When summer lacrosse tournaments or camp games end in ties, a standard tiebreaking procedure is the dreaded "Braveheart."
What's a Braveheart? It's one-on-one, full-field lacrosse, along with goalies. Each team sends out one player to face-off and then play one-on-one until somebody scores. It usually doesn't last too long, since it's a bit difficult to chase someone the length of a lacrosse field once you've given up a step.
TigerBlog thought this would have been a much cooler way to decide who advanced at the Liberty Hockey Invitational first round games Friday at the Prudential Center in Newark, rather than having a conventional three-round shootout.
UConn and Merrimack opened the tournament with a 2-2 tie, and Princeton and Yale concluded the day with their own 2-2 tie. Because of the tournament format, though, someone had to advance to the final, so there was a shootout.
How about a Braveheart instead? Each team sends out the goalie and one skater. They face off and play until someone scores. How much more fun would that be?
Hey, the NHL should adopt this too.
TigerBlog doesn't know much about hockey. He does know that Princeton has scored three goals this year, and they're all by freshmen. That's a good sign.
The Princeton-Yale game was a good one, the first for head coach Ron Fogarty with the Tigers, against the team that won the NCAA championship two years ago. The incredible thing about the game is that the teams meet again twice more in the regular season, and the next meeting was to be one day short of exactly three months later.
What will happen between then and now? A lot. But still, it was an entertaining day of hockey in Newark, and TB got a chance to see the arena, which he had not before.
At the same time, the Princeton women's hockey team was knocking off Cornell, who has dominated Ivy League women's hockey for the last few years. That game was played in Ithaca.
And this weekend, if it was Princeton-Cornell in Ithaca, Princeton won.
The Tigers and Big Red played in Ithaca in six different sports in a 28-hour stretch beginning with that women's hockey game, and Princeton went 6-0 in those six events. Maybe it's because Ithaca is Mollie Marcoux's hometown?
Anyway, if you're keeping track, Princeton defeated Cornell in women's hockey, field hockey, football, women's volleyball, women's soccer and men's soccer between last Friday and Saturday. It's left some of those teams right in the thick of the Ivy championship hunt.
* Field hockey
Princeton is tied with Columbia at 5-1 in the Ivy League. The Tigers host Penn Saturday, while Columbia is at Harvard.
Should only one win, then it would be outright Ivy League champion and the league's NCAA tournament representative. If they both win, then they share the title, but Columbia would be the league's automatic bid by virtue of its win over Princeton. In other words, Princeton needs to beat Penn and have Harvard beat Columbia to get to the NCAA tournament.
Penn and Harvard are both 3-3 in the league.
Things can get a bit murkier if Princeton and Columbia both lose and Cornell defeats Dartmouth, which would mean a three-way tie for the title. In that case, TigerBlog is pretty sure that there would be a random draw for the Ivy automatic bid, since all three would be 1-1 against each other and have a loss to either Penn or Harvard, who would be tied in the standings. TB has been wrong about these things before.
* Men's soccer
Don't look now - or actually look now - but Princeton is tied for first in the Ivy League men's soccer race. Princeton and Dartmouth are both 3-1-1, for 10 points. Harvard and Penn are both next with eight points.
There are two weeks left in the Ivy season, and Princeton hosts Penn and is at Yale. There is also a game Wednesday at American, a team earning votes in the national poll.
Should Princeton win its last two league games, it would be assured of at least a tie for the championship. Because Princeton's loss is to Dartmouth, Princeton would not get the league's automatic bid in a two-way tie, though TB figures the Tigers would be right in the mix for an at-large NCAA bid.
* Women's soccer
This is the final week of Julie Shackford's 20-year career as the women's soccer coach at Princeton. Her team can still get a share of the Ivy League title but cannot get the league's NCAA tournament bid.
Princeton has 10 points, trailing Harvard (13) and Dartmouth (12). A Tiger win over Penn Saturday, coupled with a Harvard loss to Columbia (eight points) and Dartmouth loss or tie in its game with Cornell (three points) gives Princeton a tie for the league championship. The Tigers cannot win a tiebreaker in either a two-way tie with Harvard or three-way tie with Harvard and Dartmouth, and Princeton cannot have a two-way tie with Dartmouth.
* Women's volleyball
There are two weekends and four matches left for each Ivy League women's volleyball team. Princeton is currently 7-3, trailing only Harvard and Yale, who are both 8-2.
The good news for Princeton is that they play both again, this Friday at home against Harvard and then the following Friday at Yale. Princeton is also home with Dartmouth Saturday.
The bad news? Princeton went 0-3 against those three the first time around. Still, the Tigers have a chance, and that's all they could really ask for at this point.
* Football
Princeton defeated Cornell 38-27 Saturday, going to 3-1 in the Ivy League with three games left, including one this Saturday at home at 3:30 against Penn.
Right now, Harvard is 4-0, followed by Princeton, Yale and Dartmouth all at 3-1. Princeton ends it season at Yale and home with Dartmouth.
Harvard knocked off Dartmouth Saturday in a match of the last two Ivy unbeatens. Harvard has also beaten Princeton.
Obviously, the Crimson finish the season against Yale, at home no less. Yale appears to have the best chance to knock off Harvard, who also has Columbia (0-4) and Penn (1-3) to go.
Princeton needs to win out and have someone beat Harvard. If that happens, then Princeton would be co-champion.
Showing posts with label women's volleyball. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women's volleyball. Show all posts
Monday, November 3, 2014
Thursday, October 16, 2014
One Time
It has to be so unfair to be a fan of the Baltimore Orioles.
Here your team emerges from nearly 20 years of chronically bad baseball. Finally, your team gets out of the shadows of the Yankees and Red Sox, who have won eight World Series between them in the last 18 years, and makes it to the American League Championship Series.
Surely this is an underdog team well worth rooting for, no? So what happens to your team? It finds waiting for it the Kansas City Royals, who are an even bigger underdog Cinderella type, and suddenly every neutral fan is against you.
It's hard to root against the Royals, who have an even bigger record of futility during the last 20, or even nearly 30, years than the Orioles.
Beginning in 1975, the Royals finished first or second 10 straight times and won the 1985 World Series, the only one in franchise history. Since then, though, the bottom basically fell out of a team that had little money and little fan interest.
By 1992, the Royals were in the their third straight year of finishing sixth in the AL West, and attendance dipped below 2,000,000. At no point since has it made it back, including this year.
Kansas City is playing in its first postseason since 1985 - and making the most of it. First there was a thrilling comeback win over Oakland in the wild card game, followed by sweeps over the Angels and Orioles that have put the Royals back in the World Series.
And they're 8-0 in the postseason. How nuts is that?
It's even nuttier when you consider that four of those eight wins are by one run and four of those wins were in extra innings. Of the other four games, two were decided by one run. The last two wins against the Orioles were 2-1 and 2-1.
By the way, here's a list of all Kansas City Royals players TigerBlog could have named before the playoffs began - .........
That's supposed to mean he couldn't have named any.
One thing these Royals have done is make it clear that these days, nothing is more overrated than starting pitching. Kansas City has won basically every game because of three bullpen guys whom TB had never heard of but who are completely lights out. Take yesterday. It was 2-1 in the sixth - and 2-1 when it ended.
The ability to win close games in the postseason is what defines greatness. Of Princeton's nine NCAA lacrosse championships between the men's and women's teams, five were won in overtime.
TigerBlog has been struck by the number of close games that Princeton teams have been playing this fall. Or at least he thought he was.
The numbers don't always back up what is originally suspected, so he figured he'd look.
He researched the football, two soccer and field hockey teams. He wasn't sure what to do with women's volleyball, since no game can be a one-point win but a match can be won 3-2.
Here's what he found:
* the men's soccer team has played 11 games, of which eight have been decided by either one goal or ended in a tie
* the women's soccer team has played 11 games, of which six have been decided by either one goal ended in a tie
* the football team has played four games, of which one has been decided by one point
* the field hockey team has played 12 games, of which six have been decided by one goal - and three have gone to overtime
* the women's volleyball team has played 15 matches, of which six ended 3-2, though it's not quite the same thing as one one-point game
Either way, add that up, and between the five sports, you have 53 games, of which 27 - or one more than half - have been either ties or one-point, one-goal or one-game margins.
If you factor out volleyball, then you have 38 games and 21 one-point margins. That's a lot, no?
TigerBlog didn't add this up, but the men's soccer team has probably played more than 80 percent of its season so far with the score either tied or one team up by one. That puts a ton of pressure on each possession, even in soccer, which has more possessions than any other sport, TB would guess.
Is this an anomaly? A year ago, Princeton played 17 men's soccer games, and 13 of them were one-goal or tie games. The women had eight in 17 games. The field hockey team had eight in 19 games. The football team had two in 10 games.
That's 31 of 63, or 49 percent, as opposed to 55 percent this year.
What does all this mean? Maybe it's just the nature of soccer and field hockey to play close games.
Maybe it's means nothing.
Or maybe it means that if you come watch a Princeton game, it's likely to go down to the wire. And other than football, it's free.
Yeah, let's go with that.
Here your team emerges from nearly 20 years of chronically bad baseball. Finally, your team gets out of the shadows of the Yankees and Red Sox, who have won eight World Series between them in the last 18 years, and makes it to the American League Championship Series.
Surely this is an underdog team well worth rooting for, no? So what happens to your team? It finds waiting for it the Kansas City Royals, who are an even bigger underdog Cinderella type, and suddenly every neutral fan is against you.
It's hard to root against the Royals, who have an even bigger record of futility during the last 20, or even nearly 30, years than the Orioles.
Beginning in 1975, the Royals finished first or second 10 straight times and won the 1985 World Series, the only one in franchise history. Since then, though, the bottom basically fell out of a team that had little money and little fan interest.
By 1992, the Royals were in the their third straight year of finishing sixth in the AL West, and attendance dipped below 2,000,000. At no point since has it made it back, including this year.
Kansas City is playing in its first postseason since 1985 - and making the most of it. First there was a thrilling comeback win over Oakland in the wild card game, followed by sweeps over the Angels and Orioles that have put the Royals back in the World Series.
And they're 8-0 in the postseason. How nuts is that?
It's even nuttier when you consider that four of those eight wins are by one run and four of those wins were in extra innings. Of the other four games, two were decided by one run. The last two wins against the Orioles were 2-1 and 2-1.
By the way, here's a list of all Kansas City Royals players TigerBlog could have named before the playoffs began - .........
That's supposed to mean he couldn't have named any.
One thing these Royals have done is make it clear that these days, nothing is more overrated than starting pitching. Kansas City has won basically every game because of three bullpen guys whom TB had never heard of but who are completely lights out. Take yesterday. It was 2-1 in the sixth - and 2-1 when it ended.
The ability to win close games in the postseason is what defines greatness. Of Princeton's nine NCAA lacrosse championships between the men's and women's teams, five were won in overtime.
TigerBlog has been struck by the number of close games that Princeton teams have been playing this fall. Or at least he thought he was.
The numbers don't always back up what is originally suspected, so he figured he'd look.
He researched the football, two soccer and field hockey teams. He wasn't sure what to do with women's volleyball, since no game can be a one-point win but a match can be won 3-2.
Here's what he found:
* the men's soccer team has played 11 games, of which eight have been decided by either one goal or ended in a tie
* the women's soccer team has played 11 games, of which six have been decided by either one goal ended in a tie
* the football team has played four games, of which one has been decided by one point
* the field hockey team has played 12 games, of which six have been decided by one goal - and three have gone to overtime
* the women's volleyball team has played 15 matches, of which six ended 3-2, though it's not quite the same thing as one one-point game
Either way, add that up, and between the five sports, you have 53 games, of which 27 - or one more than half - have been either ties or one-point, one-goal or one-game margins.
If you factor out volleyball, then you have 38 games and 21 one-point margins. That's a lot, no?
TigerBlog didn't add this up, but the men's soccer team has probably played more than 80 percent of its season so far with the score either tied or one team up by one. That puts a ton of pressure on each possession, even in soccer, which has more possessions than any other sport, TB would guess.
Is this an anomaly? A year ago, Princeton played 17 men's soccer games, and 13 of them were one-goal or tie games. The women had eight in 17 games. The field hockey team had eight in 19 games. The football team had two in 10 games.
That's 31 of 63, or 49 percent, as opposed to 55 percent this year.
What does all this mean? Maybe it's just the nature of soccer and field hockey to play close games.
Maybe it's means nothing.
Or maybe it means that if you come watch a Princeton game, it's likely to go down to the wire. And other than football, it's free.
Yeah, let's go with that.
Friday, September 5, 2014
Off And Running
TigerBlog stopped at the bank machine this past Saturday morning.
When he got there, a man about 10 years or so older than TB was just finishing his transaction and getting back into his car. As it was a nice day, he had the top down on his convertible.
TigerBlog has never owned a convertible. In fact, he can't remember ever being in one, other than when he was really, really little and FatherBlog had one.
As the man got back into his car to drive away, he cranked his music to a very high level. TB found this odd, as the man was probably in his 60s, as opposed to his teens or 20s.
And then there was the song itself. It took TB a second to get it, but then he figured it out. It was "Silhouettes On The Shade," a song TB recognized from Saturday night oldies of long ago. He couldn't remember who sang it and never would have come up with The Rays.
"Silhouettes On The Shade" is a doo-wop song from 1957. It was redone many times, including by the Four Seasons, Frankie Lymon, Herman's Hermits and the Crests.
At least that's what it says on Wikipedia.
Anyway, the man from the bank machine was dressed for golf, and TB assumed that's where he was going next. Was this the music he listened to to get him pumped to play? Maybe.
Perhaps that was his standard Saturday morning pre-tee psych music.
One of the most common sites before any athletic event is that of the competitors with headphones on, listening to whatever it is that gets them ready to go. TigerBlog, were he about to play in the Super Bowl or - even bigger - the Major League Lacrosse championship game - would listen to "Born To Run," of course.
Anytime television cameras go into the locker room or shows an athlete not yet in uniform out on the field or court or walking off a bus, there they are, the headphone. Hey, you can go into a Princeton locker room before a game and see the same thing.
Oh, and this is completely unrelated to anything, but TigerBlog has been in the writing business for more than 30 years and has never gotten a definitive answer to the question of whether or not it should be "lockerroom" or "locker room."
There are other avenues for inspiration.
Mollie Marcoux turned to one such avenue yesterday as she led her first department-wide staff meeting.
Before she ever spoke, there was Kurt Russell as Herb Brooks in "Miracle." It was the scene in the lockerroom (or is it locker room?) before the U.S. played the Soviet Union.
Go ahead. Watch it. Click right HERE and do it. And try not to get moved by it.
Watch whatever you need. Listen to whatever gets you going.
Tonight is opening night, for Princeton Athletics 2014-15.
It's actually late for opening night. Pretty much every school everywhere has already played.
Princeton has one home game today. The women's soccer team opens Julie Shackford's final season as head coach with a game against Rutgers at 7.
Admission is free. As in no charge. So be there.
Rutgers comes into the game having already played three times - and won all three. It's a tough task for a team in its opener to play a team playing its fourth game.
The field hockey team is at Duke, who is 2-0. The men's soccer team is at FDU, who is 0-2.
The women's volleyball team is actually the first team to play, as it goes at 12:30 today against Charlotte at Temple's tournament.
There is a difference between being in shape and being in game shape. The challenge for tonight isn't just the opponents themselves but the transition to competing in games that matter.
However it goes, tonight is the start of a new year. By the time June rolls around, Princeton will have had more than 600 other athletic contests. Will there be a national champion for the 44th straight year?
