TigerBlog isn't wrong often. When he is, he's the first to admit it.
Okay, he's joking a bit. Not about the admitting it part. Just about the not being wrong often.
Anyway, he wrote this about Olivia Hompe back in the first week of April:
In the process, [Hompe] moved into second place all-time at Princeton in
career points with 225. The record of 270, held by 1999 grad Crista
Samaras, is probably not going to be challenged, but getting to second
is pretty impressive.
He was wrong. And he'll get back to that shortly. First he wants to tell you about his weekend.
Probably like you, TigerBlog watched a lot of lacrosse on television. And just like TigerBlog, you were probably really disappointed that the Big East men's final between Marquette and Providence wasn't televised.
His viewing Saturday started with Hobart-Bryant in the Northeast Conference final, a game that was streamed on NEC Front Row. TB connected it to the television so he could watch it on the bigger screen, which was great, except that he couldn't simply change the channel during timeouts and such. That's the only drawback.
After that was Albany-Binghamton in the America East final, Towson-UMass in the Colonial final, Army-Notre Dame and Syracuse-Colgate in regular-season games and then finally Ohio State-Maryland in the Big Ten final.
All of those games were on regular television.
Then, come Sunday morning, it was Monmouth-Marist in the MAAC final and then Yale-Brown in the Ivy final.
TigerBlog was happy to see Monmouth win. For one thing, it's good for New Jersey lacrosse. For another, the team was 0-14 in its first year four years ago and now is headed to the NCAA tournament. For another, head coach Brian Fisher is known to be a pretty good guy.
Mostly, though, TB was happy for Jake Henze, a sophomore shortstick D middie for the Hawks. Jake and TigerBlog Jr. go back to sixth grade, when they first started playing club lacrosse together. After the game, Jake's dad, Steve, who had been one of TBJ's summer coaches for six years, sent a picture of him, his wife Lisa and Jake with the MAAC trophy. They looked happy.
If you had told TB 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, that there would be that much lacrosse on TV in one weekend, he never would have believed it. Back when he first started here, there was no lacrosse on television, and when there was a game, it was on satellite, with coordinates like "transponder 7, channel 443," as opposed to "ESPNU" or "CBS Sports."
If you're a lacrosse fan, you have no complaints at all about how much coverage there is. It was like the World Cup for soccer, only better.
It will only get better still this weekend, when the eight opening round NCAA tournament games are on ESPNU as well.
The other game TB watched Sunday was the Ivy League women's final between Princeton and Cornell. This game started at 11 am, an hour after the MAAC final and an hour before the Ivy men's final.
Princeton defeated Cornell 12-9 after jumping out to a 7-2 lead in the first half and holding off a Cornell challenge.
Even before the final, Princeton, Cornell and Penn - whom Princeton defeated 17-8 after losing 17-12 to the Quakers earlier this year - knew they'd be headed to the NCAA tournament. The teams played this weekend for seedings - but also for the pride of being the top dog of the league after the three-way tie in the regular season.
The Ivy tournament turned out to be a showcase for Princeton's two senior stars, goalie Ellie DeGarmo and attacker Olivia Hompe.
To show you how good DeGarmo was, Hompe scored seven goals and had two assists for her fifth nine-point game of the season - and second of the tournament, after her three-goal, six-assist effort against Penn in the semifinals - and yet DeGarmo was still the tournament MVP after her own record-setting performance with 15 saves against Cornell and 27 for the tournament.
Getting back to Hompe, when she moved into second place all-time, she trailed Samaras by 45 points. It seemed like way too high of a hill to climb. Instead, she chased it down in less than eight more games.
She went into the final against Cornell one point away, and of course she sprinted past the record in almost no time. As of now, she has 278 points, as well as the program record with 193 career goals. A little context for that would be that only eight other players in program history have at least 193 career points; she has that many goals.
Princeton drew the No. 5 seed in the NCAA tournament, which comes with it a first-round bye, something the top six seeds get. The top eight get to play at home on the first weekend.
TigerBlog watched the women's selections on ncaa.com, and he was happy for the team to see the No. 5 come up next to Princeton's name.
Then he saw who the opponent will be. That sort of surprised him.
