TigerBlog sat with Jess Deutsch, a women's basketball academic-athletic fellow whose actual job TB always gets wrong when he tries to describe it, her husband Ted (who TB is positive played baseball here at Princeton), Howard Levy and Steve DiGregorio and his wife Nadia at the men's basketball game against Columbia Saturday evening.
The group sat in its normal spot, in section N8, all the way near the railing, opposite the Princeton bench.
The three or four rows in front of TB were basically going unused until midway through the second half, when a man who looked a little like former Princeton basketball player Kevin Gillette (but wasn't, since Gillette is nearly seven-feet tall) walked in carrying an infant car seat, complete with baby, along with his wife and son, who looked to be between two and three.
For much of the rest of the game, the man and woman did what people who have two very little children do when they're at a game - they watched their kids 70% of the time and the game 30% of the time. And took pictures of the boy with the court in the background.
The baby was positioned in the infant car seat on the bench so that she faced away from the court, or directly up to TigerBlog, who waved but got no reaction, not even a smile.
Eventually, the mother picked up the baby, and the entire family headed off towards the Backcourt Bistro side of Jadwin, leaving behind the infant car seat, in which they put various coats, toys and such.
Then, a few minutes later, the mother, father and boy came back - without the littlest one.
Immediately, TB and the rest of the group, somewhat in unison, said "uh, where's the baby?"
TigerBlog immediately went out on a limb and said something like he was going with "left the baby with someone they knew on the other side rather than forgot they brought two kids with them."
Then they all left again, leaving the car seat on the bench. And then the game ended.
As the crowd filed out, TB said he waiting til they came back. Jess thought that the group might not have noticed that the baby was still in the car seat, so she actually moved all the coats and stuff out of the way, only to see that it was in fact empty.
Eventually, TB was the only person left in Section N8. And then they came back, all four of them, happy with their night in Jadwin.
The situation involving the baby was not the only drama of the night.
In fact, the Princeton-Columbia game, which started out with a quick double-figure lead for Princeton, was close for much of the second half. It was actually tied with just under nine minutes to go, and were it not for some great Princeton foul shooting, it might have gotten away.
Instead, it ended up 72-66 Princeton.
The men's and women's basketball teams at Princeton have played six Ivy League games and won them all so far.
That six-point win for the men is the only one that has been closer than 10.
The men have defeated Penn by 12, Cornell by 17 and Columbia by six.
The women? They have won by 30, 31 and 46.
The three-time defending champion women's team is the only unbeaten in the league. There are three teams with one loss each - Harvard, Dartmouth and Penn.
Princeton is at Brown and Yale (both 1-3) this weekend, before hosting Dartmouth and Harvard. If Princeton gets to 7-0, that would mean that every other team in the league would have at least two losses, and Princeton would have all kinds of margin for error.
On the men's side, it looks like a two-team race now between Princeton and Harvard, both of whom are undefeated in the league. Harvard is 4-0 with a major escape against Dartmouth and a never-should-have-gotten-that-close two OT win over Brown after the Crimson were up 22 in the second half.
After the two undefeateds, everyone else in the league has at least two losses - and they all have to play each other again. Brown, at 2-2, is at Jadwin Friday, followed by Yale Saturday.
Then it's the trip to Dartmouth and Harvard.
TigerBlog remembers a lot of years where Princeton and Penn met in the seventh league game of the year and that both teams expected to get to that game undefeated. It rarely happened that way (though one year it did was 1999, the year Princeton came from 27 points back to beat Penn at the Palestra - and then didn't win the league).
Will Princeton and Harvard be 6-0 when they play each other? Not if they're looking past anyone they won't.
On the other hand, if they do get to 6-0 each, then Feb. 16 will be a wild night in Cambridge.
That game is at the end of next weekend, but it might as well be a hundred years from now for the two teams, who both have a great deal of work to do between now and then.
It's been a great start for Princeton to the Ivy basketball season.
Two teams. Six games. Six wins.
And, of course, no misplaced babies.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Monday, February 4, 2013
Guest TigerBlog - TB-Baltimore Celebrates A Super Win
Okay, here's TigerBlog's quick take on the Super Bowl:
* Beyonce is hot
* while all of the commercials were basically awful, the one with Bar Refaeli and the computer nerd kid was gross and disturbing and caused TB to look away and definitely hit the mute button
* Jim Harbaugh is a child
* CBS couldn't figure out who the guy John Harbaugh was yelling at was and why?
* Ray Lewis said "when God is with you, who could be against you" and either didn't realize or didn't care that not one person watching thought anything other than "fraud" while remembering Lewis' role in a double homicide and how he has six kids with four women, none of whom he is currently with
* Joe Flacco is pretty good
* Baltimore's Ed Dickson caught a pass, held the ball out to signal first down and then, when one of the officials reached out for it, dropped it on the turf. Feeling badly, Dickson went to retrieve it, except another official had picked it up already. The next time he caught a pass, Dickson handed the ball directly to the official
Mostly, TB will remember this Super Bowl as the one where even as the 49ers had fourth and goal with less than two minutes to go, he still couldn't figure out if he was rooting harder against Jim Harbaugh or Ray Lewis.
Ultimately, he figured he was happier that the Ravens won, largely because of TB-Baltimore (Princeton OAC Hall-of-Famer David Rosenfeld).
As such, TB wasn't surprised when he had an email from Rosenfeld this morning asking for the floor. His thoughts:
So the euphoria hasn’t quite died down yet here in Baltimore, and any lull in the excitement will end Tuesday morning when the victory parade and celebration winds through downtown. Seemingly, despite raucous postgame celebrations in the streets Sunday night, there were no major incidents, a rarity in today’s world. It’s been an insanely liberating few months for Baltimore sports fans, starting with the Orioles’ surprise season and ending with the Ravens’ Super Bowl run.
If there’s one thing I would tell the world outside Baltimore, it’s that the Ravens have particularly great fans, so at least be happy for them. It’s a hyper-local fan base from an often-maligned city (check out this map from Deadspin; essentially, the entire group of Ravens fans make up five suburban counties and the city, the Eastern Shore has a very small population) —which leads to an us-against-them mentality that cannot be escaped during football season. Ravens fans are somewhat like Eagles fans, only nicer. It’s an extremely youthful fan base: the Giants, Steelers, Cowboys and Packers have fans because of tradition; the Ravens are 17 years old — their core group consists of folks who have grown tired of listening to their parents talking about Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts.
Plus, from the game-day perspective, the fans are simply loud and enthusiastic; maybe Seattle beats out the noise at M&T Bank Stadium as far as outdoor stadiums go, but it’s a close call.
As for the game, as usual, two weeks of over-analysis proved to be pretty much wrong, except for the fact that it finished as a close game. I saw the great Hank Goldberg on ESPN enthusiastically take “the under.” Meanwhile, the teams combined for 835 total yards, which probably would have been closer to 900 had Jacoby Jones not run back a kickoff for a touchdown. Forgotten among the thoughts of a tight, defensive showdown was the fact that the Ravens scored more points this season than any in franchise history and that much of Baltimore’s struggles during the season were on defense, despite the fact that it was the offensive coordinator who was let go. Speaking of Cam Cameron, if you want to read about an entirely decent person, as opposed to say...Jim Harbaugh, you should read this story.
Of course, kudos to the Ravens offense start with Joe Flacco, one of three starters for the Ravens who played college football in the FCS, or what was then called I-AA. The center who snapped the ball to Flacco during the game was veteran Matt Birk who, as Princeton fans may remember, played for Harvard. In addition to Flacco, Birk and cornerback Corey Graham, who played at New Hampshire, the Ravens also got huge contributions from Jones, who went to Division II Lane College, and Cary Williams, who played at Division II Washburn after transferring from Fordham.
Watching a player like Flacco perform in the Super Bowl is a great reminder of why athletic programs like Princeton’s, for instance, matter just as much as Alabama in every aspect besides the number of fans who attend the games. He was determined to not be good enough to start at the University of Pittsburgh – hardly one of the top programs in Division I – yet watching these highlights from his senior season at Delaware make you wonder who made that decision.
And the fact that he’s “boring?” Frankly, it’s a refreshing change from the athletes who usually get the attention and the acclaim. For as much as a team needs a Ray Lewis or a Terrell Suggs, it needs guys like Flacco just the same. Honestly, there was no chance that he would be nervous entering the game. And I still don’t understand the backlash against Flacco for saying he thought he was the best quarterback in the league. What coach or fan or teammate wouldn’t want their quarterback to think that, as long as he was working as hard as he could to accomplish that goal?
The night before the game, I watched some of the Princeton basketball game against Columbia, and I was once again reminded of the talent that lives in teams that get their national television chances on the NBC Sports Network at 6:00 instead of ESPN at 9:00. Even on television, it’s easy to tell that Ian Hummer could play for Michigan or Indiana. The way that Princeton runs its offense is akin to the “pistol” offense run by the 49ers and Colin Kaepernick, a constant read-and-react scheme that makes it difficult to take away every option available; sometimes, the only hope for the defense is that you miss the wide-open shot, or overthrow the wide-open pass.
Anyway, I hope that Princeton fans are happy for the Ravens today. This victory was never about Lewis and his retirement or the happiness of one brother and the despair of the other.
Like Flacco said after the game, it’s proof that a good team is a good team, even if 99.9% of the country doesn’t see it that way.
* Beyonce is hot
* while all of the commercials were basically awful, the one with Bar Refaeli and the computer nerd kid was gross and disturbing and caused TB to look away and definitely hit the mute button
* Jim Harbaugh is a child
* CBS couldn't figure out who the guy John Harbaugh was yelling at was and why?