What teams will surprise? Which teams will win as they are expected to do? What will be the biggest story of the year?
It starts tonight.
Opening day.
Tramps like us? Baby, we were born to run.
When he got there, a man about 10 years or so older than TB was just finishing his transaction and getting back into his car. As it was a nice day, he had the top down on his convertible.
TigerBlog has never owned a convertible. In fact, he can't remember ever being in one, other than when he was really, really little and FatherBlog had one.
As the man got back into his car to drive away, he cranked his music to a very high level. TB found this odd, as the man was probably in his 60s, as opposed to his teens or 20s.
And then there was the song itself. It took TB a second to get it, but then he figured it out. It was "Silhouettes On The Shade," a song TB recognized from Saturday night oldies of long ago. He couldn't remember who sang it and never would have come up with The Rays.
"Silhouettes On The Shade" is a doo-wop song from 1957. It was redone many times, including by the Four Seasons, Frankie Lymon, Herman's Hermits and the Crests.
At least that's what it says on Wikipedia.
Anyway, the man from the bank machine was dressed for golf, and TB assumed that's where he was going next. Was this the music he listened to to get him pumped to play? Maybe.
Perhaps that was his standard Saturday morning pre-tee psych music.
One of the most common sites before any athletic event is that of the competitors with headphones on, listening to whatever it is that gets them ready to go. TigerBlog, were he about to play in the Super Bowl or - even bigger - the Major League Lacrosse championship game - would listen to "Born To Run," of course.
Anytime television cameras go into the locker room or shows an athlete not yet in uniform out on the field or court or walking off a bus, there they are, the headphone. Hey, you can go into a Princeton locker room before a game and see the same thing.
Oh, and this is completely unrelated to anything, but TigerBlog has been in the writing business for more than 30 years and has never gotten a definitive answer to the question of whether or not it should be "lockerroom" or "locker room."
There are other avenues for inspiration.
Mollie Marcoux turned to one such avenue yesterday as she led her first department-wide staff meeting.
Before she ever spoke, there was Kurt Russell as Herb Brooks in "Miracle." It was the scene in the lockerroom (or is it locker room?) before the U.S. played the Soviet Union.
Go ahead. Watch it. Click right HERE and do it. And try not to get moved by it.
Watch whatever you need. Listen to whatever gets you going.
Tonight is opening night, for Princeton Athletics 2014-15.
It's actually late for opening night. Pretty much every school everywhere has already played.
Princeton has one home game today. The women's soccer team opens Julie Shackford's final season as head coach with a game against Rutgers at 7.
Admission is free. As in no charge. So be there.
Rutgers comes into the game having already played three times - and won all three. It's a tough task for a team in its opener to play a team playing its fourth game.
The field hockey team is at Duke, who is 2-0. The men's soccer team is at FDU, who is 0-2.
The women's volleyball team is actually the first team to play, as it goes at 12:30 today against Charlotte at Temple's tournament.
There is a difference between being in shape and being in game shape. The challenge for tonight isn't just the opponents themselves but the transition to competing in games that matter.
However it goes, tonight is the start of a new year. By the time June rolls around, Princeton will have had more than 600 other athletic contests. Will there be a national champion for the 44th straight year?
What teams will surprise? Which teams will win as they are expected to do? What will be the biggest story of the year?
It starts tonight.
Opening day.
Tramps like us? Baby, we were born to run.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Winterizing
TigerBlog Jr. had a lacrosse event Sunday at Lehigh.
As the wind ripped down the mountains and across the fields, TigerBlog added layer after layer, until he had on a longsleeve t shirt, a longsleeve dri-fit, two fleeces and two sweatshirts, as well as gloves and a hat.
At one point, TB asked the assembled parents - with whom he's watched lacrosse for a long, long time - what percentage of the thousands of hours they'd been together featured weather that could be described as "pleasant."
Since these tournaments occur in the summer and late fall, the answer is "almost none." It's either says like Sunday was, or sweltering summer weekends.
This in turn led to a discussion of which was preferable, the oppressively hot or the "lazy wind." You know, the wind that goes smashing through everyone because it's too lazy to go around you.
Almost universally, the answer was the heat.
TigerBlog was in full agreement. He's never been a cold weather person. He doesn't understand what the attraction is.
Even if you like to ski, how does the fact that it's freezing in January in Princeton help you do that? You still have to find someplace to go that has snow and a mountain.
TigerBlog walked outside this morning and found something that he never likes to see - snow. Okay, it was hardly a blizzard, just a few wet flakes.
But it's a nasty sign, one that says that winter is creeping up around here and the last of the days where it is sunny and in the 60s are probably gone until the spring.
Actually, this weekend looks like a pretty good one, with Saturday's high around here supposed to be 57.
The winter season, if not actual winter, arrived a few weeks ago with the start of hockey season, and both basketball teams opened their seasons Sunday.
Fall, though, is still around, at least for a little while longer.
Princeton has nine "fall" sports, not including tennis and golf, which also have fall events but whose championship season is the spring.
Of the nine fall sports, women's soccer and sprint football have completed their seasons. Men's soccer has one game left, this Saturday at home against Yale. Women's volleyball has two matches left, against Yale and Brown at home this weekend.
Both cross country teams will be at the NCAA regionals Friday at Lehigh. The NCAA championships will be Saturday the 23rd in Terre Haute, Ind.
The men's water polo team will compete at the Eastern championships at Brown Nov. 22-24, with a spot in the NCAA Final Four on the line.
The NCAA field hockey tournament begins this weekend, and Princeton, the Ivy League champion for the 19th time in 20 years, plays Penn State at Maryland Saturday in the opening round. Penn State defeated Princeton 4-3 earlier this year on Bedford Field.
For the winner of that game there is in all probability Maryland, who will play the winner of the play-in game between Quinnipiac and American.
Princeton and Maryland have combined to win the last three NCAA titles, including Princeton's win last year.
Lastly, there is the football team.
Princeton is 7-1 overall, 5-0 in the Ivy League, and hosting Yale Saturday in a fairly big game. At stake? A win would bring at least a share of the Ivy title and a bonfire. A loss would mean no bonfire and a tougher road to an Ivy title.
Princeton's final game is at Dartmouth, a team that is currently 3-2 in the league, the same as Yale and Penn. Harvard is 4-1.
Dartmouth and Yale currently rank 1-2 in the league in scoring defense. Princeton has been putting up big numbers all year in the league, and in fact the 38 the Tigers scored against Penn were the fewest they have scored in a league game this year.
Dartmouth has allowed 80 points in five league games. Yale has allowed 100.
And with that, the fall season will be over. It'll be all winter teams after that.
On the one hand, that means the coming of the cold, which TB can't stand.
On the other hand, it means the next outdoor event for Princeton will be three months away.
Feb. 22. Men's lacrosse against Hofstra. Women's lacrosse against Loyola.
That's looking on the bright side.
As the wind ripped down the mountains and across the fields, TigerBlog added layer after layer, until he had on a longsleeve t shirt, a longsleeve dri-fit, two fleeces and two sweatshirts, as well as gloves and a hat.
At one point, TB asked the assembled parents - with whom he's watched lacrosse for a long, long time - what percentage of the thousands of hours they'd been together featured weather that could be described as "pleasant."
Since these tournaments occur in the summer and late fall, the answer is "almost none." It's either says like Sunday was, or sweltering summer weekends.
This in turn led to a discussion of which was preferable, the oppressively hot or the "lazy wind." You know, the wind that goes smashing through everyone because it's too lazy to go around you.
Almost universally, the answer was the heat.
TigerBlog was in full agreement. He's never been a cold weather person. He doesn't understand what the attraction is.
Even if you like to ski, how does the fact that it's freezing in January in Princeton help you do that? You still have to find someplace to go that has snow and a mountain.
TigerBlog walked outside this morning and found something that he never likes to see - snow. Okay, it was hardly a blizzard, just a few wet flakes.
But it's a nasty sign, one that says that winter is creeping up around here and the last of the days where it is sunny and in the 60s are probably gone until the spring.
Actually, this weekend looks like a pretty good one, with Saturday's high around here supposed to be 57.
The winter season, if not actual winter, arrived a few weeks ago with the start of hockey season, and both basketball teams opened their seasons Sunday.
Fall, though, is still around, at least for a little while longer.
Princeton has nine "fall" sports, not including tennis and golf, which also have fall events but whose championship season is the spring.
Of the nine fall sports, women's soccer and sprint football have completed their seasons. Men's soccer has one game left, this Saturday at home against Yale. Women's volleyball has two matches left, against Yale and Brown at home this weekend.
Both cross country teams will be at the NCAA regionals Friday at Lehigh. The NCAA championships will be Saturday the 23rd in Terre Haute, Ind.
The men's water polo team will compete at the Eastern championships at Brown Nov. 22-24, with a spot in the NCAA Final Four on the line.
The NCAA field hockey tournament begins this weekend, and Princeton, the Ivy League champion for the 19th time in 20 years, plays Penn State at Maryland Saturday in the opening round. Penn State defeated Princeton 4-3 earlier this year on Bedford Field.
For the winner of that game there is in all probability Maryland, who will play the winner of the play-in game between Quinnipiac and American.
Princeton and Maryland have combined to win the last three NCAA titles, including Princeton's win last year.
Lastly, there is the football team.
Princeton is 7-1 overall, 5-0 in the Ivy League, and hosting Yale Saturday in a fairly big game. At stake? A win would bring at least a share of the Ivy title and a bonfire. A loss would mean no bonfire and a tougher road to an Ivy title.
Princeton's final game is at Dartmouth, a team that is currently 3-2 in the league, the same as Yale and Penn. Harvard is 4-1.
Dartmouth and Yale currently rank 1-2 in the league in scoring defense. Princeton has been putting up big numbers all year in the league, and in fact the 38 the Tigers scored against Penn were the fewest they have scored in a league game this year.
Dartmouth has allowed 80 points in five league games. Yale has allowed 100.
And with that, the fall season will be over. It'll be all winter teams after that.
On the one hand, that means the coming of the cold, which TB can't stand.
On the other hand, it means the next outdoor event for Princeton will be three months away.
Feb. 22. Men's lacrosse against Hofstra. Women's lacrosse against Loyola.
That's looking on the bright side.
Friday, November 1, 2013
Princeton vs. Cornell x 9
At first, it appeared that there was only one, a teenage boy, dressed as a hunter. As TigerBlog answered the door, the kid said that there had been a report of zombies in the area.
Just as TB began to process that, the second kid jumped out from behind the bushes, dressed as a zombie. It was a tad startling, TB will admit.
The first kid then "attacked" the second kid, presumably saving TB's house from the zombie menace. TB was so impressed he had them take extra candy.
Performance trick or treating with a zombie theme. Good stuff.
Most of the trick-or-treaters were little kids, dressed in all kinds of wholesome costumes. Of course, maybe they just appeared wholesome; after all, when Miss TigerBlog was still Little Miss TigerBlog, the most popular costume was "Hannah Montana."
If you care, which you probably don't, TB didn't have a single piece of candy.
And that's that for Halloween 2013.
Now it's time to shift attention from orange and black to Orange and Black vs. Big Red.
The last time TigerBlog saw a Princeton-Cornell game, it was the semifinals of the Ivy League men's lacrosse tournament, when Mike McDonald scored seven goals, Kip Orban ripped one of the most unstoppable shots ever and Princeton won 14-13 in overtime in one of the best games TB has ever seen.
He doubts the Princeton-Cornell rivalry will match that night back in May this weekend, but it certainly won't be lacking in opportunities.
You think Princeton played Harvard a lot last weekend, when they got together five times? Princeton and Cornell meet in nine sports in the next 35 or so hours.
Eight sports:
men's hockey (tonight in Ithaca)
women's hockey (tonight at 7 at Baker Rink)
men's and women's cross country (tomorrow at 11 and noon at West Windsor Fields as part of the Ivy League Heptagonal championships)
field hockey (tomorrow at noon on Bedford Field)
football (tomorrow at 1 on Powers Field at Princeton Stadium)
men's soccer (tomorrow at 4 on Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium)
women's volleyball (tomorrow at 5 at Dillon Gym)
women's soccer (tomorrow at 7 on Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium)
Yup. Nine sports competing against Cornell in two days.
TigerBlog would put Princeton-Cornell men's lacrosse up there with any rivalry in any Ivy League sport right now, maybe even at the top. In general, though, Princeton-Cornell isn't quite what Princeton-Penn or Princeton-Harvard-Yale are to most Princeton fans.
Still, all league rivalries are big, and this weekend features some huge events between the Tigers and Big Red. And TB cannot imagine there are too many other instances of two colleges meeting in nine sports in two days.
The rain that soaked TigerBlog on the way from the parking lot to the building has stopped, and the sun is supposed to shine all weekend on the greater Princeton metropolitan area.
Of the nine events, five directly impact the Ivy League championship race - the two cross country races, men's soccer, field hockey and football.
Princeton is 3-0 in the league in football after last weekend's riveting 51-48 three OT win over Harvard. Princeton and Penn are the only unbeatens in the league right now.
A year ago, Princeton was also 3-0 after a win over Harvard and then lost three of the last four, starting in Ithaca.
So what is different this year? Cornell still has Jeff Mathews, who recently passed Tiger offensive coordinator James Perry as the league's all-time passing yardage leader. Mathews has had great games in his career against Princeton, throwing for 998 in three games, one of which was in a driving snowstorm, ironically enough, not in Ithaca but rather Princeton two years ago,
But this isn't the same Princeton team. A year ago, Princeton was coming off back to back 1-9s and just figuring out how to be competitive. This year, Princeton is better both physically and mentally and probably more able to handle the week after the huge win and before the big game at Penn next week.
Tomorrow will tell, of course.
Conventional wisdom is that it's going to be a high-scoring game, as Princeton's offense has been rolling and Mathews can usually be counted on to put up big numbers himself. Add in perfect weather conditions and that's certainly possible.
Either way, it's a huge moment for the Tigers. At the very least, a win would improve the Tigers to 6-1 overall and guarantee the first winning record for the program since its 2006 Ivy League championship. Hey, when you were 1-9 and 1-9 two and three years ago, that's not something to take for granted.
Of course, that's not what the Tigers are thinking. They're thinking big.
One Saturday at a time. The test this weekend is big. Big Red actually.
In football and eight other sports.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
The Fireworks Are Hailing Over Little Eden Tonight
One of TigerBlog's favorite Bruce Springsteen songs - which makes it one of his favorite songs by any artist - is the song "4th of July, Asbury Park."
The first word of the song is "Sandy," the name of the girl that the singer is hoping to spend his Fourth of July with on the Asbury Park boardwalk. It doesn't get much more Springsteen than that.
When TB hears the song, it takes him right to that boardwalk. Did you hear the cops finally busted Madam Marie? If you've been to the boardwalk in Asbury Park, you know immediately that the most famous line in the song refers to the fortune teller who operated out of a little white shack with an eyeball painted on the side.
The Sandy in the song is a Jersey Shore girl, one who is listening to the singer tell her how he's tired of "hanging in those dusty arcades, banging them pleasure machines; chasing the factory girls underneath the boardwalk."
Sandy, he tells her, "the Aurora is rising behind us. The pier lights our carnival life on the water." Love me tonight, he says, "and I promise I'll love you forever."
The song is from 1973, from the album "The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle." TigerBlog was a kid then, growing up not far from Asbury Park.
Even now, 40 years later and 1,000-plus times having heard it, TigerBlog is whisked immediately to the Jersey Shore when he hears it, taken back to a place with heart and character and toughness and color, a place with its unique sights, sounds, smells.
