Game Week

Welcome to Game Week No. 1.

In case you haven't been paying attention, the first athletic event of the 2025-26 academic year is Friday at 5, when the women's soccer team hosts Rutgers. The second will be Sunday, when the women are at Loyola.  

In a normal year of athletic scheduling, there will only be two or three more weeks between now and June without a Princeton athletic event. There won't be any between now and December. 

The easiest way to know if you're cut out for working in college athletics is to ask yourself if you are excited at this time of year or dreading it. This will be TigerBlog's 37th season covering Princeton (five at the newspaper and now his 32nd here), and this time of year is still exciting. 

TigerBlog has no idea how it works in other professions. Do the workload and the subject matter change as the seasons change like they do in college athletics? 

TB has always been part of a world where the time of year dictates where he is focused. Even when he was really young, beginning when he six years old, his world was school, school, school and then eight weeks of sleepaway camp. 

While he's on the subject, the camp he attended from when he was six until he was 10 was called Camp Toledo, in High Falls, N.Y. He wrote about Camp Toledo here six years ago, including this sentence: 

"TigerBlog has a lot of fond, idyllic, Wonder Years-type memories of his summer camp days."

That entry drew 20 comments, almost all of which were the same. The poster went to Camp Toledo and talked about being there 50, 60 or 70 years ago. One commenter even said that the songs from Color War are forever stuck in his or her brain, just like they are for TB. 

Did they include their names? Nope. They were all anonymous. If you post about Toledo, leave your name. 

That rant over, this is around the time of the summer when the eight weeks would be ending and it would be time to head home, in advance of another school year. Late August has always been a time for gearing up to start the cycle all over again. 

For a few Princetonians, the late summer (is it late summer?) has meant continuing to compete internationally, even as the first game week has arrived. 

Ben Syer, the head coach of the men's hockey team, served as the associate head coach for the United States U18 team that won the Hlinka Gretzky Cup. Where was the tournament held? That would be Trencin, Slovakia.

The U.S. team went 2-1 in its group, with only a loss to Sweden. The Americans then took down Canada 4-3 in a shootout in the semifinal and then Sweden 5-3 in the gold medal game. 

It was the second win for Team USA in the 34 years of the tournament. The other was in 2003. 

The Junior Pan Am Games field hockey tournaments have reached the medal round in Asuncion, Paraguay, a mere 6,922 miles away from Trencin. The U.S. men's team is coached by Princeton assistant Pat Harris, and his team will play in the bronze medal game today at 4:30 this afternoon against Chile after a tough 1-0 loss to Canada in the semifinals.

Talia Schenck, a rising senior on the Princeton women's team, is part of the USA U21 national team, that one who is also competing in Asuncion. The Americans defeated Uruguay 2-1 last night in Semifinal No. 2, advancing to the championship game against Argentina (tomorrow at 6:45 pm Eastern).

The picture above, by the way, is of Harris and Schenck. With her four goals, Schenck is tied for the fourth leading goal scorer in the tournament. 

That the final matches these two teams is hardly a surprise. Between them, they have won all four of their games and outscored their opponents by a combined 50-2, with the lone goals yesterday, with the U.S. win over Uruguay and when Argentina defeated Chile 4-1 in the other semifinal.  

It wasn't exactly smooth last night for the Americans, who went up 2-0, had a goal early in the fourth disallowed to keep it 2-0 and then had Uruguay quickly counter, turning a 3-0 game into a 2-1 game with 12 minutes left. From there the ball was in the U.S. end pretty much the rest of the time, but Uruguay couldn't tie it — despite outshooting the Americans 11-7. 

The win last night guaranteed Schenck and the Americans no worse than a silver medal. 

When the game ends tomorrow, she'll be flying home to join her Princeton teammates, who are early on in practice ahead of their Sept. 5 opener. 

For this week, it's women's soccer only. It's Game Week, and those are exciting words to type.