* Ray Lewis said "when God is with you, who could be against you" and either didn't realize or didn't care that not one person watching thought anything other than "fraud" while remembering Lewis' role in a double homicide and how he has six kids with four women, none of whom he is currently with
* Joe Flacco is pretty good
* Baltimore's Ed Dickson caught a pass, held the ball out to signal first down and then, when one of the officials reached out for it, dropped it on the turf. Feeling badly, Dickson went to retrieve it, except another official had picked it up already. The next time he caught a pass, Dickson handed the ball directly to the official
Mostly, TB will remember this Super Bowl as the one where even as the 49ers had fourth and goal with less than two minutes to go, he still couldn't figure out if he was rooting harder against Jim Harbaugh or Ray Lewis.
Ultimately, he figured he was happier that the Ravens won, largely because of TB-Baltimore (Princeton OAC Hall-of-Famer David Rosenfeld).
As such, TB wasn't surprised when he had an email from Rosenfeld this morning asking for the floor. His thoughts:
So the euphoria hasn’t quite died down yet here in Baltimore, and any lull in the excitement will end Tuesday morning when the victory parade and celebration winds through downtown. Seemingly, despite raucous postgame celebrations in the streets Sunday night, there were no major incidents, a rarity in today’s world. It’s been an insanely liberating few months for Baltimore sports fans, starting with the Orioles’ surprise season and ending with the Ravens’ Super Bowl run.
If there’s one thing I would tell the world outside Baltimore, it’s that the Ravens have particularly great fans, so at least be happy for them. It’s a hyper-local fan base from an often-maligned city (check out this map from Deadspin; essentially, the entire group of Ravens fans make up five suburban counties and the city, the Eastern Shore has a very small population) —which leads to an us-against-them mentality that cannot be escaped during football season. Ravens fans are somewhat like Eagles fans, only nicer. It’s an extremely youthful fan base: the Giants, Steelers, Cowboys and Packers have fans because of tradition; the Ravens are 17 years old — their core group consists of folks who have grown tired of listening to their parents talking about Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts.
Plus, from the game-day perspective, the fans are simply loud and enthusiastic; maybe Seattle beats out the noise at M&T Bank Stadium as far as outdoor stadiums go, but it’s a close call.
As for the game, as usual, two weeks of over-analysis proved to be pretty much wrong, except for the fact that it finished as a close game. I saw the great Hank Goldberg on ESPN enthusiastically take “the under.” Meanwhile, the teams combined for 835 total yards, which probably would have been closer to 900 had Jacoby Jones not run back a kickoff for a touchdown. Forgotten among the thoughts of a tight, defensive showdown was the fact that the Ravens scored more points this season than any in franchise history and that much of Baltimore’s struggles during the season were on defense, despite the fact that it was the offensive coordinator who was let go. Speaking of Cam Cameron, if you want to read about an entirely decent person, as opposed to say...Jim Harbaugh, you should read this story.
Of course, kudos to the Ravens offense start with Joe Flacco, one of three starters for the Ravens who played college football in the FCS, or what was then called I-AA. The center who snapped the ball to Flacco during the game was veteran Matt Birk who, as Princeton fans may remember, played for Harvard. In addition to Flacco, Birk and cornerback Corey Graham, who played at New Hampshire, the Ravens also got huge contributions from Jones, who went to Division II Lane College, and Cary Williams, who played at Division II Washburn after transferring from Fordham.
Watching a player like Flacco perform in the Super Bowl is a great reminder of why athletic programs like Princeton’s, for instance, matter just as much as Alabama in every aspect besides the number of fans who attend the games. He was determined to not be good enough to start at the University of Pittsburgh – hardly one of the top programs in Division I – yet watching these highlights from his senior season at Delaware make you wonder who made that decision.
And the fact that he’s “boring?” Frankly, it’s a refreshing change from the athletes who usually get the attention and the acclaim. For as much as a team needs a Ray Lewis or a Terrell Suggs, it needs guys like Flacco just the same. Honestly, there was no chance that he would be nervous entering the game. And I still don’t understand the backlash against Flacco for saying he thought he was the best quarterback in the league. What coach or fan or teammate wouldn’t want their quarterback to think that, as long as he was working as hard as he could to accomplish that goal?
The night before the game, I watched some of the Princeton basketball game against Columbia, and I was once again reminded of the talent that lives in teams that get their national television chances on the NBC Sports Network at 6:00 instead of ESPN at 9:00. Even on television, it’s easy to tell that Ian Hummer could play for Michigan or Indiana. The way that Princeton runs its offense is akin to the “pistol” offense run by the 49ers and Colin Kaepernick, a constant read-and-react scheme that makes it difficult to take away every option available; sometimes, the only hope for the defense is that you miss the wide-open shot, or overthrow the wide-open pass.
Anyway, I hope that Princeton fans are happy for the Ravens today. This victory was never about Lewis and his retirement or the happiness of one brother and the despair of the other.
Like Flacco said after the game, it’s proof that a good team is a good team, even if 99.9% of the country doesn’t see it that way.
Friday, February 1, 2013
No McCareins? No Problem For Jim Harbaugh
TigerBlog isn't too into XLVII nearly as much as he was into XLVI, back a year ago, when good once again triumphed over evil.
This time around, TB isn't even sure whether he'll be rooting for the Ravens or 49ers.
On the one hand, John Harbaugh seems like the much nicer of the two brothers. Jim, in fact, was quite surly when he was going 0-2 against Princeton as the head coach of the University of San Diego, fewer than 10 years ago.
The first time, Princeton went to San Diego, back in 2004, and the Tigers won the game 24-17, aided considerably by defensive touchdowns by James Williams and Jay McCareins on consecutive San Diego snaps in the second quarter. Imagine the contortions of Harbaughs' face after that sequence.
Here's the first paragraph of the game story from goprincetontigers.com after the 2005 game in Princeton Stadium:
All things considered, the University of San Diego will probably be content to never see Jay McCareins again. The senior defensive back, who returned an interception 36 yards for a touchdown in Princeton's 24-17 win last season in San Diego, intercepted three passes, including the potential go-ahead throw, and returned one 99 yards for another touchdown in the Tigers' 20-17 win over San Diego Saturday at Princeton Stadium.
If memory serves, then John Harbaugh, then a Philadelphia Eagles assistant coach, was on the sideline with his brother for that game.
In addition to having John come off as the nicer Harbaugh - though Jim is okay in those commercials with the guy who gives the world's worst pep talk - there's Randy Moss, who is nowhere near Jerry Rice as the greatest wide receiver of all time. And maybe Moss could have been closer, had he not been such a problem child that he was shuttled from team to team.
Then again, there's the whole Ray Lewis thing.
Lewis, as you might have heard, is playing in his final game with Sunday's Super Bowl. You also might have heard that he had some involvement in a double homicide more than a decade ago, that he has six children with four different women, that he does a dance before every game and that he seems to like the spotlight. And something about deer antlers.
On the other hand, by all accounts, Lewis has also committed himself - away from the cameras - to making a real, positive difference in the lives of so many of the less fortunate and apparently has become a model citizen and community leader in recent years.
So can TB root for Lewis to go out on top? Can he root for Jim Harbaugh? Is he too much of an East Coast guy?
Next year's Super Bowl will be played at MetLife Stadium and will become the first outdoor Super Bowl in a Northern winter (or Northeastern winter at least). For those who are wondering, it'll be 35 degrees for a high here Sunday, with the low (which is probably closer to what it'll be at game time) of 22. Make up your own mind if this is a good idea or bad idea. Joe Flacco thinks it's a bad idea.
Oh, and there was a time when the commercials during the Super Bowl were super creative. In recent years, they've simply been trying to hard, and very few hit a home run (the only one TB remembers from last year was the dog and the Doritos, which he uses to bribe his owner after the dog buries the family cat).
Let's just say it's a long way from Apple's 1984 commercial.
Between now and kickoff, there are 31 Princeton athletic events. That's right. Thirty-one.
H-Y-P swimming and diving, for instance, is on the menu Friday through Sunday at DeNunzio Pool. It's a big meet for mid-year bragging rights, though there doesn't appear to be much in the way of direct correlation between the winner of the event and how they'll do at the Ivy League championships later in the season.
Who else is competing?
Men's tennis, women's tennis, wrestling, women's track and field, both squash teams, both fencing teams.
The squash matches, as TB said yesterday, will go a long way to determining the Ivy League champion for men and women.
Then there is hockey and basketball.
The men's hockey team was on a nice roll when exam break started, with 10 consecutive SRO crowds at Baker Rink and a second-place standing in the ECAC.
Now the Tigers are in fifth and heading out to consecutive weekends on the road, with the first stop at the Yale Whale to take on the eighth-ranked Bulldogs, who currently stand second in the league. Tomorrow night will see the Tigers at Brown, and then there is a trip to Colgate and Cornell next weekend.
That schedule, of course, means the women are at the opposite site, which means home games this weekend and next.
Back at the men, Princeton is four points back of Yale for second - and three points out of ninth.
Goal No. 1 is to get a first-round bye in the ECAC playoffs and home ice in the second round, the prize to the top four in the regular season. Among the teams directly behind Princeton? Brown (11 points), Cornell (10 points) and Colgate (10 points).
In other words, these are big games the next two weekends.
Princeton plays Cornell tonight and Columbia tomorrow night in basketball, with the women on the road and the men at home.
Both teams are 1-0 in the league after having handled Penn in their openers three weeks ago.
Tonight's women's game is a matchup of the only two undefeated teams in the league, for that matter. Cornell swept travel-partner Columbia (last week in double overtime) and gets its shot at the three-time defending champion Tigers are home.
As for the men, Princeton has its first five games at home (Brown and Yale next weekend), and 5-0 would be a great boost on the way to Dartmouth and then the first showdown of the year with Harvard, on Feb. 16, in Cambridge.