It's not a pristine place by any stretch, but it has something that those beaches don't. It has its own feel, and either you love it or you hate it, and if you're in the first group, there's no place quite like it; if you're in the second, then you're missing the whole point of the place.
A storm named, ironically enough, Sandy, came through here one year ago tonight and destroyed much of that same Jersey Shore. Asbury Park was hit hard by Sandy, though not nearly as hard as so many other areas a little further south, most notably Seaside Heights, and to the north, most notably the Rockaway beaches of Queens.
There are areas that still have not recovered, houses that will never be rebuilt, businesses that will never reopen.
A bit more inland, here in Princeton, the rain never hit that overwhelmingly, but the wind knocked out power, in some places for a month.
TigerBlog was relatively safe during the storm, though the only place he could find that had power was his office, where he slept for one night and where he went to charge his phone and laptop, which were his only sources of information and entertainment.
Work? Princeton was closed for three days, Monday through Wednesday. Shockingly, it reopened Thursday; most schools wouldn't be back until the following week.
The 2012 Ivy League Heptagonal cross country championships were held at Princeton's West Windsor Fields the weekend before the storm hit, with competition on a perfect autumn Saturday, when talk of the coming storm was just starting to dominate every conversation.
The 2011 Heps? Also at West Windsor Fields. This time, the story wasn't about the weather that was coming but the weather had already arrived, as the most significant snow fall of that entire winter came actually in the fall. It looks pretty now in the pictures from that day, but it made running at Heps treacherous - and destroyed the home weekend scheduled with Cornell.
This weekend's schedule is similar to what it was going to be two years ago, with football, field hockey, women's soccer, men's soccer and women's volleyball all hosting Cornell Saturday.
The day starts with the Heps cross country championships, which this year will be an incredible event, with multiple nationally ranked teams in both races.
It even includes women's hockey against Colgate, rather than Cornell.
In other words, Saturday is one of those ridiculously busy days around here, the kind that really make working in Ivy League athletics challenging and rewarding.
The weather forecast is for absolutely completely perfect conditions, sunny and the mid-60s. It may rain Friday, but it'll clear out long before the games start Saturday. Maybe the cross country course will be a bit muddy, but doesn't that make it better?
There is no forecast for a repeat of 2011's blizzard of 2012's superstorm.
The first made for some cool pictures.
The second is still being felt not far from here.
The first word of the song is "Sandy," the name of the girl that the singer is hoping to spend his Fourth of July with on the Asbury Park boardwalk. It doesn't get much more Springsteen than that.
When TB hears the song, it takes him right to that boardwalk. Did you hear the cops finally busted Madam Marie? If you've been to the boardwalk in Asbury Park, you know immediately that the most famous line in the song refers to the fortune teller who operated out of a little white shack with an eyeball painted on the side.
The Sandy in the song is a Jersey Shore girl, one who is listening to the singer tell her how he's tired of "hanging in those dusty arcades, banging them pleasure machines; chasing the factory girls underneath the boardwalk."
Sandy, he tells her, "the Aurora is rising behind us. The pier lights our carnival life on the water." Love me tonight, he says, "and I promise I'll love you forever."
The song is from 1973, from the album "The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle." TigerBlog was a kid then, growing up not far from Asbury Park.
Even now, 40 years later and 1,000-plus times having heard it, TigerBlog is whisked immediately to the Jersey Shore when he hears it, taken back to a place with heart and character and toughness and color, a place with its unique sights, sounds, smells.
It's not a pristine place by any stretch, but it has something that those beaches don't. It has its own feel, and either you love it or you hate it, and if you're in the first group, there's no place quite like it; if you're in the second, then you're missing the whole point of the place.
A storm named, ironically enough, Sandy, came through here one year ago tonight and destroyed much of that same Jersey Shore. Asbury Park was hit hard by Sandy, though not nearly as hard as so many other areas a little further south, most notably Seaside Heights, and to the north, most notably the Rockaway beaches of Queens.
There are areas that still have not recovered, houses that will never be rebuilt, businesses that will never reopen.
A bit more inland, here in Princeton, the rain never hit that overwhelmingly, but the wind knocked out power, in some places for a month.
TigerBlog was relatively safe during the storm, though the only place he could find that had power was his office, where he slept for one night and where he went to charge his phone and laptop, which were his only sources of information and entertainment.
Work? Princeton was closed for three days, Monday through Wednesday. Shockingly, it reopened Thursday; most schools wouldn't be back until the following week.
The 2012 Ivy League Heptagonal cross country championships were held at Princeton's West Windsor Fields the weekend before the storm hit, with competition on a perfect autumn Saturday, when talk of the coming storm was just starting to dominate every conversation.
The 2011 Heps? Also at West Windsor Fields. This time, the story wasn't about the weather that was coming but the weather had already arrived, as the most significant snow fall of that entire winter came actually in the fall. It looks pretty now in the pictures from that day, but it made running at Heps treacherous - and destroyed the home weekend scheduled with Cornell.
This weekend's schedule is similar to what it was going to be two years ago, with football, field hockey, women's soccer, men's soccer and women's volleyball all hosting Cornell Saturday.
The day starts with the Heps cross country championships, which this year will be an incredible event, with multiple nationally ranked teams in both races.
It even includes women's hockey against Colgate, rather than Cornell.
In other words, Saturday is one of those ridiculously busy days around here, the kind that really make working in Ivy League athletics challenging and rewarding.
The weather forecast is for absolutely completely perfect conditions, sunny and the mid-60s. It may rain Friday, but it'll clear out long before the games start Saturday. Maybe the cross country course will be a bit muddy, but doesn't that make it better?
There is no forecast for a repeat of 2011's blizzard of 2012's superstorm.
The first made for some cool pictures.
The second is still being felt not far from here.
Friday, September 27, 2013
Mrs. Guacamole
TigerBlog was at Miss TigerBlog Back To School Night last night.
It was standard middle school stuff, going through her schedule, with abbreviated 12-minute periods to meet each teacher, hear what they'll be doing for the school year, that sort of thing.
The highlight of the night was clearly when MTB's science teacher, Mrs. Giacomelli, said that when her name is entered on an iPhone, it autocorrects to "guacamole." She pointed out that this was ironic, as she doesn't like guacamole.
TigerBlog does. He's a big fan of the avocado.
Anyway, TB had to scramble to get there on time, because he was doing freshman men's lacrosse head shots and bios. TB always likes meeting the freshmen for the first time, putting faces to the names he's heard so much about through the recruiting process.
The bio process always goes basically the same way, with the same basic questions. How many letters in lacrosse? Other sports? Team championships? Individual honors? Stats? Club team? Academic honors? Community service?
What's your date of birth? Parents names. Alma maters. Were they athletes? Siblings?
Then, at the end, TB always says the same thing: "Anything else you'd want to include? Jumped out of an airplane? Climbed a mountain? Caught a 400-pound fish? Sang with the church choir in China?"
And after all the years of doing this, finally, yesterday, someone answered yes to one of those. Freshman men's lacrosse player Jack O'Brien jumped out of a plane this summer while in Cape Cod.
And then there was another first, when freshman Sam Gravitte, asked about what his mother does, responded that she was a Tony Award-winner, for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, for her performance in "Jerome Robbins' Broadway." Sam? He played Jean Valjean in a high school production of "Les Miserables."
Then there was the part when TB realized that these freshman were born for the most part after he'd already started working here. That means as they've gone from babies to Princeton lacrosse players, TB has been right here.
When TB first started covering college sports, he wasn't that much older than the people he was writing about. Eventually, the dates of birth were after he'd graduated high school, after he'd graduated college. And now? They're covering his entire tenure at Princeton.
This, by the way, ends the week of nostalgia, the one that included TigerBlog Jr.'s driving Monday and TB's realization yesterday that it's been 30 years of doing this.
Just as he has for every September since these freshmen were born, TB is looking forward to a pretty big athletic weekend involving Princeton teams.
Fall weekends are not quite like winter or spring ones, simply because there aren't as many teams. And those weekends are nothing compared to the crossovers between seasons.
Still, it's a busy one for Princeton Athletics, with 18 events on the schedule between today and Sunday.
The football team is at Georgetown, where it will be homecoming for the Hoyas. Georgetown football isn't quite like Georgetown basketball, but the Tigers and Hoyas had a pretty entertaining game last year. This time around, it'd be great for Princeton to be 1-1 heading into the Ivy League opener next Saturday against Columbia.
The field hockey team hosts Yale tonight at 7, and the official Bedford Field dedication will be held at halftime. Don't look for the namesake to be there though; Paul Bedford was in the Class of 1897.
The sprint football team is back after having to forfeit last weekend. The Tigers play at Post, and the team came within one scramble off of a fumble in overtime of winning that game.
There are three soccer games at Roberts Stadium this weekend, as the men host Florida International (7) and Florida Gulf Coast (4) tonight and Sunday and the women play Yale tomorrow (4). The Princeton-FGCU soccer game is on ESPNU Sunday.
Florida-Gulf Coast is, of course, the team that came from nowhere to the Sweet 16 in men's basketball last year. The soccer program was also an NCAA tournament team last year.
The women's volleyball team hosts Penn tonight in its Ivy opener.
There's nothing else on campus this weekend - unless you count the men's lacrosse alumni game tomorrow at 1:45.
TB loves the busy home weekends, when there are a ton of events, sandwiched around home football.
This weekend isn't quite on that level, but it's still a good one.
It was standard middle school stuff, going through her schedule, with abbreviated 12-minute periods to meet each teacher, hear what they'll be doing for the school year, that sort of thing.
The highlight of the night was clearly when MTB's science teacher, Mrs. Giacomelli, said that when her name is entered on an iPhone, it autocorrects to "guacamole." She pointed out that this was ironic, as she doesn't like guacamole.
TigerBlog does. He's a big fan of the avocado.
Anyway, TB had to scramble to get there on time, because he was doing freshman men's lacrosse head shots and bios. TB always likes meeting the freshmen for the first time, putting faces to the names he's heard so much about through the recruiting process.
The bio process always goes basically the same way, with the same basic questions. How many letters in lacrosse? Other sports? Team championships? Individual honors? Stats? Club team? Academic honors? Community service?
What's your date of birth? Parents names. Alma maters. Were they athletes? Siblings?
Then, at the end, TB always says the same thing: "Anything else you'd want to include? Jumped out of an airplane? Climbed a mountain? Caught a 400-pound fish? Sang with the church choir in China?"
And after all the years of doing this, finally, yesterday, someone answered yes to one of those. Freshman men's lacrosse player Jack O'Brien jumped out of a plane this summer while in Cape Cod.
And then there was another first, when freshman Sam Gravitte, asked about what his mother does, responded that she was a Tony Award-winner, for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, for her performance in "Jerome Robbins' Broadway." Sam? He played Jean Valjean in a high school production of "Les Miserables."
Then there was the part when TB realized that these freshman were born for the most part after he'd already started working here. That means as they've gone from babies to Princeton lacrosse players, TB has been right here.
When TB first started covering college sports, he wasn't that much older than the people he was writing about. Eventually, the dates of birth were after he'd graduated high school, after he'd graduated college. And now? They're covering his entire tenure at Princeton.
This, by the way, ends the week of nostalgia, the one that included TigerBlog Jr.'s driving Monday and TB's realization yesterday that it's been 30 years of doing this.
Just as he has for every September since these freshmen were born, TB is looking forward to a pretty big athletic weekend involving Princeton teams.
Fall weekends are not quite like winter or spring ones, simply because there aren't as many teams. And those weekends are nothing compared to the crossovers between seasons.
Still, it's a busy one for Princeton Athletics, with 18 events on the schedule between today and Sunday.
The football team is at Georgetown, where it will be homecoming for the Hoyas. Georgetown football isn't quite like Georgetown basketball, but the Tigers and Hoyas had a pretty entertaining game last year. This time around, it'd be great for Princeton to be 1-1 heading into the Ivy League opener next Saturday against Columbia.
The field hockey team hosts Yale tonight at 7, and the official Bedford Field dedication will be held at halftime. Don't look for the namesake to be there though; Paul Bedford was in the Class of 1897.
The sprint football team is back after having to forfeit last weekend. The Tigers play at Post, and the team came within one scramble off of a fumble in overtime of winning that game.
There are three soccer games at Roberts Stadium this weekend, as the men host Florida International (7) and Florida Gulf Coast (4) tonight and Sunday and the women play Yale tomorrow (4). The Princeton-FGCU soccer game is on ESPNU Sunday.
Florida-Gulf Coast is, of course, the team that came from nowhere to the Sweet 16 in men's basketball last year. The soccer program was also an NCAA tournament team last year.
The women's volleyball team hosts Penn tonight in its Ivy opener.
There's nothing else on campus this weekend - unless you count the men's lacrosse alumni game tomorrow at 1:45.
TB loves the busy home weekends, when there are a ton of events, sandwiched around home football.
This weekend isn't quite on that level, but it's still a good one.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Comical
TigerBlog has now watched his first two episodes of "Modern Family." He thinks it has the potential to be pretty funny.
His impression of the first two episodes, at least, is that the characters are a bit stereotyped but the writing is pretty good.
Apparently it's hilarious. At least that's what people say.
And it won the Emmy for Best Comedy. Again. For the fourth straight year.
Can you name the last show to win the Emmy for Best Comedy five straight times? TB will give you a chance to think about that for a few paragraphs.
TB is willing to invest in "Modern Family" on one condition. He has to be able to watch the show out of sequence, since catching up means seeing the episodes in syndication, and they probably won't be shown in order.
This, by the way, is why "Law & Order" was so perfect. Miss a week? No problem. There were no carrying over storylines.
So back at the Best Comedy Emmy Awards, the last - and only - show ever to win the award more than the four times that "Modern Family" has done so is not one of TB's 10 favorite sitcoms ever. Might not even be in his top 20.
To prove it, here are 20 comedies that TB liked more than the one that won five Best Comedy Emmys (in no particular order):
"The Odd Couple," "Taxi," "All In The Family," "Get Smart," "Barney Miller," "Bob Newhart Show," "M*A*S*H," "Seinfeld," "Night Court," "Cheers," "Family Ties," "Friends," "Big Bang Theory," "Two And A Half Men," "The Wonder Years," "The Cosby Show," "Everybody Loves Raymond," "The Dick Van Dyke Show," "Married With Children" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."
That's 20 easily.
And none of them is "Frasier," the only five-time Emmy Award winner for Best Comedy and a show TB just never got into. He did like Frasier's character on "Cheers;" the spin-off never did it for him.
So TB is going to try the whole "Modern Family" thing and see if it works for him.
This weekend is also the start of Season 3 of "Homeland." If you've read TB for awhile, you know that he considers "Homeland" to be the greatest show in television history, even after only two runs of 12 episodes each. And he's not the only one to think this way.
And the next season starts Sunday night. And please, don't tell TB that "Breaking Bad" won Best Drama. It's not even close between those two shows.
By the time Princeton alum Carrie Mathison starts to sort out what happened with the car bomb that ended last season, her alma mater will have had two more teams begin their Ivy League seasons.
The women's volleyball team hosts Penn Friday night, one year after the teams split a pair of 3-2 matches.
Princeton finished tied with Columbia for second in the league last year, but it wasn't exactly close to first when the season ended. Yale was a perfect 14-0 in the league in 2012, while the Tigers and Lions were five games back.
In fact, Yale went 42-6 in games in Ivy matches a year ago and never lost more than one in any match. Princeton was one of the teams to take a game off of the Bulldogs last year.
