Count von Count

How was your weekend?

TigerBlog starts your Monday with three numbers: four, eight and 17. He also asks you to think about which one is the most impressive. 

This has sort of a "Sesame Street" vibe now that he thinks about it. Count von Count and all that, though he'd count out each number, no?

He'll start with four. Or, as the Count, as he is also known, would have put it: "One, two, three, four ... four seconds."

If you go back to Saturday, April 19, and check out the Princeton women's open rowing schedule, you'll note that the Tigers were beaten by Yale by 3.5 seconds on Lake Carnegie. If you go back to last week and check out the women's rowing national rankings, you'd see that Princeton (No. 6) was ranked behind Yale (No. 5).

The only teams ahead of them were, in order, Stanford, Texas, Washington and Tennessee. 

The Ivy League women's rowing championships were held yesterday on the Cooper River in South Jersey. Yale went off as the big favorite, but that's not how it played out. 

Princeton got out quickly and led wire-to-wire. In the end, the Tigers pretty much reversed the regular season outcome. 

Okay, it wasn't exactly four seconds. It was 3.8. The Count rounds up. 

Splash Down. 🧡🖤 pic.twitter.com/N8Rk9I6YDc

— Princeton Open Women (@princetonwcrew) May 18, 2025

The Princeton first varsity eight boat consisted of Sara Covin, Margot LeRoux, Joely Cherniss, Anne du Croo de Jongh, Katherine George, Eleanor Smith, Samantha Smart, Zoe Scheske and Kerry Grundlingh.

Next up?

"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight ... eight consecutive championships."

The winner of the first varsity 8 race is recognized as the Ivy League champion. And how many years has that winner been Princeton? 

Well, it doesn't take a math genius like the Count to figure that out. The answer is eight. It's also 10 of the last 11, for that matter.

It's an incredible run of consistency on the part of the women's open program, whose roster has turned over several times during that run. Along the way, Princeton has produced Olympian after Olympian and then seem them graduate, only to be replaced by new generations after new generation. 

The constant? That would be head coach Lori Dauphiny. Whatever goes into building a winning program — from the athletes to the culture to the leadership to the teaching to all of it — Dauphiny has long ago figured it out. 

And so that leaves one more number:

"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 ... 17 Ivy League championships."

That's how many Ivy League championships Princeton has won this academic year.

"That's a lot of championships," the Count says. 

For the official rundown, that would be: 

field hockey, women's soccer, women's volleyball, men's cross country, women's cross country, men's fencing, women's swimming and diving, men's swimming and diving, men's indoor track and field, women's indoor track and field, softball, women's lacrosse, men's golf, women's golf, men's outdoor track and field, women's outdoor track and field, women's open rowing. 

That doesn't include the men's water polo team's NWPA championship or the men's soccer team's Ivy League tournament championship.

And that is just an extraordinary accomplishment. In fact, it's a history-making one. 

The old record for Ivy titles in an academic year had been 15, done by Princeton in 2001-02 and 2010-11. 

Getting to 17? That seemed unlikely to TigerBlog. That would mean winning in more than half of the Ivy League's sports. And yet that's what Princeton did in 2024-25.

Can that ever be beaten? Who knows. 

What this record should not be is taken for granted. There are no guarantees for future success. This doesn't happen without a lot of great athletes and coaches, all of whom buy into the same positive, winning culture as women's open rowing. 

At the same time, there are seven other Ivy League schools who are also trying their best to catch Princeton. And so, once again, TigerBlog presents the same message he always does after a year like this one:

It's the end of the movie "Patton."