Princeton cannot win the Ivy title tonight. Nor can it lose it. But with no conference tournament (the way TB likes it), every single game is important for a team hoping to win a championship.
If Princeton plays the next two weeks with its eye on Harvard, it's almost surely going to get knocked off before it ever gets to Massachusetts.
And that's your Princeton Athletics weekend. Thirty-one events and then the Super Bowl.
TB will probably root for the Ravens.
He also sees a 49ers victory, one lacking any real drama at the end, say in the 38-24 range.
This time around, TB isn't even sure whether he'll be rooting for the Ravens or 49ers.
On the one hand, John Harbaugh seems like the much nicer of the two brothers. Jim, in fact, was quite surly when he was going 0-2 against Princeton as the head coach of the University of San Diego, fewer than 10 years ago.
The first time, Princeton went to San Diego, back in 2004, and the Tigers won the game 24-17, aided considerably by defensive touchdowns by James Williams and Jay McCareins on consecutive San Diego snaps in the second quarter. Imagine the contortions of Harbaughs' face after that sequence.
Here's the first paragraph of the game story from goprincetontigers.com after the 2005 game in Princeton Stadium:
All things considered, the University of San Diego will probably be content to never see Jay McCareins again. The senior defensive back, who returned an interception 36 yards for a touchdown in Princeton's 24-17 win last season in San Diego, intercepted three passes, including the potential go-ahead throw, and returned one 99 yards for another touchdown in the Tigers' 20-17 win over San Diego Saturday at Princeton Stadium.
If memory serves, then John Harbaugh, then a Philadelphia Eagles assistant coach, was on the sideline with his brother for that game.
In addition to having John come off as the nicer Harbaugh - though Jim is okay in those commercials with the guy who gives the world's worst pep talk - there's Randy Moss, who is nowhere near Jerry Rice as the greatest wide receiver of all time. And maybe Moss could have been closer, had he not been such a problem child that he was shuttled from team to team.
Then again, there's the whole Ray Lewis thing.
Lewis, as you might have heard, is playing in his final game with Sunday's Super Bowl. You also might have heard that he had some involvement in a double homicide more than a decade ago, that he has six children with four different women, that he does a dance before every game and that he seems to like the spotlight. And something about deer antlers.
On the other hand, by all accounts, Lewis has also committed himself - away from the cameras - to making a real, positive difference in the lives of so many of the less fortunate and apparently has become a model citizen and community leader in recent years.
So can TB root for Lewis to go out on top? Can he root for Jim Harbaugh? Is he too much of an East Coast guy?
Next year's Super Bowl will be played at MetLife Stadium and will become the first outdoor Super Bowl in a Northern winter (or Northeastern winter at least). For those who are wondering, it'll be 35 degrees for a high here Sunday, with the low (which is probably closer to what it'll be at game time) of 22. Make up your own mind if this is a good idea or bad idea. Joe Flacco thinks it's a bad idea.
Oh, and there was a time when the commercials during the Super Bowl were super creative. In recent years, they've simply been trying to hard, and very few hit a home run (the only one TB remembers from last year was the dog and the Doritos, which he uses to bribe his owner after the dog buries the family cat).
Let's just say it's a long way from Apple's 1984 commercial.
Between now and kickoff, there are 31 Princeton athletic events. That's right. Thirty-one.
H-Y-P swimming and diving, for instance, is on the menu Friday through Sunday at DeNunzio Pool. It's a big meet for mid-year bragging rights, though there doesn't appear to be much in the way of direct correlation between the winner of the event and how they'll do at the Ivy League championships later in the season.
Who else is competing?
Men's tennis, women's tennis, wrestling, women's track and field, both squash teams, both fencing teams.
The squash matches, as TB said yesterday, will go a long way to determining the Ivy League champion for men and women.
Then there is hockey and basketball.
The men's hockey team was on a nice roll when exam break started, with 10 consecutive SRO crowds at Baker Rink and a second-place standing in the ECAC.
Now the Tigers are in fifth and heading out to consecutive weekends on the road, with the first stop at the Yale Whale to take on the eighth-ranked Bulldogs, who currently stand second in the league. Tomorrow night will see the Tigers at Brown, and then there is a trip to Colgate and Cornell next weekend.
That schedule, of course, means the women are at the opposite site, which means home games this weekend and next.
Back at the men, Princeton is four points back of Yale for second - and three points out of ninth.
Goal No. 1 is to get a first-round bye in the ECAC playoffs and home ice in the second round, the prize to the top four in the regular season. Among the teams directly behind Princeton? Brown (11 points), Cornell (10 points) and Colgate (10 points).
In other words, these are big games the next two weekends.
Princeton plays Cornell tonight and Columbia tomorrow night in basketball, with the women on the road and the men at home.
Both teams are 1-0 in the league after having handled Penn in their openers three weeks ago.
Tonight's women's game is a matchup of the only two undefeated teams in the league, for that matter. Cornell swept travel-partner Columbia (last week in double overtime) and gets its shot at the three-time defending champion Tigers are home.
As for the men, Princeton has its first five games at home (Brown and Yale next weekend), and 5-0 would be a great boost on the way to Dartmouth and then the first showdown of the year with Harvard, on Feb. 16, in Cambridge.
Princeton cannot win the Ivy title tonight. Nor can it lose it. But with no conference tournament (the way TB likes it), every single game is important for a team hoping to win a championship.
If Princeton plays the next two weeks with its eye on Harvard, it's almost surely going to get knocked off before it ever gets to Massachusetts.
And that's your Princeton Athletics weekend. Thirty-one events and then the Super Bowl.
TB will probably root for the Ravens.
He also sees a 49ers victory, one lacking any real drama at the end, say in the 38-24 range.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
What A Racket
Three young men holding four pizzas each walked into Jadwin Gym yesterday at 5 pm or so.
They were headed for the women's tennis match, one that would turn into a big win both for Princeton and for direct marketing.
About 27 hours earlier, women's assistant coach Sadhaf Fath peered around the corner during an OAC staff meeting and dropped off a flyer, printed on basic white copy paper, inviting everyone to the match, with the words "FREE PIZZA" in all caps.
As the young men with the pizzas made their way down to the courts on E level in Jadwin, they found themselves with a much-larger-than-normal crowd waiting for them.
Doing a little estimating, if 100 people come for the pizza and even a third stay for the match, then attendance has gone up.
The women's tennis team defeated Temple 6-1 yesterday in the dual meet opener for both the 2013 season and the career of head coach Laura Granville, who appears to be following the same marketing strategy of her predecessor, Megan Rose, who was famous for bringing bagels to matches.
Up next for the 73rd-ranked women's tennis team (the top 75 are ranked) is a trip this weekend to Akron to take on 52nd-ranked Missouri and the home team. There are also trips to Duke, Syracuse, Denver and Colorado and finally Loyola Marymount - and home matches against Rutgers, Seton Hall, Binghamton and DePaul - before the Ivy season begins March 30 against Penn.
By then, squash season will be long over.
The top three stories on goprincetontigers.com this morning featured people holding rackets, and the tennis match was the third one in.
The first two were squash, after a hugely successful night for the men and women here at Jadwin, just one floor up from where the tennis match was going on.
Princeton is the top-ranked team in the country for both the men and the women, though that doesn't necessarily make both teams prohibitive favorites to run the table in the league or national championships. This year appears to be the most balanced year for squash on both sides in years.
Both of Princeton's teams beat Penn 9-0 last night, and that was a much bigger surprise on the women's side than the men's. The Quakers were ranked third in the women's poll, which means that the Tigers have now defeated No. 2 (Harvard) and No. 3 (Penn).
Next up is Yale this Saturday in New Haven at noon, for both the men and women. Yale is very, very tough at home, especially on the four-glass-walled court that will only be used for the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 matches for the men.
In addition, Yale defeated Princeton 5-4 in both men's and women's squash in the Ivy scrimmages back in November, so obviously nothing is certain.
On the women's side, Princeton and Yale are both unbeaten in the league. If there is a divide between the top four teams in the league, then Princeton would have seem to have a little more margin for error than Yale.
Should Yale win, the Bulldogs still have to play both Penn and Harvard, who has only one loss and would possibly be playing to force a three-way tie for the league title when it met the Bulldogs.
Should Princeton win, it would be 4-0 in the league with wins over the other top three schools and with matches against Brown, Columbia and Cornell remaining to play. Oh, and Trinity, but that of course has nothing to do with the Ivy race.
Meanwhile, on the men's side, the 9-0 win over Penn was accomplished without losing a single game.
The standings are the same for the men - Princeton and Yale are the lone unbeatens, and Harvard, with its loss to Princeton, has one loss. So does Cornell, a legitimate threat to beat one of the top teams as well.
After Saturday, Princeton has Cornell remaining. Yale has Harvard remaining. The winner in New Haven will have the inside track to the championship, or at least a share of it, or even a three-way piece of it.
This weekend will be the first trip to New Haven for the men's and women's squash teams. The second will next month for the national championships.
In the squash world, winning the Ivy title is like winning the SEC title in football.
The winners this weekend between Yale and Princeton will have taken a huge step in that direction.
They were headed for the women's tennis match, one that would turn into a big win both for Princeton and for direct marketing.
About 27 hours earlier, women's assistant coach Sadhaf Fath peered around the corner during an OAC staff meeting and dropped off a flyer, printed on basic white copy paper, inviting everyone to the match, with the words "FREE PIZZA" in all caps.
As the young men with the pizzas made their way down to the courts on E level in Jadwin, they found themselves with a much-larger-than-normal crowd waiting for them.
Doing a little estimating, if 100 people come for the pizza and even a third stay for the match, then attendance has gone up.