Yale is again the favorite, though not as prohibitively as a year ago. Princeton is at Yale Oct. 12 and home with Yale Nov. 15, which means the race can take shape a little before those meetings.
The other Ivy opener is in women's soccer, as the Tigers host Yale Saturday at 4.
Princeton is 4-1-2 this year after going 14-4-1 last year, which included a 7-0-0 run through the league.
Tyler Lussi has been the answer to the question of "where would Jen Hoy's goals come from this year." Lussi has six of them in her first seven college games. In fact, Lussi has six of Princeton's 11 goals through seven games, including two in the Tigers' most recent game, a 3-1 win at Fordham Tuesday night.
The Ivy League women's soccer race figures to be really wide open. In fact, of the eight schools in the league, six are at above .500 and a seventh is at .500. And the one that's under .500 is Dartmouth, which figures to be right there at the end as well.
Penn is 4-0-2 to date and has two common opponents with Princeton, St Joe's (both beat the Hawks 1-0) and William & Mary (both tied).
The Ivy openers are just part of a very busy weekend schedule for Princeton Athletics.
And when it's over? Season 3 of "Homeland."
And a few "Modern Family" episodes before then.
TB will give it a chance.
His impression of the first two episodes, at least, is that the characters are a bit stereotyped but the writing is pretty good.
Apparently it's hilarious. At least that's what people say.
And it won the Emmy for Best Comedy. Again. For the fourth straight year.
Can you name the last show to win the Emmy for Best Comedy five straight times? TB will give you a chance to think about that for a few paragraphs.
TB is willing to invest in "Modern Family" on one condition. He has to be able to watch the show out of sequence, since catching up means seeing the episodes in syndication, and they probably won't be shown in order.
This, by the way, is why "Law & Order" was so perfect. Miss a week? No problem. There were no carrying over storylines.
So back at the Best Comedy Emmy Awards, the last - and only - show ever to win the award more than the four times that "Modern Family" has done so is not one of TB's 10 favorite sitcoms ever. Might not even be in his top 20.
To prove it, here are 20 comedies that TB liked more than the one that won five Best Comedy Emmys (in no particular order):
"The Odd Couple," "Taxi," "All In The Family," "Get Smart," "Barney Miller," "Bob Newhart Show," "M*A*S*H," "Seinfeld," "Night Court," "Cheers," "Family Ties," "Friends," "Big Bang Theory," "Two And A Half Men," "The Wonder Years," "The Cosby Show," "Everybody Loves Raymond," "The Dick Van Dyke Show," "Married With Children" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."
That's 20 easily.
And none of them is "Frasier," the only five-time Emmy Award winner for Best Comedy and a show TB just never got into. He did like Frasier's character on "Cheers;" the spin-off never did it for him.
So TB is going to try the whole "Modern Family" thing and see if it works for him.
This weekend is also the start of Season 3 of "Homeland." If you've read TB for awhile, you know that he considers "Homeland" to be the greatest show in television history, even after only two runs of 12 episodes each. And he's not the only one to think this way.
And the next season starts Sunday night. And please, don't tell TB that "Breaking Bad" won Best Drama. It's not even close between those two shows.
By the time Princeton alum Carrie Mathison starts to sort out what happened with the car bomb that ended last season, her alma mater will have had two more teams begin their Ivy League seasons.
The women's volleyball team hosts Penn Friday night, one year after the teams split a pair of 3-2 matches.
Princeton finished tied with Columbia for second in the league last year, but it wasn't exactly close to first when the season ended. Yale was a perfect 14-0 in the league in 2012, while the Tigers and Lions were five games back.
In fact, Yale went 42-6 in games in Ivy matches a year ago and never lost more than one in any match. Princeton was one of the teams to take a game off of the Bulldogs last year.
Yale is again the favorite, though not as prohibitively as a year ago. Princeton is at Yale Oct. 12 and home with Yale Nov. 15, which means the race can take shape a little before those meetings.
The other Ivy opener is in women's soccer, as the Tigers host Yale Saturday at 4.
Princeton is 4-1-2 this year after going 14-4-1 last year, which included a 7-0-0 run through the league.
Tyler Lussi has been the answer to the question of "where would Jen Hoy's goals come from this year." Lussi has six of them in her first seven college games. In fact, Lussi has six of Princeton's 11 goals through seven games, including two in the Tigers' most recent game, a 3-1 win at Fordham Tuesday night.
The Ivy League women's soccer race figures to be really wide open. In fact, of the eight schools in the league, six are at above .500 and a seventh is at .500. And the one that's under .500 is Dartmouth, which figures to be right there at the end as well.
Penn is 4-0-2 to date and has two common opponents with Princeton, St Joe's (both beat the Hawks 1-0) and William & Mary (both tied).
The Ivy openers are just part of a very busy weekend schedule for Princeton Athletics.
And when it's over? Season 3 of "Homeland."
And a few "Modern Family" episodes before then.
TB will give it a chance.
Thursday, September 5, 2013
Happy New Year
Happy New Year to all. Happy 5774.
That's 5,774 continuous years of the Hebrew calender, one whose years run of a similar but not exact length to the Gregorian calendar. Because of that, and the fact that not all Hebrew months and years are the same length, the Jewish holidays fall in similar but not exact spots each year.
TigerBlog recently read something interesting about that subject.
All Jewish holidays begin at sundown, so for instance Rosh Hashanah this year actually started last night, not today.
Hanukkah this year starts on sundown Wednesday, Nov. 27, which is the absolute earliest it can start. The next day, Nov. 28, is Thanksgiving, which means the first day of Hanukkah will be on Thanksgiving Day. This is also the latest that Thanksgiving Day can fall, since it is the fourth Thursday in November.
The last time Hanukkah was on Nov. 28 and Nov. 28 was the fourth Thursday of the month was 1861, before Thanksgiving was an actual holiday. And because of the way the Hebrew calendar is just out of sync enough with the solar year, Hanukkah won't be able to fall on Nov. 28 again until the Hebrew calendar cycles through the Gregorian calendar, which would be in the year 79,811.
TB won't be around then.
Meanwhile, Rosh Hashanah falls insanely early this year as well. It's almost never this early in September.
In fact, Jewish holidays are never on time. As TB wrote a year ago:
In Jewish culture, the High Holy Days never come on time. They're either early or late, as in "the holidays came really early this year," which is said at every family celebration as a way of suggesting that the hostess was caught completely off guard, what with the end of the summer and all, and therefore couldn't create a proper meal for the occasion. This is usually followed by a general agreement that "we should only be together on wonderful occasions."
Rosh Hashanah is the start of the Jewish High Holy Days, an eight-day period of celebration and introspection that culminates in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when TigerBlog's people fast for 24 hours to atone for their sins.
The customary greeting for today, though, is simply "Happy New Year," as that's what Rosh Hashanah is, the start of the Jewish new year.
So happy 5774, one and all.
TB has always thought that this is a good time for the new year, as opposed to Jan. 1. New school year. End of summer. Change of seasons. All of that suggests a turning of the page.
And so it is at Princeton Athletics, as the wildly successful 2012-13 academic year is officially in the rearview mirror and the curtain is rising on 2013-14.
The first games of the new academic year are a little more than 24 hours away.
Princeton hosts two games tomorrow, as the field hockey team begins defense of its NCAA championship when it takes on Duke at 6 on Bedford Field and the women's soccer team follows up on the second-best season in program history when it hosts Richmond, also at 6.
Combine those two from a year ago, and you have a 35-5-1 overall record, a 14-0-0 Ivy record, a 6-1 NCAA tournament record (all games played away from home) and one NCAA championship. That's not too bad.
The field hockey team is also home Saturday, this time at 4, against Fairfield. The women's soccer team hosts Army Sunday at noon.
There's no admission charge for either sport, by the way.
The men's soccer team is at FDU tomorrow at 7. Jim Barlow's team has its home opener as week from Sunday at 2 against Seton Hall, after playing at Rutgers next Friday.
The women's volleyball team also plays tomorrow, when it begins its season at the George Mason tournament.
All of these opponents, by the way, have already played multiple games this season. Princeton teams start a weekend or two later, and it takes a few games to achieve full fitness levels.
Still, it's the first games of a new year.
What will 2013-14 have in store?
The first games are always exciting, the start of a run into early June at the NCAA track and field championships.
Happy New Year to all.
That's 5,774 continuous years of the Hebrew calender, one whose years run of a similar but not exact length to the Gregorian calendar. Because of that, and the fact that not all Hebrew months and years are the same length, the Jewish holidays fall in similar but not exact spots each year.
TigerBlog recently read something interesting about that subject.
All Jewish holidays begin at sundown, so for instance Rosh Hashanah this year actually started last night, not today.
Hanukkah this year starts on sundown Wednesday, Nov. 27, which is the absolute earliest it can start. The next day, Nov. 28, is Thanksgiving, which means the first day of Hanukkah will be on Thanksgiving Day. This is also the latest that Thanksgiving Day can fall, since it is the fourth Thursday in November.
The last time Hanukkah was on Nov. 28 and Nov. 28 was the fourth Thursday of the month was 1861, before Thanksgiving was an actual holiday. And because of the way the Hebrew calendar is just out of sync enough with the solar year, Hanukkah won't be able to fall on Nov. 28 again until the Hebrew calendar cycles through the Gregorian calendar, which would be in the year 79,811.
TB won't be around then.
Meanwhile, Rosh Hashanah falls insanely early this year as well. It's almost never this early in September.
In fact, Jewish holidays are never on time. As TB wrote a year ago:
In Jewish culture, the High Holy Days never come on time. They're either early or late, as in "the holidays came really early this year," which is said at every family celebration as a way of suggesting that the hostess was caught completely off guard, what with the end of the summer and all, and therefore couldn't create a proper meal for the occasion. This is usually followed by a general agreement that "we should only be together on wonderful occasions."
Rosh Hashanah is the start of the Jewish High Holy Days, an eight-day period of celebration and introspection that culminates in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when TigerBlog's people fast for 24 hours to atone for their sins.
The customary greeting for today, though, is simply "Happy New Year," as that's what Rosh Hashanah is, the start of the Jewish new year.
So happy 5774, one and all.
TB has always thought that this is a good time for the new year, as opposed to Jan. 1. New school year. End of summer. Change of seasons. All of that suggests a turning of the page.
And so it is at Princeton Athletics, as the wildly successful 2012-13 academic year is officially in the rearview mirror and the curtain is rising on 2013-14.
The first games of the new academic year are a little more than 24 hours away.
Princeton hosts two games tomorrow, as the field hockey team begins defense of its NCAA championship when it takes on Duke at 6 on Bedford Field and the women's soccer team follows up on the second-best season in program history when it hosts Richmond, also at 6.
Combine those two from a year ago, and you have a 35-5-1 overall record, a 14-0-0 Ivy record, a 6-1 NCAA tournament record (all games played away from home) and one NCAA championship. That's not too bad.
The field hockey team is also home Saturday, this time at 4, against Fairfield. The women's soccer team hosts Army Sunday at noon.
There's no admission charge for either sport, by the way.
The men's soccer team is at FDU tomorrow at 7. Jim Barlow's team has its home opener as week from Sunday at 2 against Seton Hall, after playing at Rutgers next Friday.
The women's volleyball team also plays tomorrow, when it begins its season at the George Mason tournament.
All of these opponents, by the way, have already played multiple games this season. Princeton teams start a weekend or two later, and it takes a few games to achieve full fitness levels.
Still, it's the first games of a new year.
What will 2013-14 have in store?
The first games are always exciting, the start of a run into early June at the NCAA track and field championships.
Happy New Year to all.
Friday, October 5, 2012
Toes On The Tape
There's a corner of TigerBlog's office that is used to take head shots of athletes.
The backdrop that hangs on the wall looks like - and may originally have been - a blanket from a hotel room somewhere. There is a piece of tape on the floor that goes on an angle, and if you're getting your picture taken, you put your toes on the tape and square your shoulders.
As TB understands it, this eliminates the shadow in the background.
The person getting the picture doesn't realize the tape is on the floor and always stands directly against the backdrop, leading to the instruction of "toes on the tape." Once, TB saw a Princeton athlete who he believes had a perfect SAT score respond to "toes on the tape" by putting his toes on the tape - and face the backdrop, with the back of his head to the camera.
The actual picture-taking process is always fairly similar.
Whichever team it is has already designated whether it's going to be jerseys, pullovers, jackets/ties - whatever look brings uniformity. Then they bring one or two of those and constantly change, one after the other.
When TB first started working here, head shots were taken with a little office camera that included an obsolete thing called "film," which then had to be taken to a place called a "dark room" to be "developed."
Now, it's all done digitally, which means that the result of the picture is immediately available.
Not to be sexist or anything, but TB would say that about 70% of the women's athletes and about 5% of the men's athletes ask to see the picture after it's taken and/or ask to delete that one and take another one.
These head shots used to be used mostly for media guides and sometimes game programs. Now they're for the webpage.
TB has spent the last week taking men's lacrosse head shots.
For all of the years that TB has been here, the men's lacrosse shots have been taken with jerseys, and the only issue is the white one or the black one. This required going to the equipment room to get two jerseys, which the players would use regardless of what their actual number was.
Recently, the men's lacrosse upperclassmen didn't always want to get a new picture, since their old one was fine.
This year, TB and men's lacrosse coach Chris Bates thought it'd be a good idea to go with jackets and ties, and this has led to the somewhat hilarious sight of having players come in 5-10 at a time and share the same tie, and sometimes the same shirt.
Or, in the case of one, TB had to give a brief tutorial on the art of tying a tie.
The men's lacrosse team is playing in the Play For Parkinson's event at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va., tomorrow. TB would love to go watch that, as the Tigers play Georgetown (noon) and Virginia (2).
Of course, there are other events closer to home this weekend.
There's the soccer doubleheader against Brown here (women at 4, men at 7). There's home sprint football, women's volleyball, field hockey and men's water polo as well this weekend.
The women's volleyball team looks to build on its 3-0 league start when it hosts Columbia and Cornell tonight and tomorrow at Dillon Gym.
The field hockey team hosts American Sunday.
Sprint football is home tonight against Post and then next Friday against first-year team Franklin Pierce. Men's water polo hosts Bucknell tomorrow night.
It's all on the all-sports schedule.
And of course, that doesn't count the football game at Lafayette tomorrow at 6.
There are all kinds of choices.
That's what Ivy League athletic weekends are all about.
The backdrop that hangs on the wall looks like - and may originally have been - a blanket from a hotel room somewhere. There is a piece of tape on the floor that goes on an angle, and if you're getting your picture taken, you put your toes on the tape and square your shoulders.
As TB understands it, this eliminates the shadow in the background.
The person getting the picture doesn't realize the tape is on the floor and always stands directly against the backdrop, leading to the instruction of "toes on the tape." Once, TB saw a Princeton athlete who he believes had a perfect SAT score respond to "toes on the tape" by putting his toes on the tape - and face the backdrop, with the back of his head to the camera.
The actual picture-taking process is always fairly similar.
Whichever team it is has already designated whether it's going to be jerseys, pullovers, jackets/ties - whatever look brings uniformity. Then they bring one or two of those and constantly change, one after the other.
When TB first started working here, head shots were taken with a little office camera that included an obsolete thing called "film," which then had to be taken to a place called a "dark room" to be "developed."
Now, it's all done digitally, which means that the result of the picture is immediately available.
Not to be sexist or anything, but TB would say that about 70% of the women's athletes and about 5% of the men's athletes ask to see the picture after it's taken and/or ask to delete that one and take another one.
These head shots used to be used mostly for media guides and sometimes game programs. Now they're for the webpage.
