout. There they were, brother against brother, in Round 2 of the NCAA championships. 

It was 10:17 last night when they took to Mat No. 6. There was no announcer on the ESPN+ broadcast, but you could hear the arena public address in the background. He said, TB is pretty sure, that this was the first brother vs. brother match in the NCAA championship history. He definitely said "this is really happening" when the match began and he introduced the two brothers.

It looked like any other match, once the reality of the fact that it was two brothers went away. In the end, it was Mac who won, 4-2. 

Oh, and instead of the cursory post-match handshake, there was a hug between the two.

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This weekend will, as TB said, see the opening games in Ivy baseball and softball. For Princeton softball, that means three games against Harvard, the last two teams standing in Ivy softball each of the least three years. 

More than that, it's the debut of Cynthia Lynn Paul '94 Field, located on the Meadows Campus. It is the first Princeton athletic venue named for a female alum. Paul was a member of Princeton's Ivy League title-winning team in 1991 after growing up in Cherry Hill, N.J., and went on to found Lynrock Lake LP, an investment management firm based in Rye Brook, N.Y. 

There are two games tomorrow, beginning at 12:30, and then one more Sunday, also at 12:30. 

The baseball team is also at home, against Dartmouth for three, with a doubleheader tomorrow starting at 11:30 and then a single game Sunday at noon. 

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The men's lacrosse team hosts Harvard tomorrow at noon. Princeton is 4-2, but it was the No. 1 team in the NCAA's first RPI release. 

How tough has Princeton's schedule been so far? Going by the RPI, Princeton has wins over No. 3 North Carolina, No. 4 Duke, No. 6 Penn State and No. 25 Rutgers, with losses to No. 2 Maryland and No. 5 Cornell (last week in Ithaca).

Where is Harvard in this? That would be 8th. And Princeton's next opponent, Dartmouth? That would be 17th. 

Harvard opened its Ivy season last week with a home win against Yale. 

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McKenzie Blake and Coulter Mackesy continue to chase the career records for goals with Princeton lacrosse, which currently stand at 209 (Kyla Sears for the women) and 163 (Jesse Hubbard for the men). 

Blake and her teammates will be in Baltimore tonight to take on Towson. The Tigers, by the way, are the No. 6 team in the women's RPI, the highest rating of any Ivy team.

Blake currently has 175 career goals, leaving her 34 away from Sears. At her current pace of 4.71 goals per game (third-best in Division I), she'd finish the regular season with 212. 

As for Mackesy, he has 143 goals in his career. With three more he would tie Chris Massey for second place at 146, and he's obviously 20 behind Hubbard's 163. If he continues at his current pace of 3.33 per game, he'd finish the regular season with 166.

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The complete weekend schedule can be found HERE.