The women's tennis team defeated Temple 6-1 yesterday in the dual meet opener for both the 2013 season and the career of head coach Laura Granville, who appears to be following the same marketing strategy of her predecessor, Megan Rose, who was famous for bringing bagels to matches.
Up next for the 73rd-ranked women's tennis team (the top 75 are ranked) is a trip this weekend to Akron to take on 52nd-ranked Missouri and the home team. There are also trips to Duke, Syracuse, Denver and Colorado and finally Loyola Marymount - and home matches against Rutgers, Seton Hall, Binghamton and DePaul - before the Ivy season begins March 30 against Penn.
By then, squash season will be long over.
The top three stories on goprincetontigers.com this morning featured people holding rackets, and the tennis match was the third one in.
The first two were squash, after a hugely successful night for the men and women here at Jadwin, just one floor up from where the tennis match was going on.
Princeton is the top-ranked team in the country for both the men and the women, though that doesn't necessarily make both teams prohibitive favorites to run the table in the league or national championships. This year appears to be the most balanced year for squash on both sides in years.
Both of Princeton's teams beat Penn 9-0 last night, and that was a much bigger surprise on the women's side than the men's. The Quakers were ranked third in the women's poll, which means that the Tigers have now defeated No. 2 (Harvard) and No. 3 (Penn).
Next up is Yale this Saturday in New Haven at noon, for both the men and women. Yale is very, very tough at home, especially on the four-glass-walled court that will only be used for the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 matches for the men.
In addition, Yale defeated Princeton 5-4 in both men's and women's squash in the Ivy scrimmages back in November, so obviously nothing is certain.
On the women's side, Princeton and Yale are both unbeaten in the league. If there is a divide between the top four teams in the league, then Princeton would have seem to have a little more margin for error than Yale.
Should Yale win, the Bulldogs still have to play both Penn and Harvard, who has only one loss and would possibly be playing to force a three-way tie for the league title when it met the Bulldogs.
Should Princeton win, it would be 4-0 in the league with wins over the other top three schools and with matches against Brown, Columbia and Cornell remaining to play. Oh, and Trinity, but that of course has nothing to do with the Ivy race.
Meanwhile, on the men's side, the 9-0 win over Penn was accomplished without losing a single game.
The standings are the same for the men - Princeton and Yale are the lone unbeatens, and Harvard, with its loss to Princeton, has one loss. So does Cornell, a legitimate threat to beat one of the top teams as well.
After Saturday, Princeton has Cornell remaining. Yale has Harvard remaining. The winner in New Haven will have the inside track to the championship, or at least a share of it, or even a three-way piece of it.
This weekend will be the first trip to New Haven for the men's and women's squash teams. The second will next month for the national championships.
In the squash world, winning the Ivy title is like winning the SEC title in football.
The winners this weekend between Yale and Princeton will have taken a huge step in that direction.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Business Casual
TigerBlog owns a nice suit. He has two shirts and a few ties that he can wear with it.
He has two pairs of black sweats. They're very comfortable. One of them, the ones with the Princeton shield and Warrior lacrosse logo, is better than the other, which is just plain black.
Basically everything else he has is standard issue Princeton stuff. And a few pairs of pants, light and dark khaki and green khaki, that can be interchanged with various orange and black and white shirts.
Actually, if you have a total of five pairs of pants and maybe 20 shirts, then how many combinations do you have? That's easy. It's 100. Ah, but now you have to subtract out a few of the combinations that don't quite match, so it's not exactly 100.
When TigerBlog saw a suggestion to dress in "business casual plus" for a meeting last week, he chose not to go with the suit and instead was wearing his uniform, which meant one of the nearly 100 similar looks he could muster up.
Then, when he got there, he found everyone else in the room wearing a jacket, with most in ties. Oh well. TB was still comfortable.
TigerBlog's fashion sense isn't great. He likes the look of sneakers with khaki pants more than he likes to wear dress shoes or even casual shoes, like his Merrell's. It took him a long time to settle on white socks instead of black socks with the white sneakers and khakis.
He's always figured he can't go wrong with solid colors, and let's face it, he's been helped considerably by being at Princeton, where orange and black go with everything.
TigerBlog was listening to the Princeton-College of New Jersey basketball game on the radio Sunday when Derek Jones mentioned that the Princeton staff was wearing suits and sneakers as part of a Coaches vs. Cancer event.
This led Noah Savage, who in a very short time has become a great color commentator, to remark that he's never understood why basketball coaches get dressed up, with men's coaches in suits and women's coaches in formal business attire.
"As a player," Savage said, "I'm very comfortable being coached by someone in business casual."
TigerBlog laughed out loud at that.
Not every basketball coach wears a suit.
Pete Carril, at least at the stage of his career when TigerBlog first started covering his teams, always wore a navy blue sweater with a white golf shirt under it, as well as gray pants. The sweater had a cigar hole in it that was right over the part on the white shirt under it that had a basketball on it, so it made it look like the blue sweater actually had a basketball on it, something that took TigerBlog a few years to figure out.
Bill Carmody wore very business casual clothes when he coached at Princeton. He's more of a sport coat guy now at Northwestern.
The opposite end of the spectrum is John Thompson, who could be in some men's suit catalog any time he's coaching. TigerBlog never understand how he could travel and still have his suits be completely wrinkle-free on game night.
Mitch Henderson likes to dress in a suit for a game as well. He and his staff are very well attired.
TigerBlog isn't sure when basketball coaches first started to dress up, or why for that matter. Maybe it's because the crowd is so close to them.
Connie Mack used to wear a suit when in his 50 years of managing baseball in Philadelphia, but now the rules say that managers and coaches have to wear uniforms. Besides, that's a very baseball thing to do.
In football, where coaches are lost on the sideline and are much more exposed to the elements, there are many different styles. Some have even worn suits or jackets or ties.
For the most part, they dress uniformly among the entire coaching staff, usually in khaki pants with team apparel, depending on the temperature.
The same is true for lacrosse, whose coaches seem to most closely resemble football coaches.
Soccer? They dress very casually it appears, in shorts and sweats, also depending on the weather.
In other words, it doesn't seem like there is uniformity to the thought process. Baseball and soccer coaches dress like the players. Basketball coaches dress up, but they don't match each other.
Football and lacrosse coaches usually match each other.
TigerBlog's look for Princeton lacrosse games almost always mirrors that of the coaches, even though he's not trying to do so. In fact, he's often been called "coach" when on the road by the other school's facilities staff.
He takes that as a compliment, he guesses.
When TB first started working at Princeton, he wore a tie to every game. In fact, he remembers a football game at Bucknell where it rained so hard and the entire field turned to mud (1996?) that he wore the jeans he wore the day before - and wondered if he'd get fired.
Instead, he just got basically ruined jeans, because they were so caked in mud when it was all over.
These days, he sees some of his counterparts in ties at games, while others go the same route as he does. TB thinks everyone should be comfortable and look professional, and the khaki/school attire look is very professional in his mind.
The first men's lacrosse game of the year is three weeks from Saturday. TigerBlog will be going business casual for that one.
Even with white socks.
He has two pairs of black sweats. They're very comfortable. One of them, the ones with the Princeton shield and Warrior lacrosse logo, is better than the other, which is just plain black.
Basically everything else he has is standard issue Princeton stuff. And a few pairs of pants, light and dark khaki and green khaki, that can be interchanged with various orange and black and white shirts.
Actually, if you have a total of five pairs of pants and maybe 20 shirts, then how many combinations do you have? That's easy. It's 100. Ah, but now you have to subtract out a few of the combinations that don't quite match, so it's not exactly 100.
When TigerBlog saw a suggestion to dress in "business casual plus" for a meeting last week, he chose not to go with the suit and instead was wearing his uniform, which meant one of the nearly 100 similar looks he could muster up.
Then, when he got there, he found everyone else in the room wearing a jacket, with most in ties. Oh well. TB was still comfortable.
TigerBlog's fashion sense isn't great. He likes the look of sneakers with khaki pants more than he likes to wear dress shoes or even casual shoes, like his Merrell's. It took him a long time to settle on white socks instead of black socks with the white sneakers and khakis.
He's always figured he can't go wrong with solid colors, and let's face it, he's been helped considerably by being at Princeton, where orange and black go with everything.
TigerBlog was listening to the Princeton-College of New Jersey basketball game on the radio Sunday when Derek Jones mentioned that the Princeton staff was wearing suits and sneakers as part of a Coaches vs. Cancer event.
This led Noah Savage, who in a very short time has become a great color commentator, to remark that he's never understood why basketball coaches get dressed up, with men's coaches in suits and women's coaches in formal business attire.
"As a player," Savage said, "I'm very comfortable being coached by someone in business casual."
TigerBlog laughed out loud at that.
Not every basketball coach wears a suit.
Pete Carril, at least at the stage of his career when TigerBlog first started covering his teams, always wore a navy blue sweater with a white golf shirt under it, as well as gray pants. The sweater had a cigar hole in it that was right over the part on the white shirt under it that had a basketball on it, so it made it look like the blue sweater actually had a basketball on it, something that took TigerBlog a few years to figure out.
Bill Carmody wore very business casual clothes when he coached at Princeton. He's more of a sport coat guy now at Northwestern.
The opposite end of the spectrum is John Thompson, who could be in some men's suit catalog any time he's coaching. TigerBlog never understand how he could travel and still have his suits be completely wrinkle-free on game night.
Mitch Henderson likes to dress in a suit for a game as well. He and his staff are very well attired.
TigerBlog isn't sure when basketball coaches first started to dress up, or why for that matter. Maybe it's because the crowd is so close to them.