TB has spent the last week taking men's lacrosse head shots.
For all of the years that TB has been here, the men's lacrosse shots have been taken with jerseys, and the only issue is the white one or the black one. This required going to the equipment room to get two jerseys, which the players would use regardless of what their actual number was.
Recently, the men's lacrosse upperclassmen didn't always want to get a new picture, since their old one was fine.
This year, TB and men's lacrosse coach Chris Bates thought it'd be a good idea to go with jackets and ties, and this has led to the somewhat hilarious sight of having players come in 5-10 at a time and share the same tie, and sometimes the same shirt.
Or, in the case of one, TB had to give a brief tutorial on the art of tying a tie.
The men's lacrosse team is playing in the Play For Parkinson's event at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va., tomorrow. TB would love to go watch that, as the Tigers play Georgetown (noon) and Virginia (2).
Of course, there are other events closer to home this weekend.
There's the soccer doubleheader against Brown here (women at 4, men at 7). There's home sprint football, women's volleyball, field hockey and men's water polo as well this weekend.
The women's volleyball team looks to build on its 3-0 league start when it hosts Columbia and Cornell tonight and tomorrow at Dillon Gym.
The field hockey team hosts American Sunday.
Sprint football is home tonight against Post and then next Friday against first-year team Franklin Pierce. Men's water polo hosts Bucknell tomorrow night.
It's all on the all-sports schedule.
And of course, that doesn't count the football game at Lafayette tomorrow at 6.
There are all kinds of choices.
That's what Ivy League athletic weekends are all about.
Friday, November 4, 2011
Lane Change
TigerBlog was driving on 95 the other night when he noticed a car at a weird angle on the grass between the north and south sides.
TB was in the middle lane, heading north. As he glanced away from the first car and looked ahead, the car in front of him was swerving into the left lane, rather frantically.
In a split second, TB saw why - there was another car stopped in the middle lane just ahead. With its lights off, it was hardly visible.
Like the driver in front of him, TB had to quickly move away from the middle lane, or else he would have plowed directly into the stopped car. Plus, he was texting and eating and reading the newspaper at the same time (well, not really).
TB, like the other car, went left instead of right (not TB's usual reaction) and for a brief second, he thought he turned away too quickly and might lose control. Instead, everything leveled out.
For the next few seconds, TB had the usual near-miss racing heartbeat situation. And he wondered how many more cars would be able to get away from the stuck car in the middle before one didn't.
TB never saw a story in the local papers about a big accident on 95, so he'll assume that nothing came of it.
Eventually, when his heart settled down, he began to chuckle a little as he thought back to an episode from the TV show "Cheers," from season 6, in 1988, called "I On Sports."
In the episode, Sam fills in doing the sports on the local news station in Boston. In a near-perfect spoof of TV newscasters, there is this exchange:
Reporter 1 - "... and with his appeals exhausted, the execution will go on as scheduled Friday."
Ditzy newswoman - "so he won't be around for that great weekend weather we're going to have."
Had TB smashed into the car, well, then of course he wouldn't be around for this weekend's schedule.
The schedule for this weekend in Princeton athletics isn't quite what it is next weekend, which is one of the busiest TB can ever remember.
Still, there are some good events, including two of what TB's old buddy Harvey Yavener would have given five stars.
The field hockey team is at Penn tonight as the final weekend of begins, with two games tonight, one tomorrow and one Sunday.
Heading into the final weekend, there could mathematically be an outright champ or a two-, three- or four-way tie for the Ivy title. Realistically, though, any scenario for more than a co-championship would involve a Yale loss to Brown, which is 0-6 in the league.
Right now, Princeton and Yale are 5-1, while Dartmouth and Columbia are 4-2. All four play the other four schools, and wins by Dartmouth and Columbia and losses by Yale and Princeton makes it a four-way tie.
Princeton is in a win-win situation, as in a win over Penn brings at least a share of the Ivy title and the league's bid to the NCAA play-in game. The Ivy winner will host the NEC champ - already Rider, which is in the MAAC for most sports but the NEC for field hockey - in an NCAA play-in game Tuesday at 1.
Assuming Yale will beat Brown, the a Princeton loss to Penn would take away both of those prizes. Princeton does hold the tiebreakers in the four-way tie scenario, but it's really unlikely to come to that.
Keep in mind that Princeton is playing this year without its top four players - Julia and Katie Reinprecht, Kathleen Sharkey, Michele Cesan - who helped the U.S. earn an Olympic bid by winning the Pan Am Games title.
Meanwhile, the women's volleyball race is essentially a three-team contest with two league weekends left.
Yale is currently 9-1, followed by 8-2 Princeton and 7-3 Columbia. This weekend should shake things up a bit, as Princeton is at last-place Brown (2-8) tonight before what figures to be the big showdown at Yale tomorrow.
Should Yale (against 3-7 Penn) and Princeton both win tonight, then the match tomorrow is a must. A Princeton win would then tie the two for first; a Yale win would clinch at least a tie for the league title.
Princeton hosts Cornell and Columbia next weekend; Yale is at Harvard/Dartmouth.
Women's volleyball, like basketball, is a double round-robin format, and there would be a one-match playoff for the NCAA bid should there be a co-championship.
Also this weekend is obviously a football game at Penn, as well as men's and women's soccer at Penn.
There isn't much at home this weekend, other than sprint football tonight against Penn, women's hockey against Brown tonight and Yale tomorrow afternoon (Skate With the Tigers) and men's water polo in the Southern championships.
Next weekend? How about home women's basketball, women's volleyball and men's hockey Friday night and then football, men's basketball, men's soccer, women's volleyball and men's hockey Saturday.
TB was in the middle lane, heading north. As he glanced away from the first car and looked ahead, the car in front of him was swerving into the left lane, rather frantically.
In a split second, TB saw why - there was another car stopped in the middle lane just ahead. With its lights off, it was hardly visible.
Like the driver in front of him, TB had to quickly move away from the middle lane, or else he would have plowed directly into the stopped car. Plus, he was texting and eating and reading the newspaper at the same time (well, not really).
TB, like the other car, went left instead of right (not TB's usual reaction) and for a brief second, he thought he turned away too quickly and might lose control. Instead, everything leveled out.
For the next few seconds, TB had the usual near-miss racing heartbeat situation. And he wondered how many more cars would be able to get away from the stuck car in the middle before one didn't.
TB never saw a story in the local papers about a big accident on 95, so he'll assume that nothing came of it.
Eventually, when his heart settled down, he began to chuckle a little as he thought back to an episode from the TV show "Cheers," from season 6, in 1988, called "I On Sports."
In the episode, Sam fills in doing the sports on the local news station in Boston. In a near-perfect spoof of TV newscasters, there is this exchange:
Reporter 1 - "... and with his appeals exhausted, the execution will go on as scheduled Friday."
Ditzy newswoman - "so he won't be around for that great weekend weather we're going to have."
Had TB smashed into the car, well, then of course he wouldn't be around for this weekend's schedule.
The schedule for this weekend in Princeton athletics isn't quite what it is next weekend, which is one of the busiest TB can ever remember.
Still, there are some good events, including two of what TB's old buddy Harvey Yavener would have given five stars.
The field hockey team is at Penn tonight as the final weekend of begins, with two games tonight, one tomorrow and one Sunday.
Heading into the final weekend, there could mathematically be an outright champ or a two-, three- or four-way tie for the Ivy title. Realistically, though, any scenario for more than a co-championship would involve a Yale loss to Brown, which is 0-6 in the league.
Right now, Princeton and Yale are 5-1, while Dartmouth and Columbia are 4-2. All four play the other four schools, and wins by Dartmouth and Columbia and losses by Yale and Princeton makes it a four-way tie.
Princeton is in a win-win situation, as in a win over Penn brings at least a share of the Ivy title and the league's bid to the NCAA play-in game. The Ivy winner will host the NEC champ - already Rider, which is in the MAAC for most sports but the NEC for field hockey - in an NCAA play-in game Tuesday at 1.
Assuming Yale will beat Brown, the a Princeton loss to Penn would take away both of those prizes. Princeton does hold the tiebreakers in the four-way tie scenario, but it's really unlikely to come to that.
Keep in mind that Princeton is playing this year without its top four players - Julia and Katie Reinprecht, Kathleen Sharkey, Michele Cesan - who helped the U.S. earn an Olympic bid by winning the Pan Am Games title.
Meanwhile, the women's volleyball race is essentially a three-team contest with two league weekends left.
Yale is currently 9-1, followed by 8-2 Princeton and 7-3 Columbia. This weekend should shake things up a bit, as Princeton is at last-place Brown (2-8) tonight before what figures to be the big showdown at Yale tomorrow.
Should Yale (against 3-7 Penn) and Princeton both win tonight, then the match tomorrow is a must. A Princeton win would then tie the two for first; a Yale win would clinch at least a tie for the league title.
Princeton hosts Cornell and Columbia next weekend; Yale is at Harvard/Dartmouth.
Women's volleyball, like basketball, is a double round-robin format, and there would be a one-match playoff for the NCAA bid should there be a co-championship.
Also this weekend is obviously a football game at Penn, as well as men's and women's soccer at Penn.
There isn't much at home this weekend, other than sprint football tonight against Penn, women's hockey against Brown tonight and Yale tomorrow afternoon (Skate With the Tigers) and men's water polo in the Southern championships.
Next weekend? How about home women's basketball, women's volleyball and men's hockey Friday night and then football, men's basketball, men's soccer, women's volleyball and men's hockey Saturday.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Steven Jobs - And Sabrina's Job
TigerBlog was going to write about women's volleyball this morning.
He was going to start out by talking about how he knows little about the sport of volleyball and how he's seen less volleyball than pretty much any sport in his time here.
He was going to go on about volleyball stat keeping, which is clearly the most difficult of any of the sports for which athletic communications types regular keep stats.
Then he was going to segue into the big women's volleyball weekend coming up.
He'll get back to the last part later. As for the background, you'll have to take his word for it that it would have been funny.
TB's plan changed when he heard the news that Steve Jobs - Apple's founder, not to mention the man who turned Pixar into what it became - had died last night.
Steve Jobs changed the world as much as anyone who has ever lived. His impact on the modern world cannot be overstated, and not only in terms of the entertainment value of i-Tunes or the convenience of faster computers.
Jobs' work has touched every aspect of society, leading to huge advancements in areas like health care, commerce, politics, international relations, all of it.
And his company made the "Toy Story" movies. And the greatest commercial ever made.
Back on Super Bowl Sunday 1984 - the Raiders thumped the Redskins - Apple trotted out a mesmerizing commercial announcing the launch of its new product, the MacIntosh computer. The commercial was stunning in its scope, at a time when "plop plop, fizz fizz" was considered cutting edge.
Back in early 1980s, TigerBlog had an electric typewriter - and that put him ahead of most people. Shortly after that, the world was flooded by the personal computer, and Mac became the most powerful tool in the industry.
And that was later followed up, after a rocky patch that saw him leave the company for awhile, with i-Tunes, the I-Pad and all kinds of other advancements in technology, all of which have made the world a much smaller, much more efficient place.
TigerBlog has always used Macs, and they have made arduous tasks simple over the years, with further advancements constantly emerging.
Jobs battled cancer in recent years, ultimately passing away yesterday at the age of 56.
And what about that?
Job was worth $100,000,000 by the time he was 25. He has left a mark on the world that few have ever matched.
But he only got a 56-year run. Would you make that choice? Or would you rather opt for the more mundane, but a much longer life?
Anyway, Jobs passed away yesterday after having a most remarkable life.
Meanwhile, back at the women's volleyball, Princeton under first-year coach Sabrina King is off to a great start.
The Tigers are currently 3-0 in the Ivy League, tied with Yale for first place, one game ahead of Columbia. Princeton is at Columbia Friday and Cornell Saturday and then home next weekend with Yale/Brown.
Princeton has won two of its first three league matches in five games, against both Penn and Dartmouth.
What TigerBlog does know about women's volleyball is that Dillon Gym is quite a venue when the team is playing. The crowds are loud and right on top of the action, and TB assumes the reverse is true now that Princeton takes to the road in the league for the first time.
King was a player and longtime assistant under venerable coach Glen Nelson.
Now in her first season as the head coach (TB was going to go with something like 'King Is The Queen,' but it sounded trite), she's off to a good start.
Of course, there are 11 matches to play, and the league is ultra-competitive.
Still, it's been a great start for the King era of Princeton volleyball.
So far, Sabrina King is doing a great job.
As for Steven Jobs, alav ha shalom.
He was going to start out by talking about how he knows little about the sport of volleyball and how he's seen less volleyball than pretty much any sport in his time here.
He was going to go on about volleyball stat keeping, which is clearly the most difficult of any of the sports for which athletic communications types regular keep stats.
Then he was going to segue into the big women's volleyball weekend coming up.
He'll get back to the last part later. As for the background, you'll have to take his word for it that it would have been funny.
TB's plan changed when he heard the news that Steve Jobs - Apple's founder, not to mention the man who turned Pixar into what it became - had died last night.
Steve Jobs changed the world as much as anyone who has ever lived. His impact on the modern world cannot be overstated, and not only in terms of the entertainment value of i-Tunes or the convenience of faster computers.
Jobs' work has touched every aspect of society, leading to huge advancements in areas like health care, commerce, politics, international relations, all of it.
And his company made the "Toy Story" movies. And the greatest commercial ever made.
Back on Super Bowl Sunday 1984 - the Raiders thumped the Redskins - Apple trotted out a mesmerizing commercial announcing the launch of its new product, the MacIntosh computer. The commercial was stunning in its scope, at a time when "plop plop, fizz fizz" was considered cutting edge.
Back in early 1980s, TigerBlog had an electric typewriter - and that put him ahead of most people. Shortly after that, the world was flooded by the personal computer, and Mac became the most powerful tool in the industry.
And that was later followed up, after a rocky patch that saw him leave the company for awhile, with i-Tunes, the I-Pad and all kinds of other advancements in technology, all of which have made the world a much smaller, much more efficient place.
TigerBlog has always used Macs, and they have made arduous tasks simple over the years, with further advancements constantly emerging.
Jobs battled cancer in recent years, ultimately passing away yesterday at the age of 56.
And what about that?
Job was worth $100,000,000 by the time he was 25. He has left a mark on the world that few have ever matched.
But he only got a 56-year run. Would you make that choice? Or would you rather opt for the more mundane, but a much longer life?
Anyway, Jobs passed away yesterday after having a most remarkable life.
Meanwhile, back at the women's volleyball, Princeton under first-year coach Sabrina King is off to a great start.
The Tigers are currently 3-0 in the Ivy League, tied with Yale for first place, one game ahead of Columbia. Princeton is at Columbia Friday and Cornell Saturday and then home next weekend with Yale/Brown.
Princeton has won two of its first three league matches in five games, against both Penn and Dartmouth.
What TigerBlog does know about women's volleyball is that Dillon Gym is quite a venue when the team is playing. The crowds are loud and right on top of the action, and TB assumes the reverse is true now that Princeton takes to the road in the league for the first time.
King was a player and longtime assistant under venerable coach Glen Nelson.
Now in her first season as the head coach (TB was going to go with something like 'King Is The Queen,' but it sounded trite), she's off to a good start.
Of course, there are 11 matches to play, and the league is ultra-competitive.
Still, it's been a great start for the King era of Princeton volleyball.
So far, Sabrina King is doing a great job.
As for Steven Jobs, alav ha shalom.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Some Assembly Required
As anyone who has kids knows, getting the present to go from the pile of parts inside the box to the picture outside the box isn't always easy.
TigerBlog's best skill isn't putting stuff together. He can iron. He can fold clothes. He can do the dishes. He can type fast.
Putting stuff together? Not his best thing.
Not that he hasn't tried, somewhat successfully in fact, to assemble all kinds of items through the years.
Of course, there were some nightmares along the way, such as the "8 in 1" climbing thing where two of the plastic pieces simply would not fit together. This was back when TigerBlog Jr. was maybe a year or two at most, and finally it was up to three OAC interns to figure it out, a process that ended when Jenn Garrett slammed the pieces together so hard that they simply stuck to whatever it was that was holding them in place.
As an aside, TBJ eventually used the climber as his first lacrosse goal, pelting the plastic with tennis balls.
Matt Ciciarelli, one of the interns in the "8 in 1" nightmare, volunteered to take the lead in assembling the driveway basketball hoop, something that took roughly an entire day. As Matt got most of the way through, the project stopped because the package was missing two of the pieces necessary.
As Matt kept working, TB went back to the store to get the missing pieces, which were replaced by having the kid who worked in the stockroom take them out of an unopened basketball hoop package. TigerBlog was left to wonder if every person who bought the hoop was missing the same two pieces, as each successive box was opened to fill in the missing ones for the previous person.
As an aside, the hoop is still there and working just fine.
TigerBlog had flashbacks to all of that when the OAC futon arrived late last week.
TB carried the two packages from the lobby to his office and unpacked the one that had the frame in it. This would prove to be his greatest contribution to assembly.
Realizing that this was going to be something of a challenge, TB went to the business office to enlist help, with the basic question of "do either of you have 15 minutes and the ability put stuff together" posed to Jon Kurian and Ryan Yurko.
Kurian barely looked up from his computer while saying he had plenty of the first and none of the second. Yurko, on the other hand, seemed somewhat excited to be involved.
TigerBlog, by the way, would have bet everything he owns that he would have gotten those two responses.
Anyway, it took about a half-hour before Yurko had the entire futon up and running. This included the time it took to take about half of it apart when he realized that he'd used the wrong bolts in the wrong place earlier on, something he did without a single curse.
Having a new futon sitting in an office after at least two decades without a single decorative change certainly creates a buzz for those who walk by. A few came in to sit down, and most liked it, though one suggested it was too low to the ground.
Eventually, women's volleyball coach Sabrina King walked by on her way to a meeting down the hall, only to find that the person she was waiting to see had stepped away.
So, Sabrina came in and sat down on the futon. Unlike people who used to come in and sit down on the old maroon chairs, the futon people actually seem to be taking a break from what they're doing and relaxing.
In Sabrina's case, it was the opportunity to slow down for a minute before the start of her first practice as the head coach of the Tiger program, which she has been part of for 11 of the last 14 years.
She was a player for four years, and her teams won three Ivy League titles in that time. She graduated in 2001 after being named Ivy League Player of the Year.
She also was an assistant coach for seven years, winning two more Ivy titles, giving her five with the program.
After living in California for two years, King is back now, this time as the head coach for a Princeton team that got off to a strong start in the league last year before finishing in a tie for third.
TigerBlog can't think of too many examples of someone who made the progression from Princeton player to Princeton assistant coach to Princeton head coach.
Joe Scott and John Thompson did it in men's basketball. Charlie Caldwell did so in football, although it was awhile ago. Of those three, only Thompson did so without ever coaching anywhere else in between, and he left to go to Georgetown after coaching at Princeton. Former men's hockey coach Len Quesnelle did so as well.
Current head men's rowing coaches Greg Hughes (heavyweight) and Marty Crotty (lightweights) are part of the club. There are probably others, though TB can't think of them off the top of his head.
King's first season begins Sept. 2 with a tournament at Hofstra; the Ivy season opens at home Sept. 23 against Penn.
In the meantime, King is now in her first preseason as the Tiger head coach, trying to assemble a championship program of her own - without printed directions or pictures to guide her.
TigerBlog's best skill isn't putting stuff together. He can iron. He can fold clothes. He can do the dishes. He can type fast.
Putting stuff together? Not his best thing.
Not that he hasn't tried, somewhat successfully in fact, to assemble all kinds of items through the years.
Of course, there were some nightmares along the way, such as the "8 in 1" climbing thing where two of the plastic pieces simply would not fit together. This was back when TigerBlog Jr. was maybe a year or two at most, and finally it was up to three OAC interns to figure it out, a process that ended when Jenn Garrett slammed the pieces together so hard that they simply stuck to whatever it was that was holding them in place.
As an aside, TBJ eventually used the climber as his first lacrosse goal, pelting the plastic with tennis balls.
Matt Ciciarelli, one of the interns in the "8 in 1" nightmare, volunteered to take the lead in assembling the driveway basketball hoop, something that took roughly an entire day. As Matt got most of the way through, the project stopped because the package was missing two of the pieces necessary.
As Matt kept working, TB went back to the store to get the missing pieces, which were replaced by having the kid who worked in the stockroom take them out of an unopened basketball hoop package. TigerBlog was left to wonder if every person who bought the hoop was missing the same two pieces, as each successive box was opened to fill in the missing ones for the previous person.
As an aside, the hoop is still there and working just fine.
TigerBlog had flashbacks to all of that when the OAC futon arrived late last week.
TB carried the two packages from the lobby to his office and unpacked the one that had the frame in it. This would prove to be his greatest contribution to assembly.
Realizing that this was going to be something of a challenge, TB went to the business office to enlist help, with the basic question of "do either of you have 15 minutes and the ability put stuff together" posed to Jon Kurian and Ryan Yurko.
Kurian barely looked up from his computer while saying he had plenty of the first and none of the second. Yurko, on the other hand, seemed somewhat excited to be involved.
TigerBlog, by the way, would have bet everything he owns that he would have gotten those two responses.
Anyway, it took about a half-hour before Yurko had the entire futon up and running. This included the time it took to take about half of it apart when he realized that he'd used the wrong bolts in the wrong place earlier on, something he did without a single curse.
Having a new futon sitting in an office after at least two decades without a single decorative change certainly creates a buzz for those who walk by. A few came in to sit down, and most liked it, though one suggested it was too low to the ground.
Eventually, women's volleyball coach Sabrina King walked by on her way to a meeting down the hall, only to find that the person she was waiting to see had stepped away.
So, Sabrina came in and sat down on the futon. Unlike people who used to come in and sit down on the old maroon chairs, the futon people actually seem to be taking a break from what they're doing and relaxing.
In Sabrina's case, it was the opportunity to slow down for a minute before the start of her first practice as the head coach of the Tiger program, which she has been part of for 11 of the last 14 years.
She was a player for four years, and her teams won three Ivy League titles in that time. She graduated in 2001 after being named Ivy League Player of the Year.
She also was an assistant coach for seven years, winning two more Ivy titles, giving her five with the program.
After living in California for two years, King is back now, this time as the head coach for a Princeton team that got off to a strong start in the league last year before finishing in a tie for third.
TigerBlog can't think of too many examples of someone who made the progression from Princeton player to Princeton assistant coach to Princeton head coach.
Joe Scott and John Thompson did it in men's basketball. Charlie Caldwell did so in football, although it was awhile ago. Of those three, only Thompson did so without ever coaching anywhere else in between, and he left to go to Georgetown after coaching at Princeton. Former men's hockey coach Len Quesnelle did so as well.
Current head men's rowing coaches Greg Hughes (heavyweight) and Marty Crotty (lightweights) are part of the club. There are probably others, though TB can't think of them off the top of his head.
King's first season begins Sept. 2 with a tournament at Hofstra; the Ivy season opens at home Sept. 23 against Penn.
In the meantime, King is now in her first preseason as the Tiger head coach, trying to assemble a championship program of her own - without printed directions or pictures to guide her.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Opening Days
The English Premier League season begins this weekend with nine matches instead of the mathematically complete 10 that originally were scheduled.
Everton at Tottenham has been postponed in the wake of the rioting that has frighteningly enveloped the area this week.
TigerBlog used to watch the top English teams play on the small black-and-white television in his room when he was a kid. From there until about two or three years ago, he could care less about English football.
Now, in large part because of the winning battle that Princeton men's soccer coach Jim Barlow fought with TB to get him to appreciate the magnitude of the EPL, and of international soccer in general.
The EPL is different than any American professional sport in ways that would be interesting to see implemented here.
As TB said earlier this year, the concept of relegation is beyond fascinating, and it made for an unreal end to last season for the Premier League.
Then there is the idea that there are no playoffs, so that the team that wins the regular-season title simply is the league champion. The other incentive - a major one - is to finish in the top four in the league to earn a spot into the Champions League, which gives the opportunity to play for the European club championship.
The 20 teams that compete in the EPL are divided into some basic categories: the very few top teams who have a legitimate shot at winning, the ones competing for a Champions League spot, the ones who have no chance of getting to the Champions League but are too good to get relegated and the ones who have to fight to avoid relegation.
It makes being a fan of one of the team's in the middle somewhat frustrating, TB assumes.
Of course, what separates the top teams from the middle and bottom is money and how much of it is spent on the elite players. In that way, it's sort of like Major League Baseball, where the Yankees, Red Sox and Phillies become Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City.
TB hasn't quite figured out who his favorite EPL team is, because he doesn't like to root for the rich teams and there's no sense in rooting for the middle ones. He rooted for Blackpool to avoid relegation last year, but that didn't quite work out. Maybe he'll root for one of the new teams.
Closer to home, the U.S. men's national team played a 1-1 tie with Mexico earlier this week in a game played at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia.
It was the first game for the U.S. since Jurgen Klinsmann became the head coach, replacing Princeton alum/former coach Bob Bradley. TigerBlog admits that he didn't have the same connection to the game without the Princeton connection.
Also, TB couldn't help but wonder what might have been for Bradley if the Gold Cup final between the U.S. and Mexico - a 4-2 Mexico win in what would be Bradley's last game with the U.S. - had been played at the Linc instead of at the Rose Bowl, perhaps maybe the crowd would have been pro-U.S. rather than 80% pro-Mexico.
The EPL kicks off a 38-game schedule this weekend; the NFL regular season starts in four weeks.
The Princeton athletic year begins three weeks from today.
Three weeks. Can that possibly be correct?
It is. In fact, four Princeton teams start their seasons on Sept. 2 - none of them at home:
field hockey at Bucknell (and at American two days later)
women's soccer at Long Beach State (and Cal St.-Northridge two days later)
men's soccer at College of Charleston (and at Furman two days later)
women's volleyball in Hofstra's weekend-long tournament
Most of the rest of Division I will already have started by the time Princeton gets going; in fact, there are regular-season games next weekend.
The first home game of the 2011-12 academic year is a field hockey game against Penn State on Thursday, Sept. 8.
Meanwhile, TB is still trying to come to grips with the fact that the summer is winding down and that athletes will be on campus in the next few days to start preseasons.
Last Friday, TB and compliance director Anthony Archbald were talking about how there were only four weeks until the first athletic events, and both agreed that time would fly by.
One down. Three to go.
Everton at Tottenham has been postponed in the wake of the rioting that has frighteningly enveloped the area this week.
TigerBlog used to watch the top English teams play on the small black-and-white television in his room when he was a kid. From there until about two or three years ago, he could care less about English football.
Now, in large part because of the winning battle that Princeton men's soccer coach Jim Barlow fought with TB to get him to appreciate the magnitude of the EPL, and of international soccer in general.
The EPL is different than any American professional sport in ways that would be interesting to see implemented here.
As TB said earlier this year, the concept of relegation is beyond fascinating, and it made for an unreal end to last season for the Premier League.
Then there is the idea that there are no playoffs, so that the team that wins the regular-season title simply is the league champion. The other incentive - a major one - is to finish in the top four in the league to earn a spot into the Champions League, which gives the opportunity to play for the European club championship.
The 20 teams that compete in the EPL are divided into some basic categories: the very few top teams who have a legitimate shot at winning, the ones competing for a Champions League spot, the ones who have no chance of getting to the Champions League but are too good to get relegated and the ones who have to fight to avoid relegation.
It makes being a fan of one of the team's in the middle somewhat frustrating, TB assumes.
Of course, what separates the top teams from the middle and bottom is money and how much of it is spent on the elite players. In that way, it's sort of like Major League Baseball, where the Yankees, Red Sox and Phillies become Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City.
TB hasn't quite figured out who his favorite EPL team is, because he doesn't like to root for the rich teams and there's no sense in rooting for the middle ones. He rooted for Blackpool to avoid relegation last year, but that didn't quite work out. Maybe he'll root for one of the new teams.
Closer to home, the U.S. men's national team played a 1-1 tie with Mexico earlier this week in a game played at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia.
It was the first game for the U.S. since Jurgen Klinsmann became the head coach, replacing Princeton alum/former coach Bob Bradley. TigerBlog admits that he didn't have the same connection to the game without the Princeton connection.
Also, TB couldn't help but wonder what might have been for Bradley if the Gold Cup final between the U.S. and Mexico - a 4-2 Mexico win in what would be Bradley's last game with the U.S. - had been played at the Linc instead of at the Rose Bowl, perhaps maybe the crowd would have been pro-U.S. rather than 80% pro-Mexico.
The EPL kicks off a 38-game schedule this weekend; the NFL regular season starts in four weeks.
The Princeton athletic year begins three weeks from today.
Three weeks. Can that possibly be correct?
It is. In fact, four Princeton teams start their seasons on Sept. 2 - none of them at home:
field hockey at Bucknell (and at American two days later)
women's soccer at Long Beach State (and Cal St.-Northridge two days later)
men's soccer at College of Charleston (and at Furman two days later)
women's volleyball in Hofstra's weekend-long tournament
Most of the rest of Division I will already have started by the time Princeton gets going; in fact, there are regular-season games next weekend.
The first home game of the 2011-12 academic year is a field hockey game against Penn State on Thursday, Sept. 8.
Meanwhile, TB is still trying to come to grips with the fact that the summer is winding down and that athletes will be on campus in the next few days to start preseasons.
Last Friday, TB and compliance director Anthony Archbald were talking about how there were only four weeks until the first athletic events, and both agreed that time would fly by.
One down. Three to go.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
King's Reign
TigerBlog can refer to the blog itself or to the writer of the blog. Almost always, the writer is the same TigerBlog. Every now and then, though, another TigerBlog takes over for the day.
In the past, this has led to confusion and emails asking if this was actually TigerBlog or a different TigerBlog. Today, TigerBlog offers, well, a different TigerBlogger:
Glenn Nelson stood on the tee box, and for just a split second, wasn’t focused on the shot ahead.
The long-long-longtime head coach of all things Princeton volleyball was convinced one year that his teams finally needed a media/recruiting guide. It was the summer of 1999, and while Nelson had no real plans of using it (as evidenced by the unopened box that stayed in this TB’s trunk for months), he finally gave in.
He had one condition. He wasn’t going to talk about players or previews in his office or on the phone. If TB wanted information, he was going to have to fish for it over 18 holes. Well, 19 holes.
The tricky part is breaking Nelson’s focus on the golf course. Despite a limp brought on from an injury decades earlier, the man had a magician’s touch, especially close to the green. Put the ball anywhere inside 20 yards and it’s up, down and off to the next hole.
He’d answer a question or two, but it never broke his concentration. That is, until the player in question was Sabrina King.
To this day, TB doesn’t remember Nelson’s quote, though it had something to do with the fact that she’d be playing for one of the best teams in the country if she had been six inches taller. The quote itself didn’t matter. The point had already been made.
Sabrina King was something special.