Connie Mack used to wear a suit when in his 50 years of managing baseball in Philadelphia, but now the rules say that managers and coaches have to wear uniforms. Besides, that's a very baseball thing to do.
In football, where coaches are lost on the sideline and are much more exposed to the elements, there are many different styles. Some have even worn suits or jackets or ties.
For the most part, they dress uniformly among the entire coaching staff, usually in khaki pants with team apparel, depending on the temperature.
The same is true for lacrosse, whose coaches seem to most closely resemble football coaches.
Soccer? They dress very casually it appears, in shorts and sweats, also depending on the weather.
In other words, it doesn't seem like there is uniformity to the thought process. Baseball and soccer coaches dress like the players. Basketball coaches dress up, but they don't match each other.
Football and lacrosse coaches usually match each other.
TigerBlog's look for Princeton lacrosse games almost always mirrors that of the coaches, even though he's not trying to do so. In fact, he's often been called "coach" when on the road by the other school's facilities staff.
He takes that as a compliment, he guesses.
When TB first started working at Princeton, he wore a tie to every game. In fact, he remembers a football game at Bucknell where it rained so hard and the entire field turned to mud (1996?) that he wore the jeans he wore the day before - and wondered if he'd get fired.
Instead, he just got basically ruined jeans, because they were so caked in mud when it was all over.
These days, he sees some of his counterparts in ties at games, while others go the same route as he does. TB thinks everyone should be comfortable and look professional, and the khaki/school attire look is very professional in his mind.
The first men's lacrosse game of the year is three weeks from Saturday. TigerBlog will be going business casual for that one.
Even with white socks.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Marshall, Not Mitchell
Miss TigerBlog plays field hockey on Monday nights, so TigerBlog couldn't stay around for "Pardon the Interruption" last night.
Instead, he could only watch "Around the Horn," which is clearly the junior varsity of the two shows on ESPN's "Happy Hour" at 5 and 5:30 each weekday.
"PTI" is just so much better, simply because of the two hosts, Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser. Still, "Around the Horn" is still a really good jayvee show, especially because of its main host, Tony Reali, a Fordham grad, by the way.
Yesterday's "Around the Horn" featured a segment at the end, when it was down to the final two voices, in which the question of Marshall Henderson's taunting of the Auburn student section after his two foul shots for Ole Miss won the game Saturday afternoon was raised.
If you haven't seen the clip yet, please click here now and do so. If you have, please move on to the next paragraph.
As an aside, the first TigerBlog saw of the incident was when someone tweeted "Mitchell Henderson" instead of "Marshall Henderson," which made me wonder why Princeton's men's basketball coach had become an internet sensation.
Anyway, as you can see from the clip, it got a bit ugly there for a few seconds. Or did it?
That was Reali's question, anyway.
Was what Henderson did okay? How about what the fans did? Who was in the right?
Meanwhile, the clip itself has been dissected on the internet in every way possible, with the supporting roles of "Auburn Pajama Girl" and "the old guy."
Don't think so? Do a search for "Auburn Pajama Girl" and more than 34,000,000 results come up. Do one for "Alabama Pajama Girl" and 1,800,000 come up.
Had TigerBlog been on "Around the Horn" last night, he would have offered that everyone was in the wrong. He would have added that this is something that used to be described in two words that seem extinct now: poor sportsmanship.
Hey, Henderson, you won the game. You don't need to rush to the other team's students and mock them, even if they had been merciless to you the entire night. And the students? They aren't as accountable because their not representing the University in an official capacity, such as a student-athlete is.
But still. This is where America is right now? Fans at a game who think they can say anything they want? F bombs flying back and forth and it makes for great entertainment, rather than being seen for what it is, which is boorish behavior that used to be discouraged and punished rather than encouraged and rewarded like it is now?
Yup. It's how America is. The more outlandish, the less respectful - and the more likely you are to get your own reality show. It's fame for the sake of fame, regardless of what it took to achieve it. TigerBlog guarantees that the kids in the middle of the Auburn section were treated like royalty when they got back to the dorms.
TigerBlog wrestles with the idea of where the line is and when has it been crossed, in terms of what fans (especially students) can say and do at games. Additionally, what is an institution supposed to do when it feels that the line has been crossed?
The idea is to get students to the games to create a nice advantage for the home team. And TB supposes he's talking mostly basketball here, because of how close the fans are to the players.
He also realizes that someone can yell something completely inappropriate without every using a curse word or any other "derogatory comments," as the NCAA's sportsmanship message reads.
So what do you do? Have a group stationed next to the students monitoring what they say and then have a committee decide if it's okay or not? And TigerBlog's version of appropriate is not the same as yours. And yours isn't the same as the next person's.
At places like Princeton, there is a huge reliance on families with children as a target audience. Does this mean Princeton needs to be more diligent with enforcing the "derogatory comments" action?
And what should that enforcement look like? If you tell students not to do something, they're more likely to do it louder next time. It's just how all 18- to 22-year-olds are.
As TB watched that clip, he couldn't help but think back to the 1999 Penn-Princeton game at the Palestra, when Princeton rallied from 27 points down with 15 minutes to go to win the game. Brian Earl, now an assistant coach for the Tigers, was one of the key reasons why Princeton won that game.
When it ended, Earl clutched the basketball and hugged his teammates. In fact, TB still has a copy of the Philadelphia Daily News that has a great picture of that moment.
What Earl didn't do was run over to the Penn students and shove his jersey in their faces. And TB has a hard time believing that Auburn's fans were on Henderson more than Penn's were on Earl that night and every other night he played in that building.
Before TigerBlog saw the clip from the Ole Miss-Auburn game, he'd never heard of Marshall Henderson. Now everyone knows who he is.
Unfortunately, in 2013, that's mission accomplished.
Instead, he could only watch "Around the Horn," which is clearly the junior varsity of the two shows on ESPN's "Happy Hour" at 5 and 5:30 each weekday.
"PTI" is just so much better, simply because of the two hosts, Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser. Still, "Around the Horn" is still a really good jayvee show, especially because of its main host, Tony Reali, a Fordham grad, by the way.
Yesterday's "Around the Horn" featured a segment at the end, when it was down to the final two voices, in which the question of Marshall Henderson's taunting of the Auburn student section after his two foul shots for Ole Miss won the game Saturday afternoon was raised.
If you haven't seen the clip yet, please click here now and do so. If you have, please move on to the next paragraph.
As an aside, the first TigerBlog saw of the incident was when someone tweeted "Mitchell Henderson" instead of "Marshall Henderson," which made me wonder why Princeton's men's basketball coach had become an internet sensation.
Anyway, as you can see from the clip, it got a bit ugly there for a few seconds. Or did it?
That was Reali's question, anyway.
Was what Henderson did okay? How about what the fans did? Who was in the right?
Meanwhile, the clip itself has been dissected on the internet in every way possible, with the supporting roles of "Auburn Pajama Girl" and "the old guy."
Don't think so? Do a search for "Auburn Pajama Girl" and more than 34,000,000 results come up. Do one for "Alabama Pajama Girl" and 1,800,000 come up.
Had TigerBlog been on "Around the Horn" last night, he would have offered that everyone was in the wrong. He would have added that this is something that used to be described in two words that seem extinct now: poor sportsmanship.
Hey, Henderson, you won the game. You don't need to rush to the other team's students and mock them, even if they had been merciless to you the entire night. And the students? They aren't as accountable because their not representing the University in an official capacity, such as a student-athlete is.
But still. This is where America is right now? Fans at a game who think they can say anything they want? F bombs flying back and forth and it makes for great entertainment, rather than being seen for what it is, which is boorish behavior that used to be discouraged and punished rather than encouraged and rewarded like it is now?
Yup. It's how America is. The more outlandish, the less respectful - and the more likely you are to get your own reality show. It's fame for the sake of fame, regardless of what it took to achieve it. TigerBlog guarantees that the kids in the middle of the Auburn section were treated like royalty when they got back to the dorms.
TigerBlog wrestles with the idea of where the line is and when has it been crossed, in terms of what fans (especially students) can say and do at games. Additionally, what is an institution supposed to do when it feels that the line has been crossed?
The idea is to get students to the games to create a nice advantage for the home team. And TB supposes he's talking mostly basketball here, because of how close the fans are to the players.
He also realizes that someone can yell something completely inappropriate without every using a curse word or any other "derogatory comments," as the NCAA's sportsmanship message reads.
So what do you do? Have a group stationed next to the students monitoring what they say and then have a committee decide if it's okay or not? And TigerBlog's version of appropriate is not the same as yours. And yours isn't the same as the next person's.
At places like Princeton, there is a huge reliance on families with children as a target audience. Does this mean Princeton needs to be more diligent with enforcing the "derogatory comments" action?
And what should that enforcement look like? If you tell students not to do something, they're more likely to do it louder next time. It's just how all 18- to 22-year-olds are.
As TB watched that clip, he couldn't help but think back to the 1999 Penn-Princeton game at the Palestra, when Princeton rallied from 27 points down with 15 minutes to go to win the game. Brian Earl, now an assistant coach for the Tigers, was one of the key reasons why Princeton won that game.
When it ended, Earl clutched the basketball and hugged his teammates. In fact, TB still has a copy of the Philadelphia Daily News that has a great picture of that moment.
What Earl didn't do was run over to the Penn students and shove his jersey in their faces. And TB has a hard time believing that Auburn's fans were on Henderson more than Penn's were on Earl that night and every other night he played in that building.
Before TigerBlog saw the clip from the Ole Miss-Auburn game, he'd never heard of Marshall Henderson. Now everyone knows who he is.
Unfortunately, in 2013, that's mission accomplished.
Monday, January 28, 2013
Shootaround
The Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia is part of a pretty nice sports complex, one that houses the 20,000 seat arena alongside Lincoln Financial Field and Citizens Bank Park.
Unlike the other two, the Wells Fargo Center has had five names in its short existence, starting out as Spectrum II and then becoming the CoreStates Center, the First Union Center and the Wachovia Center and now Wells Fargo.
Together, the buildings are the home of Philadelphia's four major professional sports teams - and about a million other events. For a small area that packs so many people into it on a regular basis, the sports complex has great parking and is easier to get into and out of than any other such complex TigerBlog has ever experienced.
Way back when, that area was home to three venues that no longer exist.
The Spectrum was the arena where the Sixers and Flyers played. Mammoth Veterans Stadium was the home for the Eagles and Phillies. Only one person has ever really liked Veterans Stadium, and that's TigerBlog, who thought it was a great place.
Long forgotten is JFK Stadium, which began its life as Municipal Stadium and was mostly known for hosting the Army-Navy football game from the 1930s to the 1970s.
TB was in the Wells Fargo Center early yesterday, very, very early yesterday, for a lacrosse event.
There was hardly anyone in the building, and when the horn went off to end one of the games, TigerBlog knew that the sound was familiar, though it took him a few minutes to place it.
When an arena of that size is full, then the sound of the horn gets muffled, at least a little.
When it's empty, the horn - followed by the sound of applause from a sparse audience - has a pretty unique sound to it. Maybe it's an echo. Or maybe it's just the sound with little else distracting from it.
Then it came to TB. It was the sound of the end of one of the practice sessions that teams have in the arena the day before the NCAA basketball tournament.
Teams have essentially a glorified shootaround on the game court the day before the games, and these practices are open to the public. Mostly they're just dunk contests or something like that, along with a lot of three-point shooting and foul shooting to get used to the environment.
The actual serious practicing is done at some other site, usually a small college or even high school gym in the area, that the NCAA teams have been able to secure.
TigerBlog has been to a bunch of those pre-tournament shootarounds, and they had the same sound as the nearly empty Wells Fargo Center.
Will Princeton's men's basketball team be experiencing one of those shootarounds in the near future?
Well, it'll basically be a sprint from now through the end of the regular season.
Princeton defeated the College of New Jersey 71-33 yesterday in its post-exam return to the court. Princeton, who hadn't played in 15 days, is now 8-7 on the season, with nothing but Ivy games coming up.
Princeton has played 15 games in 79 days since the season began on Nov. 10.
Beginning Friday night, when Cornell comes to Jadwin Gym, Princeton will play 13 games in 40 days.
The Tigers are 1-0 in the Ivy League, with a win over Penn. Princeton almost got a huge gift Saturday afternoon when Dartmouth almost knocked off Harvard, but the Crimson rallied from 11 down with three minutes to go to win in OT.
For 37 minutes, that game was all Dartmouth. And a loss would have been devastating to the Crimson.
No team has played more than two league games, and only Harvard (2-0) and Princeton (1-0) are undefeated. Columbia, who owns an 18-point win over the same Villanova team that just defeated Louisville and Syracuse last week, lost to Cornell in New York City Saturday, which means that Yale and Brown and Columbia and Cornell split their home-and-homes.
Princeton's first five Ivy games are all at home (the Penn game and now Cornell/Columbia this weekend and Brown/Yale next weekend). The Tigers play at Harvard on Feb. 16 (a Saturday) and then wrap up the season with Harvard at home on a Friday, followed by Dartmouth at home and then a game at Penn.
It's a pretty nicely set up schedule.
The goal of every year is to win the league and get to the NCAA tournament.
That's when the fun really starts.
There is nothing like the NCAA men's basketball tournament in college athletics. As 1996 showed, a team never knows when it's going to do something that will live on forever as one of the great March accomplishments.
For Princeton, the goal is to hear the unmuffled sound of a horn in a nearly empty arena the day before the tournament.
The sprint to get there begins Friday.
On your mark ...
Unlike the other two, the Wells Fargo Center has had five names in its short existence, starting out as Spectrum II and then becoming the CoreStates Center, the First Union Center and the Wachovia Center and now Wells Fargo.
Together, the buildings are the home of Philadelphia's four major professional sports teams - and about a million other events. For a small area that packs so many people into it on a regular basis, the sports complex has great parking and is easier to get into and out of than any other such complex TigerBlog has ever experienced.
Way back when, that area was home to three venues that no longer exist.
The Spectrum was the arena where the Sixers and Flyers played. Mammoth Veterans Stadium was the home for the Eagles and Phillies. Only one person has ever really liked Veterans Stadium, and that's TigerBlog, who thought it was a great place.
Long forgotten is JFK Stadium, which began its life as Municipal Stadium and was mostly known for hosting the Army-Navy football game from the 1930s to the 1970s.
TB was in the Wells Fargo Center early yesterday, very, very early yesterday, for a lacrosse event.
There was hardly anyone in the building, and when the horn went off to end one of the games, TigerBlog knew that the sound was familiar, though it took him a few minutes to place it.
When an arena of that size is full, then the sound of the horn gets muffled, at least a little.
When it's empty, the horn - followed by the sound of applause from a sparse audience - has a pretty unique sound to it. Maybe it's an echo. Or maybe it's just the sound with little else distracting from it.
Then it came to TB. It was the sound of the end of one of the practice sessions that teams have in the arena the day before the NCAA basketball tournament.
Teams have essentially a glorified shootaround on the game court the day before the games, and these practices are open to the public. Mostly they're just dunk contests or something like that, along with a lot of three-point shooting and foul shooting to get used to the environment.
The actual serious practicing is done at some other site, usually a small college or even high school gym in the area, that the NCAA teams have been able to secure.
TigerBlog has been to a bunch of those pre-tournament shootarounds, and they had the same sound as the nearly empty Wells Fargo Center.
Will Princeton's men's basketball team be experiencing one of those shootarounds in the near future?
Well, it'll basically be a sprint from now through the end of the regular season.
Princeton defeated the College of New Jersey 71-33 yesterday in its post-exam return to the court. Princeton, who hadn't played in 15 days, is now 8-7 on the season, with nothing but Ivy games coming up.
Princeton has played 15 games in 79 days since the season began on Nov. 10.
Beginning Friday night, when Cornell comes to Jadwin Gym, Princeton will play 13 games in 40 days.
The Tigers are 1-0 in the Ivy League, with a win over Penn. Princeton almost got a huge gift Saturday afternoon when Dartmouth almost knocked off Harvard, but the Crimson rallied from 11 down with three minutes to go to win in OT.
For 37 minutes, that game was all Dartmouth. And a loss would have been devastating to the Crimson.
No team has played more than two league games, and only Harvard (2-0) and Princeton (1-0) are undefeated. Columbia, who owns an 18-point win over the same Villanova team that just defeated Louisville and Syracuse last week, lost to Cornell in New York City Saturday, which means that Yale and Brown and Columbia and Cornell split their home-and-homes.
Princeton's first five Ivy games are all at home (the Penn game and now Cornell/Columbia this weekend and Brown/Yale next weekend). The Tigers play at Harvard on Feb. 16 (a Saturday) and then wrap up the season with Harvard at home on a Friday, followed by Dartmouth at home and then a game at Penn.
It's a pretty nicely set up schedule.
The goal of every year is to win the league and get to the NCAA tournament.
That's when the fun really starts.
There is nothing like the NCAA men's basketball tournament in college athletics. As 1996 showed, a team never knows when it's going to do something that will live on forever as one of the great March accomplishments.
For Princeton, the goal is to hear the unmuffled sound of a horn in a nearly empty arena the day before the tournament.
The sprint to get there begins Friday.
On your mark ...
Friday, January 25, 2013
Memories Of Levien
TigerBlog looked through the closed blinds of the Lou Gehrig Room and out over the court at Columbia University's Levien Gymnasium, and the first thought he had was of Mike Bechtold.
It was back on March 2, 2002, that Bechtold had the biggest night of his Princeton basketball career, as he went for 25 points - more than half the Tigers would score - in a 49-48 win over Columbia here at Levien. Bechtold shot 5 for 10 from three-point range that night, and his fifth three-pointer was the game-winner in the final seconds.
Bechtold shot 9 for 15 from the field in that game; every other Princeton player combined was 6 for 28. Trivia question, with answer to come later, is this: which Princeton player played all 40 minutes in that game.
As TigerBlog peeked through the window, he could still Bechtold's last three-pointer, launched from straight on above the top of the key, right at the basket TB was looking down on through the class yesterday. He could see it as it rattled around and eventually splashed through.
TB was at Columbia yesterday for an Ivy League meeting. Actually, he's back right now for Day 2.
As an aside, the way people drive in Manhattan is fascinating. It's almost like there's an assumption that following 80% of the traffic laws is good enough, and people weave in and out, make turns from two or three lanes over and mostly cut each other off rather than give up the unforgivable sin of allowing someone to gain a car length on them.
Anyway, TigerBlog pulled up both yesterday and today to the familiar entrance to the parking garage at Columbia, the one with the entrance on Amsterdam Avenue at 119th Street. From there, it's a winding walk through the part of Columbia that is not on any admissions publications (and, in fairness, is the way in for almost no visitors to the otherwise attractive campus), past dumpsters and parked facilities vehicles and side doors into buildings on this side campus, before reaching the ultimate destination of the building that houses Levien Gym, the university's athletic offices, squash courts, the pool and such.
There's an old gym that is a few hallways away from Levien, where as TB came in yesterday and today some of the Columbia softball players were getting some swings in.
Just before the entrance to the old gym is a stairway that goes up to where the visiting lockerroom is for basketball. TigerBlog has spent many winter evenings waiting outside that lockerroom to take Princeton's coach at the time and players to the postgame interview area.
Usually, it was after a win. But not always.