If Sydney Johnson wins an Ivy League title the way John Thompson III did 10 years earlier, the face of Princeton men’s basketball will still be Pete Carril. It’s not like that in every sport here, but two years since his retirement, Nelson still remains the face of Princeton volleyball.
But for quite some time, as both player and assistant coach, King has been its heart and soul.
King was named the fourth head coach of Princeton women’s volleyball last week, an announcement that apparently brought plenty of positive responses to the inbox of Director of Athletics Gary Walters. King is beloved by the alumni, from those who preceded her to those who both played with and were recruited by her.
She began as an assistant coach in 2002, and she left the program when Nelson retired following the 2008-09 academic year. Of the last 14 women’s volleyball seasons, she has been here for 11, and she has been part of the team photo for each of Princeton’s last five Ivy League champions.
King spent the last two years away from the volleyball court, doing a variety of things to find if any could match the fulfillment she found in coaching at Princeton.
Obviously, we learned that answer last week.
The fact that it was coaching at Princeton was the key to King. TB has a hunch that this was King’s first application for a full-time head coaching position, and he also has a hunch that it will be her last. She wasn’t meant to coach volleyball in the MAAC, or the NEC, or even in a BCS conference.
She wasn’t meant to coach at Yale or Penn, either.
Sabrina King recruited the best players of the last decade, including a handful on the team right now. Her last class of recruits included Lydia Rudnick, one of two unanimous first-team All-Ivy selections last season, and Pat Schwagler, the reigning EIVA Rookie of the Year.
Schwagler, by the way, is male. King’s job description didn’t necessarily include assisting Nelson in men’s recruiting, but she did so anyway. Why?
The same reason she wasn’t meant to coach anywhere but here.
Sabrina King is Princeton volleyball.
TB has covered Princeton volleyball for 11 seasons – 22 if you count the men – so he feels pretty confident in predicting a long, successful run for King. In fact, the potential combination of King and men’s coach Sam Shweisky could make each stronger; both possess different strength that could complement the other.
There will be some form of learning curve as the head coach, especially because only one coach could do things the Glenn Nelson way, and he’s in somewhere in a fairway with a wedge in his hands.
King will figure it out. She’ll do it because she’s smart, because she knows the game and the University and, more than anything, because Princeton volleyball means more to her than it does to anybody else.
In the past, this has led to confusion and emails asking if this was actually TigerBlog or a different TigerBlog. Today, TigerBlog offers, well, a different TigerBlogger:
Glenn Nelson stood on the tee box, and for just a split second, wasn’t focused on the shot ahead.
The long-long-longtime head coach of all things Princeton volleyball was convinced one year that his teams finally needed a media/recruiting guide. It was the summer of 1999, and while Nelson had no real plans of using it (as evidenced by the unopened box that stayed in this TB’s trunk for months), he finally gave in.
He had one condition. He wasn’t going to talk about players or previews in his office or on the phone. If TB wanted information, he was going to have to fish for it over 18 holes. Well, 19 holes.
The tricky part is breaking Nelson’s focus on the golf course. Despite a limp brought on from an injury decades earlier, the man had a magician’s touch, especially close to the green. Put the ball anywhere inside 20 yards and it’s up, down and off to the next hole.
He’d answer a question or two, but it never broke his concentration. That is, until the player in question was Sabrina King.
To this day, TB doesn’t remember Nelson’s quote, though it had something to do with the fact that she’d be playing for one of the best teams in the country if she had been six inches taller. The quote itself didn’t matter. The point had already been made.
Sabrina King was something special.
If Sydney Johnson wins an Ivy League title the way John Thompson III did 10 years earlier, the face of Princeton men’s basketball will still be Pete Carril. It’s not like that in every sport here, but two years since his retirement, Nelson still remains the face of Princeton volleyball.
But for quite some time, as both player and assistant coach, King has been its heart and soul.
King was named the fourth head coach of Princeton women’s volleyball last week, an announcement that apparently brought plenty of positive responses to the inbox of Director of Athletics Gary Walters. King is beloved by the alumni, from those who preceded her to those who both played with and were recruited by her.
She began as an assistant coach in 2002, and she left the program when Nelson retired following the 2008-09 academic year. Of the last 14 women’s volleyball seasons, she has been here for 11, and she has been part of the team photo for each of Princeton’s last five Ivy League champions.
King spent the last two years away from the volleyball court, doing a variety of things to find if any could match the fulfillment she found in coaching at Princeton.
Obviously, we learned that answer last week.
The fact that it was coaching at Princeton was the key to King. TB has a hunch that this was King’s first application for a full-time head coaching position, and he also has a hunch that it will be her last. She wasn’t meant to coach volleyball in the MAAC, or the NEC, or even in a BCS conference.
She wasn’t meant to coach at Yale or Penn, either.
Sabrina King recruited the best players of the last decade, including a handful on the team right now. Her last class of recruits included Lydia Rudnick, one of two unanimous first-team All-Ivy selections last season, and Pat Schwagler, the reigning EIVA Rookie of the Year.
Schwagler, by the way, is male. King’s job description didn’t necessarily include assisting Nelson in men’s recruiting, but she did so anyway. Why?
The same reason she wasn’t meant to coach anywhere but here.
Sabrina King is Princeton volleyball.
TB has covered Princeton volleyball for 11 seasons – 22 if you count the men – so he feels pretty confident in predicting a long, successful run for King. In fact, the potential combination of King and men’s coach Sam Shweisky could make each stronger; both possess different strength that could complement the other.
There will be some form of learning curve as the head coach, especially because only one coach could do things the Glenn Nelson way, and he’s in somewhere in a fairway with a wedge in his hands.
King will figure it out. She’ll do it because she’s smart, because she knows the game and the University and, more than anything, because Princeton volleyball means more to her than it does to anybody else.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Kills, Digs, Blocks, Spikes
Down on E level of Jadwin Gym, there is a storage closet that has a bunch of old file cabinets that used to be in the back room of the OAC, in a spot that is now the shiny new offices of Associate Athletic Director Chris Brock and Assistant Athletic Director Kelly Widener.
These file cabinets include drawers labeled "football, pre-1930" and "men's basketball, 1945-1967." They are filled with old papers, yellowing and crinkly, that have all kinds of information on them, from old rosters to box scores to preseason releases - and, of course, stats.
In fact, there are decades' worth of stats that are hand-written on old notebook paper, with simple columns like "goals" and "points" and "touchdowns."
Back when TigerBlog first covering Princeton in his newspaper days, the shift to computerizing stats was just happening, though not yet for in-game. Instead, then - and through TB's first year or two here in the OAC - stats at all games were still done by hand, with a group of four or five or so people armed with papers, charts, pencils, a typewriter (to type the play-by-play) and blank box scores to fill in. It would take at least 30 minutes after a game to have a finished box.
After the game, TB would have to go into a different office here in Jadwin, then occupied by Marge DeFrank (a longtime administrative assistant here who passed away several years ago), and use Marge's computer to update the cumulative stats. It was an annoying, arduous process.
For men's lacrosse stats, TB developed an excel spreadsheet on which he would have to enter that game's goals, assists, saves, etc., and then excel would do the rest, updating season and career stats.
Eventually, the trend in college sports went to doing computerized in-game stats, which seemed like the very invention of computers themselves to many SIDs at the time.
There were a few companies that were vying for the emerging market of college stats, most notably one called StatMan (which nobody but TB liked) and another called StatCrew (which everyone else liked). TB doesn't know what happened to StatMan, but basically every college now uses StatCew for all of its computerized statting.
StatCrew has programs that are basically structured the same for football, basketball, lacrosse, soccer, field hockey, volleyball, baseball and softball. These programs have come light years from what they were in the mid-1990s, and the advances in StatCrew software - ability to do live stats, compatibility with the web, ease of NCAA reporting, variety of reports it can create - have done so much to help make athletic communications a much more efficient venture.
All of the programs work in the same manner. Games are set up with the opponents and their rosters, and then all statistical entering is done by uniform numbers, not by names. The programs are designed to anticipate everything that can happen off of a given situation, so if you enter, say, a shot in soccer, the program knows that the next thing for that shot has to be that it was a goal, was a save, went wide, hit the post, was blocked, etc.
Within seconds after the game is over, final stats and updated cumulative stats can be on your web page.
While there are still some in the sports info world who are still intimidated by the process of entering stats, it is something that can be learned with relative ease.
If you ask any SID what the hardest sport to do is, they will almost unanimously say volleyball. TigerBlog has never done StatCrew for a volleyball match, and he'd basically be lost if he tried. The stats are somewhat complex, with digs and kills and assists and aces and everything else, and the game moves quite rapidly.
Princeton's women's volleyball team made the Penn stat crew stay later than anyone thought would be the case when the defending Ivy champion Quakers went up 2-0 in Saturday night's Ivy League opener.
But the Tigers stormed back, winning the final three games 25-23, 25-19 and then 25-9 to shock Penn.
Women's volleyball in the Ivy League works just like basketball, with a double round-robin travel-partner format that determines the league champion and the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. Should there be a tie for the title at the end, there would be a playoff to determine the automatic bid.
For Princeton and Penn, it was just the opener. Dartmouth and Yale are off to 2-0 starts, and the Big Green are 11-2 overall. Princeton this weekend is home to Brown and Yale as the league race begins to sort itself out.
Of course, for decades, the face of Princeton volleyball was Glenn Nelson, a somewhat beloved figure in Tiger athletic history for his humor, his laid-back style - and his success on the court.
Jolie Ward is now in Year 2 as the head coach, as is her assistant (and the men's head coach) Sam Schweisky, who took the Tiger men to the EIVA final in his first year. While much was made a year ago about how Chris Bates took over from Bill Tierney in men's lacrosse, Ward and Schweisky stepped into as enormous a shadow in Dillon Gym.
With football and a soccer doubleheader Saturday, a big chance for sprint football Friday night and another game against a Top 15 team in field hockey Sunday (all at home), it's possible to overlook women's volleyball, an indoor sport (along with men's water polo) among mostly outdoor fall sports. This is a big weekend for the Tigers in Dillon, where the atmosphere for matches can be outrageous.
And where else can you get stats like this (from the story after the Penn game): Lydia Rudnick recorded 26 kills, 12 digs and a .300 attack percentage in the win. Junior Cathryn Quinn, Princeton's most experienced starter, also had a strong effort for the Tigers. The middle recorded 18 kills and six blocks while providing important leadership after the Tigers found themselves in an early hole.
These file cabinets include drawers labeled "football, pre-1930" and "men's basketball, 1945-1967." They are filled with old papers, yellowing and crinkly, that have all kinds of information on them, from old rosters to box scores to preseason releases - and, of course, stats.
In fact, there are decades' worth of stats that are hand-written on old notebook paper, with simple columns like "goals" and "points" and "touchdowns."
Back when TigerBlog first covering Princeton in his newspaper days, the shift to computerizing stats was just happening, though not yet for in-game. Instead, then - and through TB's first year or two here in the OAC - stats at all games were still done by hand, with a group of four or five or so people armed with papers, charts, pencils, a typewriter (to type the play-by-play) and blank box scores to fill in. It would take at least 30 minutes after a game to have a finished box.
After the game, TB would have to go into a different office here in Jadwin, then occupied by Marge DeFrank (a longtime administrative assistant here who passed away several years ago), and use Marge's computer to update the cumulative stats. It was an annoying, arduous process.
For men's lacrosse stats, TB developed an excel spreadsheet on which he would have to enter that game's goals, assists, saves, etc., and then excel would do the rest, updating season and career stats.
Eventually, the trend in college sports went to doing computerized in-game stats, which seemed like the very invention of computers themselves to many SIDs at the time.
There were a few companies that were vying for the emerging market of college stats, most notably one called StatMan (which nobody but TB liked) and another called StatCrew (which everyone else liked). TB doesn't know what happened to StatMan, but basically every college now uses StatCew for all of its computerized statting.
StatCrew has programs that are basically structured the same for football, basketball, lacrosse, soccer, field hockey, volleyball, baseball and softball. These programs have come light years from what they were in the mid-1990s, and the advances in StatCrew software - ability to do live stats, compatibility with the web, ease of NCAA reporting, variety of reports it can create - have done so much to help make athletic communications a much more efficient venture.
All of the programs work in the same manner. Games are set up with the opponents and their rosters, and then all statistical entering is done by uniform numbers, not by names. The programs are designed to anticipate everything that can happen off of a given situation, so if you enter, say, a shot in soccer, the program knows that the next thing for that shot has to be that it was a goal, was a save, went wide, hit the post, was blocked, etc.
Within seconds after the game is over, final stats and updated cumulative stats can be on your web page.
While there are still some in the sports info world who are still intimidated by the process of entering stats, it is something that can be learned with relative ease.
If you ask any SID what the hardest sport to do is, they will almost unanimously say volleyball. TigerBlog has never done StatCrew for a volleyball match, and he'd basically be lost if he tried. The stats are somewhat complex, with digs and kills and assists and aces and everything else, and the game moves quite rapidly.
Princeton's women's volleyball team made the Penn stat crew stay later than anyone thought would be the case when the defending Ivy champion Quakers went up 2-0 in Saturday night's Ivy League opener.
But the Tigers stormed back, winning the final three games 25-23, 25-19 and then 25-9 to shock Penn.
Women's volleyball in the Ivy League works just like basketball, with a double round-robin travel-partner format that determines the league champion and the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. Should there be a tie for the title at the end, there would be a playoff to determine the automatic bid.
For Princeton and Penn, it was just the opener. Dartmouth and Yale are off to 2-0 starts, and the Big Green are 11-2 overall. Princeton this weekend is home to Brown and Yale as the league race begins to sort itself out.
Of course, for decades, the face of Princeton volleyball was Glenn Nelson, a somewhat beloved figure in Tiger athletic history for his humor, his laid-back style - and his success on the court.
Jolie Ward is now in Year 2 as the head coach, as is her assistant (and the men's head coach) Sam Schweisky, who took the Tiger men to the EIVA final in his first year. While much was made a year ago about how Chris Bates took over from Bill Tierney in men's lacrosse, Ward and Schweisky stepped into as enormous a shadow in Dillon Gym.
With football and a soccer doubleheader Saturday, a big chance for sprint football Friday night and another game against a Top 15 team in field hockey Sunday (all at home), it's possible to overlook women's volleyball, an indoor sport (along with men's water polo) among mostly outdoor fall sports. This is a big weekend for the Tigers in Dillon, where the atmosphere for matches can be outrageous.
And where else can you get stats like this (from the story after the Penn game): Lydia Rudnick recorded 26 kills, 12 digs and a .300 attack percentage in the win. Junior Cathryn Quinn, Princeton's most experienced starter, also had a strong effort for the Tigers. The middle recorded 18 kills and six blocks while providing important leadership after the Tigers found themselves in an early hole.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
The Next Step In Princeton Volleyball
For the first time in as long as TB has been working with volleyball (which dates back to the 20th century), the dartboard is gone from the coach's office.
Yes, a new era in Princeton volleyball has begun.
Jolie Ward steps into the unenviable position of following Princeton legend Glenn Nelson, who guided the women's program to 11 Ivy League titles and the men to a historic 1998 NCAA semifinal berth before retiring last spring.
Part of the new era includes two head coaches for the two programs, which hasn't happened since 1981. Ward will coach the women's program, and her assistant coach will also serve as the head men's coach. In TB's opinion, this move was a necessity because of the importance of both recruiting and off-season practicing. In truth, Nelson was able to work with the men's program full time in the spring because assistant coach Sabrina King was a full-time spring coach and also handled the heavy majority of recruiting duties.