In addition to Bechtold's big night - one that gave Princeton a share of the Ivy League championship that ultimately ended up with a loss in the Ivy League play-in for the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament - TB remembers the night in 1990 when Princeton, on a night when Matt Eastwick would be the high scorer with 12 points, defeated Columbia 67-39. Late in the game, the Columbia students would chant "you may be winning, but we're building character."
There was another 9-for-15 performance by a Princeton player in an Ivy-clincher in Levien Gym, this time in 1996. That night, it was Steve Goodrich who carried the Tigers, this time with 24 points, as Princeton edged out the Lions.
The significance of that game? Well, nobody ever talks about it, but it was huge. The Princeton win left the Tigers at 12-1 in the Ivy League, while Penn would finish 11-2. The next three Princeton games were the 14-point loss to Penn at the Palestra on the closing night of the regular season and then the playoff win and NCAA tournament win over UCLA.
No win over Columbia? Probably no NCAA tournament in Pete Carril's final season, since it would have made the game at the Palestra winner-take-all.
They weren't all wins. In 1993, Buck Jenkins lit up Princeton for 32 points as the building rocked. Jenkins would be the Ivy League Player of the Year.
Oh, and the trivia question? Let's up it to this: one Princeton player went all 40 minutes in the 2002, 1996 and 1993 games at Levien. Can you name all three? Hint - two of them have the same first name.
Levien Gym is an interesting place.
It has a lobby with plaques for Columbia's athletic hall of fame inductees. It's tucked into a building where, from the outside, there's no way to tell that it's a basketball arena.
The fans sit behind the court on both sides, but there are no stands behind either basket. The walls are very close to the end of the court.
Almost every time that TB made the Cornell/Columbia road trip, he went up-and-back to both schools rather than staying over. As a result, there were a lot of Friday and Saturday nights driving into Manhattan, seeing the life of the city as the theater crowd gathered 80 or so blocks to the south.
He's always liked going to Levien, a friendly place where he'd always see Princeton alums he knew - and almost always would see competitive games with rabid, vocal home fans.
TB isn't sure what year he stumbled on Alex Oberweger, who was a Columbia student broadcaster when TB first met him.
Today, Oberweger is one of the top members of the Columbia athletic administration. He is a smart and pragmatic, a very good combination, and TB has no problem seeing him as a athletic director one day. Or an upper administrator within the university itself. What he can't see is Oberweger's ever leaving Columbia or New York City, where he was born and raised.
During yesterday's first day of the meeting, TB and Oberweger talked briefly about Princeton-Columbia men's basketball, and he remarked how big this year's games between the schools will be.
Right now, Columbia and Princeton are two of the four teams at 1-0 in the league (along with Harvard and Brown). The Lions are 9-6 overall, and one of those nine wins is a convincing thumping of Villanova, who just beat Louisville.
Princeton will be at Levien four weeks from tonight in what figures to be one of the defining games of the Ivy season. The building will be sold out, TB assumes, and he also assumes it'll be loud.
It'll be a big contrast to right now, when there is mostly silence here, save for the people who work here and a few Columbia athletes, as well as the people in TB's meeting.
It's quiet here.
And yet TB can still see all the memories of Princeton-Columbia basketball for all of the years he's seen games here.
Oh, and the trivia answer:
2002 - Kyle Wente.
1996 - Chris Doyal
1993 - Chris Pavlic
It was back on March 2, 2002, that Bechtold had the biggest night of his Princeton basketball career, as he went for 25 points - more than half the Tigers would score - in a 49-48 win over Columbia here at Levien. Bechtold shot 5 for 10 from three-point range that night, and his fifth three-pointer was the game-winner in the final seconds.
Bechtold shot 9 for 15 from the field in that game; every other Princeton player combined was 6 for 28. Trivia question, with answer to come later, is this: which Princeton player played all 40 minutes in that game.
As TigerBlog peeked through the window, he could still Bechtold's last three-pointer, launched from straight on above the top of the key, right at the basket TB was looking down on through the class yesterday. He could see it as it rattled around and eventually splashed through.
TB was at Columbia yesterday for an Ivy League meeting. Actually, he's back right now for Day 2.
As an aside, the way people drive in Manhattan is fascinating. It's almost like there's an assumption that following 80% of the traffic laws is good enough, and people weave in and out, make turns from two or three lanes over and mostly cut each other off rather than give up the unforgivable sin of allowing someone to gain a car length on them.
Anyway, TigerBlog pulled up both yesterday and today to the familiar entrance to the parking garage at Columbia, the one with the entrance on Amsterdam Avenue at 119th Street. From there, it's a winding walk through the part of Columbia that is not on any admissions publications (and, in fairness, is the way in for almost no visitors to the otherwise attractive campus), past dumpsters and parked facilities vehicles and side doors into buildings on this side campus, before reaching the ultimate destination of the building that houses Levien Gym, the university's athletic offices, squash courts, the pool and such.
There's an old gym that is a few hallways away from Levien, where as TB came in yesterday and today some of the Columbia softball players were getting some swings in.
Just before the entrance to the old gym is a stairway that goes up to where the visiting lockerroom is for basketball. TigerBlog has spent many winter evenings waiting outside that lockerroom to take Princeton's coach at the time and players to the postgame interview area.
Usually, it was after a win. But not always.
In addition to Bechtold's big night - one that gave Princeton a share of the Ivy League championship that ultimately ended up with a loss in the Ivy League play-in for the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament - TB remembers the night in 1990 when Princeton, on a night when Matt Eastwick would be the high scorer with 12 points, defeated Columbia 67-39. Late in the game, the Columbia students would chant "you may be winning, but we're building character."
There was another 9-for-15 performance by a Princeton player in an Ivy-clincher in Levien Gym, this time in 1996. That night, it was Steve Goodrich who carried the Tigers, this time with 24 points, as Princeton edged out the Lions.
The significance of that game? Well, nobody ever talks about it, but it was huge. The Princeton win left the Tigers at 12-1 in the Ivy League, while Penn would finish 11-2. The next three Princeton games were the 14-point loss to Penn at the Palestra on the closing night of the regular season and then the playoff win and NCAA tournament win over UCLA.
No win over Columbia? Probably no NCAA tournament in Pete Carril's final season, since it would have made the game at the Palestra winner-take-all.
They weren't all wins. In 1993, Buck Jenkins lit up Princeton for 32 points as the building rocked. Jenkins would be the Ivy League Player of the Year.
Oh, and the trivia question? Let's up it to this: one Princeton player went all 40 minutes in the 2002, 1996 and 1993 games at Levien. Can you name all three? Hint - two of them have the same first name.
Levien Gym is an interesting place.
It has a lobby with plaques for Columbia's athletic hall of fame inductees. It's tucked into a building where, from the outside, there's no way to tell that it's a basketball arena.
The fans sit behind the court on both sides, but there are no stands behind either basket. The walls are very close to the end of the court.
Almost every time that TB made the Cornell/Columbia road trip, he went up-and-back to both schools rather than staying over. As a result, there were a lot of Friday and Saturday nights driving into Manhattan, seeing the life of the city as the theater crowd gathered 80 or so blocks to the south.
He's always liked going to Levien, a friendly place where he'd always see Princeton alums he knew - and almost always would see competitive games with rabid, vocal home fans.
TB isn't sure what year he stumbled on Alex Oberweger, who was a Columbia student broadcaster when TB first met him.
Today, Oberweger is one of the top members of the Columbia athletic administration. He is a smart and pragmatic, a very good combination, and TB has no problem seeing him as a athletic director one day. Or an upper administrator within the university itself. What he can't see is Oberweger's ever leaving Columbia or New York City, where he was born and raised.
During yesterday's first day of the meeting, TB and Oberweger talked briefly about Princeton-Columbia men's basketball, and he remarked how big this year's games between the schools will be.
Right now, Columbia and Princeton are two of the four teams at 1-0 in the league (along with Harvard and Brown). The Lions are 9-6 overall, and one of those nine wins is a convincing thumping of Villanova, who just beat Louisville.
Princeton will be at Levien four weeks from tonight in what figures to be one of the defining games of the Ivy season. The building will be sold out, TB assumes, and he also assumes it'll be loud.
It'll be a big contrast to right now, when there is mostly silence here, save for the people who work here and a few Columbia athletes, as well as the people in TB's meeting.
It's quiet here.
And yet TB can still see all the memories of Princeton-Columbia basketball for all of the years he's seen games here.
Oh, and the trivia answer:
2002 - Kyle Wente.
1996 - Chris Doyal
1993 - Chris Pavlic
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Cruising
TigerBlog was driving along yesterday when came across a billboard that read "the current temperature is 89," with the "89" as one of those electric displays that change when the necessary number changes.
As he was processing how wrong the number was, he saw the words underneath the temperature, words that read: "in the Caribbean, that is."
It was a billboard for a cruise line.
TigerBlog went on a cruise once. He didn't like it very much.
If he wanted to do all the stuff there was to do on the ship, then he had to stay up late. If he wanted to get off the ship to go to the islands, he had to get up early.
Plus, the boat rocked. He definitely didn't like that.
On the other hand, the cruise ship itself was an amazing structure. As TB recalls, it sailed from San Juan and went through the Caribbean, and it was like being on a mall that could float. A floating mall, that is, with a bunch of food courts, all of which served all-you-can-eat fare around the clock.
And with tiny staterooms, with tinier bathrooms in them.
For TB, a much better vacation is finding one beach and sitting on it for a week.
FatherBlog is on a cruise even as you are reading this. His itinerary started in Tahiti and went through French Polynesia. Currently, he's in the Marquesas Islands.
Yesterday's destination was Nuku Hiva, for which TB did a search. It seems to be a fairly scenic place.
TB's Aunt Edie took cruises all over the world. BrotherBlog's last major vacation was a cruise in the Mediterranean, through the French and Italian Rivieras.
This week would have been a great week to be on vacation in a tropical location, even if it had to be on a cruise.
And it wasn't just because of the weather.
This is Week 2 of first semester exams. It's a week that has no athletic events at Princeton. Hey, for that matter, there wasn't even an event meeting this past Tuesday at 10, which is a complete rarity for the academic year.
Princeton's teams return to competition tomorrow at the Armory in New York City, where the women's track and field team will be participating in a meet.
After having no events for 12 days, Princeton will have 23 in the next eight days, with at least one event every day.
The home portion of the schedule resumes with something of a double feature Sunday afternoon.
The men's basketball team plays its Division III game against the College of New Jersey Sunday at 2, and then the men's hockey team hosts Sacred Heart at 4.
By next weekend, the basketball and hockey teams of both sexes will be in full league mode, and there will be one intense game after another for the rest of the season.
For now, though, there's still one more day with nothing going on.
TigerBlog is in New York for a meeting all day anyway, so he couldn't have gone away this week after all.
Of course, if he really wanted to go on a cruise, there's always the Circle Line.
As he was processing how wrong the number was, he saw the words underneath the temperature, words that read: "in the Caribbean, that is."
It was a billboard for a cruise line.
TigerBlog went on a cruise once. He didn't like it very much.
If he wanted to do all the stuff there was to do on the ship, then he had to stay up late. If he wanted to get off the ship to go to the islands, he had to get up early.
Plus, the boat rocked. He definitely didn't like that.
On the other hand, the cruise ship itself was an amazing structure. As TB recalls, it sailed from San Juan and went through the Caribbean, and it was like being on a mall that could float. A floating mall, that is, with a bunch of food courts, all of which served all-you-can-eat fare around the clock.
And with tiny staterooms, with tinier bathrooms in them.
For TB, a much better vacation is finding one beach and sitting on it for a week.
FatherBlog is on a cruise even as you are reading this. His itinerary started in Tahiti and went through French Polynesia. Currently, he's in the Marquesas Islands.
Yesterday's destination was Nuku Hiva, for which TB did a search. It seems to be a fairly scenic place.
TB's Aunt Edie took cruises all over the world. BrotherBlog's last major vacation was a cruise in the Mediterranean, through the French and Italian Rivieras.
This week would have been a great week to be on vacation in a tropical location, even if it had to be on a cruise.
And it wasn't just because of the weather.
This is Week 2 of first semester exams. It's a week that has no athletic events at Princeton. Hey, for that matter, there wasn't even an event meeting this past Tuesday at 10, which is a complete rarity for the academic year.
Princeton's teams return to competition tomorrow at the Armory in New York City, where the women's track and field team will be participating in a meet.
After having no events for 12 days, Princeton will have 23 in the next eight days, with at least one event every day.
The home portion of the schedule resumes with something of a double feature Sunday afternoon.
The men's basketball team plays its Division III game against the College of New Jersey Sunday at 2, and then the men's hockey team hosts Sacred Heart at 4.
By next weekend, the basketball and hockey teams of both sexes will be in full league mode, and there will be one intense game after another for the rest of the season.
For now, though, there's still one more day with nothing going on.
TigerBlog is in New York for a meeting all day anyway, so he couldn't have gone away this week after all.
Of course, if he really wanted to go on a cruise, there's always the Circle Line.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
One Month Away
TigerBlog's iPhone has an app on the first screen that shows the weather.
The icon is a blue sky with an orange sun, underneath of which it says "73" with the symbol for degrees, which TB can't figure out how to get on his computer.
Then you click on the app, and it tells you the actual temperature and the forecast for the next five days, of wherever TB happens to be at that moment. It's actually pretty neat.
This morning, it said it was nine degrees in Princeton, or only 64 degrees away from the 73 on the app's icon. Now, a few hours later, it has vaulted up three degrees, all the way to 12.
Yes, it's really winter here. Of course, this comes on the heels of Sunday's high temperature, which was 60. And it'll be back near 50 next week.
Last winter was the mildest TB can remember. Even with how cold it is today, it's still better than snow, which is in the forecast for Friday, though without much accumulation.
TB was walking into the building this morning with Marcus Jenkins, the men's basketball coach assistant coach, who agreed that nobody ever says "it's awesome when it's this cold out."
Meanwhile, back at TB's iPhone, there's another app for the calendar, which very nicely has today's date on it each day. For instance, on the 14th of the month, it'll say "14" across the icon.
Today TB was greeted with the number 23, which made him immediately think of where he will be the next time that app has "23" on it.
He'll be at Hofstra. For Princeton-Hofstra men's lacrosse. That same day, by the way, the women open the season at home against Villanova that same day.
Princeton hasn't started practice yet. The Ivy League schools actually have their first practices on Feb. 1, which is a week from Friday and one day before the first Division I men's game, as Delaware plays at High Point. The women have already had their first real game, as Syracuse played Jacksonville.
TigerBlog doesn't think that the Ivy schools are at a disadvantage because they start a few weeks later. In fact, who would want to be practicing outside on days like today?
There are some big early February games on the horizon, including Denver's opener against Duke on Feb. 9.
As for Princeton's men, it'll be a fascinating season.
The Tigers averaged 11.2 goals per game and gave up 7.25 in 2012, when the Tigers went 11-5, won the Ivy League at 6-0 and returned to the NCAA tournament.
The offense will be led by junior Tom Schreiber, who came within two assists last year of having Princeton's second "30/30" season (David Tickner in 1976 had 34 goals and 32 assists for the only season of 30 goals, 30 assists in school history). The cast around him offensively is very good, and the Tigers could easily add to the scoring offense total this time around.
Schreiber, by the way, is can't-miss viewing, as he is a threat to do something spectacular every single time he touches the ball.
And the rule changes could help Princeton, as they are meant to open the game up, give more possessions and add to the offense. The major ones involve substitutions, which all are on the fly right now (other than after goals and penalties) and of course the biggest one, the 30-second countdown after a stall warning, a change that is clearly a prelude to a shot clock.
For Princeton, all the question marks are on defense. How could they not be, when graduation took, among others, All-Americas Tyler Fiorito in goal, Chad Wiedmaier on defense and John Cunningham at longstick midfielder, as well as four-year starter and All-Ivy performer Jonathan Meyers.
TigerBlog envisions a lacrosse season with sun and warmth that increases as the season goes along, building to hopefully another successful May.
For now, it's up four more degrees, all the way to 16.
The warm weather is coming though.
He, a month from today, it'll be spring.
The icon is a blue sky with an orange sun, underneath of which it says "73" with the symbol for degrees, which TB can't figure out how to get on his computer.
Then you click on the app, and it tells you the actual temperature and the forecast for the next five days, of wherever TB happens to be at that moment. It's actually pretty neat.
This morning, it said it was nine degrees in Princeton, or only 64 degrees away from the 73 on the app's icon. Now, a few hours later, it has vaulted up three degrees, all the way to 12.
Yes, it's really winter here. Of course, this comes on the heels of Sunday's high temperature, which was 60. And it'll be back near 50 next week.
Last winter was the mildest TB can remember. Even with how cold it is today, it's still better than snow, which is in the forecast for Friday, though without much accumulation.
TB was walking into the building this morning with Marcus Jenkins, the men's basketball coach assistant coach, who agreed that nobody ever says "it's awesome when it's this cold out."
Meanwhile, back at TB's iPhone, there's another app for the calendar, which very nicely has today's date on it each day. For instance, on the 14th of the month, it'll say "14" across the icon.
Today TB was greeted with the number 23, which made him immediately think of where he will be the next time that app has "23" on it.
He'll be at Hofstra. For Princeton-Hofstra men's lacrosse. That same day, by the way, the women open the season at home against Villanova that same day.
Princeton hasn't started practice yet. The Ivy League schools actually have their first practices on Feb. 1, which is a week from Friday and one day before the first Division I men's game, as Delaware plays at High Point. The women have already had their first real game, as Syracuse played Jacksonville.
TigerBlog doesn't think that the Ivy schools are at a disadvantage because they start a few weeks later. In fact, who would want to be practicing outside on days like today?
There are some big early February games on the horizon, including Denver's opener against Duke on Feb. 9.
As for Princeton's men, it'll be a fascinating season.
The Tigers averaged 11.2 goals per game and gave up 7.25 in 2012, when the Tigers went 11-5, won the Ivy League at 6-0 and returned to the NCAA tournament.
The offense will be led by junior Tom Schreiber, who came within two assists last year of having Princeton's second "30/30" season (David Tickner in 1976 had 34 goals and 32 assists for the only season of 30 goals, 30 assists in school history). The cast around him offensively is very good, and the Tigers could easily add to the scoring offense total this time around.
Schreiber, by the way, is can't-miss viewing, as he is a threat to do something spectacular every single time he touches the ball.
And the rule changes could help Princeton, as they are meant to open the game up, give more possessions and add to the offense. The major ones involve substitutions, which all are on the fly right now (other than after goals and penalties) and of course the biggest one, the 30-second countdown after a stall warning, a change that is clearly a prelude to a shot clock.
For Princeton, all the question marks are on defense. How could they not be, when graduation took, among others, All-Americas Tyler Fiorito in goal, Chad Wiedmaier on defense and John Cunningham at longstick midfielder, as well as four-year starter and All-Ivy performer Jonathan Meyers.
TigerBlog envisions a lacrosse season with sun and warmth that increases as the season goes along, building to hopefully another successful May.
For now, it's up four more degrees, all the way to 16.
The warm weather is coming though.
He, a month from today, it'll be spring.
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