Ward's bio looks good. She earned several team and league honors as a player and posted winning records in her first two stops; in one year at Manhattan, she turned a program that finished 10th the previous season into a playoff contender and missed the four-team postseason on the final day of the conference schedule.
Realistically, though, Princeton wasn't going to hire a coach without the credentials. So what did TB learn about Jolie Ward in the first 24 hours that he thought would serve her and the program best?
GoPrincetonTigers.com has a two-part video chat that will run this week with Ward, where she discusses her own career, her goals for her players and her view of the overall program. In the second part, which will air tomorrow, she specifically talks about the history of the Princeton program. The first thing she did was mention Glenn Nelson.
There were two ways to go about this. One is to just begin your own legacy; the fact of the matter is, within a couple years, your incoming recruits probably won't know who the former coach was anyway. She could have talked about what she wanted the program to become and left it at that.
To specifically mention Nelson, and then to talk about how failure of either program is, in her wording, "unacceptable" because of Nelson's legacy, says more than anything else about Ward. She didn't lower the bar for herself.
And because she didn't lower it for herself, she certainly won't lower it for her players. Without question, there will be a different aura around this program. It isn't necessarily better or worse; right now, zero matches into Ward's time here, it is only different.
But by also specifically crediting Nelson for the program's success, and by challenging herself to maintain his lofty standards, TB also believes that she is inviting the volleyball alumni -- who have known only one face around this program -- to stay on board. Again, this was a smart move; maintaining the alumni base, which is especially strong in Nelson's home-away-from-home of California, will keep the strong ties of the program alive and ideally be a way to locate young talent on the opposite coast.
TB would like to believe the alumni will give Ward a chance. While Nelson was truly one-of-a-kind, his professional passions were the sport and the Princeton players who worked at it. Those will be Ward's as well, and like Nelson, she seems eager to work at bringing the highest level of volleyball to Princeton University.
It may take a couple weeks for the current players to get comfortable with a new coach after knowing only Nelson's method of doing things, but maybe that isn't so bad. With four starters leaving and only one, Sheena Donohue, with more than a year of starting experience, an uncomfortable, difficult preseason may lead to the highest level of work and position competition.
When the league season rolls around Oct. 3, we'll have a better sense of what the 2009 squad will be like. There were few around Princeton who were bigger fans of the previous regime than TB, but there are also few who are more excited and, after the last 24 hours, optimistic for the current regime.
Yes, a new era in Princeton volleyball has begun.
Jolie Ward steps into the unenviable position of following Princeton legend Glenn Nelson, who guided the women's program to 11 Ivy League titles and the men to a historic 1998 NCAA semifinal berth before retiring last spring.
Part of the new era includes two head coaches for the two programs, which hasn't happened since 1981. Ward will coach the women's program, and her assistant coach will also serve as the head men's coach. In TB's opinion, this move was a necessity because of the importance of both recruiting and off-season practicing. In truth, Nelson was able to work with the men's program full time in the spring because assistant coach Sabrina King was a full-time spring coach and also handled the heavy majority of recruiting duties.
Ward's bio looks good. She earned several team and league honors as a player and posted winning records in her first two stops; in one year at Manhattan, she turned a program that finished 10th the previous season into a playoff contender and missed the four-team postseason on the final day of the conference schedule.
Realistically, though, Princeton wasn't going to hire a coach without the credentials. So what did TB learn about Jolie Ward in the first 24 hours that he thought would serve her and the program best?
GoPrincetonTigers.com has a two-part video chat that will run this week with Ward, where she discusses her own career, her goals for her players and her view of the overall program. In the second part, which will air tomorrow, she specifically talks about the history of the Princeton program. The first thing she did was mention Glenn Nelson.
There were two ways to go about this. One is to just begin your own legacy; the fact of the matter is, within a couple years, your incoming recruits probably won't know who the former coach was anyway. She could have talked about what she wanted the program to become and left it at that.
To specifically mention Nelson, and then to talk about how failure of either program is, in her wording, "unacceptable" because of Nelson's legacy, says more than anything else about Ward. She didn't lower the bar for herself.
And because she didn't lower it for herself, she certainly won't lower it for her players. Without question, there will be a different aura around this program. It isn't necessarily better or worse; right now, zero matches into Ward's time here, it is only different.
But by also specifically crediting Nelson for the program's success, and by challenging herself to maintain his lofty standards, TB also believes that she is inviting the volleyball alumni -- who have known only one face around this program -- to stay on board. Again, this was a smart move; maintaining the alumni base, which is especially strong in Nelson's home-away-from-home of California, will keep the strong ties of the program alive and ideally be a way to locate young talent on the opposite coast.
TB would like to believe the alumni will give Ward a chance. While Nelson was truly one-of-a-kind, his professional passions were the sport and the Princeton players who worked at it. Those will be Ward's as well, and like Nelson, she seems eager to work at bringing the highest level of volleyball to Princeton University.
It may take a couple weeks for the current players to get comfortable with a new coach after knowing only Nelson's method of doing things, but maybe that isn't so bad. With four starters leaving and only one, Sheena Donohue, with more than a year of starting experience, an uncomfortable, difficult preseason may lead to the highest level of work and position competition.
When the league season rolls around Oct. 3, we'll have a better sense of what the 2009 squad will be like. There were few around Princeton who were bigger fans of the previous regime than TB, but there are also few who are more excited and, after the last 24 hours, optimistic for the current regime.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
For You, Muh-NISH
For those who read the Star-Ledger, you might recognize the byline "M.A. Mehta" from his coverage of Rutgers women's basketball, Georgetown men's basketball (for any reason at all) and outstanding feature writing (TigerBlog does not say this casually; M.A. is one of the best sportswriters TB has ever read).
What you might not know is that M.A. Mehta is actually Manish Mehta (pronounced "mah-NEESH" by the rest of the world and "muh-NISH" by Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson). Before he was ever M.A. the sportswriter, Manish was simply Manish, a member of the Princeton Office of Athletic Communications staff.
Back in those days, Manish was the volleyball contact, a distinction that earned him a trip to the 1999 NCAA men's final four in Hawaii. As is the case with anyone who came in contact with retiring coach Glenn Nelson, Manish was immediately drawn to him.
Now that Nelson has announced his retirement, Manish sent an email looking for funny Glenn Nelson stories for a feature that he wants to write. TigerBlog (this TigerBlog, not the TigerBlog who has spent way more time around Glenn) responded that most of the ones he had weren't fit for print in the Star-Ledger, but TB would try to come up with something.
As an aside, the first thought TB had about Nelson is that despite the fact that he walks with a limp, he still moves faster all the time than perhaps anyone TB has ever been around. But that's not what Manish was after.
So, here are this TigerBlog's two best printable Glenn Nelson stories:
One, ironically, has to do with when Manish was the volleyball contact. Back then, computer stats were new to sports information, and the volleyball version of the stat program is by far the toughest. Seeing that Manish was struggling with the program, Nelson called timeout. Why? So his sports information guy could get caught up.
The second story has to do with Nelson and his long, long, long-time tennis partner, Pete Carril. When Carril left to become an assistant coach with the Sacramento Kings, Nelson badgered him for years to get him some Kings gear. Finally, one day, years later, Carril showed up with a bag in hand for Nelson. The next day, Nelson saw Carril again on the balcony in Jadwin and said: "Hey, Coach. You know those Kings shorts you gave me yesterday? Your wallet was in the back pocket." He then flipped Carril his wallet.
What you might not know is that M.A. Mehta is actually Manish Mehta (pronounced "mah-NEESH" by the rest of the world and "muh-NISH" by Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson). Before he was ever M.A. the sportswriter, Manish was simply Manish, a member of the Princeton Office of Athletic Communications staff.
Back in those days, Manish was the volleyball contact, a distinction that earned him a trip to the 1999 NCAA men's final four in Hawaii. As is the case with anyone who came in contact with retiring coach Glenn Nelson, Manish was immediately drawn to him.
Now that Nelson has announced his retirement, Manish sent an email looking for funny Glenn Nelson stories for a feature that he wants to write. TigerBlog (this TigerBlog, not the TigerBlog who has spent way more time around Glenn) responded that most of the ones he had weren't fit for print in the Star-Ledger, but TB would try to come up with something.
As an aside, the first thought TB had about Nelson is that despite the fact that he walks with a limp, he still moves faster all the time than perhaps anyone TB has ever been around. But that's not what Manish was after.
So, here are this TigerBlog's two best printable Glenn Nelson stories:
One, ironically, has to do with when Manish was the volleyball contact. Back then, computer stats were new to sports information, and the volleyball version of the stat program is by far the toughest. Seeing that Manish was struggling with the program, Nelson called timeout. Why? So his sports information guy could get caught up.
The second story has to do with Nelson and his long, long, long-time tennis partner, Pete Carril. When Carril left to become an assistant coach with the Sacramento Kings, Nelson badgered him for years to get him some Kings gear. Finally, one day, years later, Carril showed up with a bag in hand for Nelson. The next day, Nelson saw Carril again on the balcony in Jadwin and said: "Hey, Coach. You know those Kings shorts you gave me yesterday? Your wallet was in the back pocket." He then flipped Carril his wallet.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
One More Match ...
The Princeton women's volleyball Class of 2008 will not end its respective careers in the NCAA tournament. Inside a packed Dillon Gym last Saturday, that dream was vanquished in three tight sets against Yale. Give the Bulldogs credit; they won the key points late in the first and second sets and held off a rally in the third, and hopefully they will represent the Ivy League well in the NCAAs.But that loss does not erase the impressive four years posted by the Princeton senior class, a rare collection of players at varying positions who came together and achieved an incredible record in their time together.
That group, consisting of Lindsey Ensign, Kelli Grobe, Parker Henritze, Jessica Hoffmann, Bailey Robinson and Sasha Sadrai, will enter Wednesday night's match with a career record of 77-19. As freshmen, Ensign, Grobe and Henritze were consistent starters, and Henritze went on to earn Ivy League Rookie of the Year honors.
The next season, Hoffmann and Robinson moved into the starting lineup and Sadrai was becoming a back-row regular (if you aren't familiar with the sport, trust us, she played a lot). That season, Princeton went 21-3 overall, 11-3 in the Ivy League and finished second. Last season, starting five members of the Class of 2008, Princeton went 21-4 and became the first Ivy volleyball team to go 14-0 in league play. The performances of starters Jenny McReynolds '08 and current junior Sheena Donohue were also crucial to the title, but this piece is meant to point out that every member of that junior class played a key role in arguably the most dominant volleyball team in league history.
Despite not winning the Ivy League this season, Princeton has put together another strong year. The team is 17-4, 11-2 in the league, but simply couldn't find a way to beat Yale in two tries. When Princeton takes on Penn, its fiercest rival, tonight, they will want nothing more than to send this great class out on a high note.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Fall Races Coming To The Wire
This weekend brings with it November, which means that the fall Ivy League races are starting to wind down. As of now, no Ivy League championship has been awarded for 2008-09 in any sport, though the first two of the 33 that will be won in this academic year are guaranteed to be decided this Friday.
In all, five Princeton teams still have a realistic chance to think in terms of a fall Ivy League championship. That hardly means that any of the five will win.
The first two championships to be decided will be Friday, which happens to be Halloween, at the Ivy League Heptagonal Cross Country championships at Van Cortlandt Park in New York City. Van Cortlandt Park has hosted 60 of the last 61 Heps cross country championships.
Princeton is the defending champion in both the men's and women's divisions. The women are a prohibitive favorite again and a legitimate national contender. The men's team is ranked higher than any other Ivy team, but there are several serious challengers, most notably Cornell, Dartmouth and Columbia.
The Ivy League field hockey championship essentially comes down to this Saturday's game between Princeton and Cornell in Ithaca. Both teams are 5-0 in the league; no other team has fewer than two league losses. The winner of the game will clinch at least a tie for the Ivy League championship and will also clinch the Ivy League's spot in the NCAA tournament play-in game, which either Princeton or Cornell will host Tuesday, Nov. 11.
Princeton has outscored its league foes 25-4; Cornell has outscored its foes 14-7. The loser of the game Saturday can still get a share of the league title with a win and a loss by the winner the following week, when Princeton its at Penn and Cornell is home against Dartmouth. Penn and Dartmouth are both 3-2 in the league.
The women's soccer race is pretty wide open heading down the stretch and can still go in all sorts of directions. Harvard, at 4-1-0, is in first after its win over Princeton Saturday night; Princeton and Columbia are next at 3-1-1. Princeton plays at Cornell and home with Penn. Harvard is at Dartmouth and home with Columbia, while the Lions are at Yale this weekend as well.
The best case scenario for Princeton is wins in its last two games, a Yale win over Columbia and a Columbia win over Harvard. There are countless other scenarios as well that yield one champion or multiple champions, and Penn and Yale are still mathematically alive in some scenarios. Princeton, with a strong RPI, is still alive for an at-large berth to the NCAA tournament should the Tigers not win the league's automatic bid.
The women's volleyball race is basically at the midpoint, and Princeton and Yale are tied with one league loss apiece, though Yale defeated Princeton 3-0 in New Haven in the first meeting. Princeton and Yale meet Nov. 15 at Dillon Gym.
Cornell is a strong third in the league race at 6-2, while Penn is at 4-3. The Quakers are the only team to knock off Yale in the league this season.
In all, five Princeton teams still have a realistic chance to think in terms of a fall Ivy League championship. That hardly means that any of the five will win.
The first two championships to be decided will be Friday, which happens to be Halloween, at the Ivy League Heptagonal Cross Country championships at Van Cortlandt Park in New York City. Van Cortlandt Park has hosted 60 of the last 61 Heps cross country championships.
Princeton is the defending champion in both the men's and women's divisions. The women are a prohibitive favorite again and a legitimate national contender. The men's team is ranked higher than any other Ivy team, but there are several serious challengers, most notably Cornell, Dartmouth and Columbia.
The Ivy League field hockey championship essentially comes down to this Saturday's game between Princeton and Cornell in Ithaca. Both teams are 5-0 in the league; no other team has fewer than two league losses. The winner of the game will clinch at least a tie for the Ivy League championship and will also clinch the Ivy League's spot in the NCAA tournament play-in game, which either Princeton or Cornell will host Tuesday, Nov. 11.
Princeton has outscored its league foes 25-4; Cornell has outscored its foes 14-7. The loser of the game Saturday can still get a share of the league title with a win and a loss by the winner the following week, when Princeton its at Penn and Cornell is home against Dartmouth. Penn and Dartmouth are both 3-2 in the league.
The women's soccer race is pretty wide open heading down the stretch and can still go in all sorts of directions. Harvard, at 4-1-0, is in first after its win over Princeton Saturday night; Princeton and Columbia are next at 3-1-1. Princeton plays at Cornell and home with Penn. Harvard is at Dartmouth and home with Columbia, while the Lions are at Yale this weekend as well.
The best case scenario for Princeton is wins in its last two games, a Yale win over Columbia and a Columbia win over Harvard. There are countless other scenarios as well that yield one champion or multiple champions, and Penn and Yale are still mathematically alive in some scenarios. Princeton, with a strong RPI, is still alive for an at-large berth to the NCAA tournament should the Tigers not win the league's automatic bid.
The women's volleyball race is basically at the midpoint, and Princeton and Yale are tied with one league loss apiece, though Yale defeated Princeton 3-0 in New Haven in the first meeting. Princeton and Yale meet Nov. 15 at Dillon Gym.
Cornell is a strong third in the league race at 6-2, while Penn is at 4-3. The Quakers are the only team to knock off Yale in the league this season.
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