Princeton will play Sunday at 1 against the winner of the game on Sherrerd Field Friday night at 7 between ... Cornell and Notre Dame. Princeton is 3-0 against those two this year, with a pair of wins in Ithaca during the last three weekends and a win over Notre Dame in Princeton back on March 11.
If Princeton can get past the winner of Cornell-Notre Dame, it's possible that waiting ahead will be Penn State, a team who defeated Princeton earlier this season. Beyond that would be the Final Four.
Ah, but that's thinking about. Maybe it's an advantage to play a team you've already beaten. Maybe it's an advantage to play someone new. None of that will matter in the second half Sunday.
If you were going to build a women's lacrosse team, you'd do so around a goalie and an all-time great offensive player. That's where Princeton is right now.
The challenges ahead are defined now. And it's another chance to play at home.
And again, TigerBlog was wrong when he said Hompe probably wouldn't catch Samaras. She did - with some time to spare.
Hey, there's nothing wrong with saying you're wrong - especially when you're usually right.
Tuesday, May 9, 2017
Monday, May 8, 2017
Two Plus Forty
TigerBlog walked up to the softball field Saturday and was immediately struck by two things.
First, almost everyone in attendance acted like it was 10-15 degrees warmer than it was, with shorts and t-shirts the norm on a day that was close but wasn't quite there. Second, every Princeton fan there acted like it was a late spring celebration more than playoff game.
The Princeton softball team took care of the second part. Nobody seemed to mind about the first part.
The occasion was the Ivy League championship series between Princeton and Harvard, a best-of-three event that called for two games Saturday and then an if-necessary game yesterday. It would not be necessary.
Princeton won the first game 1-0, scratching out a run in the bottom of the seventh on an infield hit, a walk, a fly out, a fielder's choice that didn't get an out and then the game-winning single by Allison Harvey.
There was one run in Game 1. There'd be two in the top of the first of Game 2 and 17 in all, as Princeton would win 13-4. The Tigers led 6-0 before Harvard made a run to get to 6-4. Princeton then put up seven runs in the final two innings, and that was that.
The result was a second-straight Ivy League championship for Princeton and another trip to the NCAA regionals.
At one point during Game 2, TigerBlog was standing next to his colleague Cody Chruschiel when the subject came to whether or not the two of them could make bat hit ball were they to stand in the batter's box. If, TB asked, Cody got to see 10 pitches, could he hit one in fair territory?
No, Cody said. TB would like to think he could, but Cody is probably right. TB isn't saying get a hit. He's saying simply put the bat on the ball (bunting wouldn't count).
Perhaps another way to put it would be to wonder how many pitches he'd have to see before he put one in play?
As for the Tigers, with the final out of Game 2 came the celebration that everyone came to see. The NCAA draw is this coming Sunday, followed by the regionals for the 64-team tournament the following weekend.
So that's two Ivy League titles for Lisa Van Ackeren, the Princeton head coach.
Here's another rite of spring at Princeton. Each spring, someone says Princeton won't win the Ivy League Heptagonal outdoor men's track and field championships. More often than not, Princeton wins anyway.
That was the case this weekend at Yale, where the Tigers rallied to win their latest Heps championship, this time scratching out their own win on the final event of Day 2 in the final event of Day 2. That, by the way, would be the last event of the two-day decathlon, which was the last event of the two-day meet.
Princeton would overtake Cornell thanks to the points from its three freshmen decathletes and win 156-149. Once again, Princeton got the crucial points when it needed them.
At some point, it must have dawned on men's track and field coach Fred Samara that this day was going to break his way. Maybe it was Saturday. Maybe it was yesterday.
At some point, though, he had to start to figure out that it was going to be close and then after that that his team would win.
This wasn't, after all, his first time at this. Or even, like Van Ackeren, his second. In fact, and TigerBlog means this as a total compliment, but Fred Samara has been winning Ivy League championships at Princeton since before Lisa Van Ackeren was born.
Hmmm. Reading that over, it might not exactly sound like a compliment. But it is.
Actually, it's more of testament than a compliment. It's a testament to the incredible career that Fred Samara has put together at Princeton - and continues to add onto each year.
You know how many Heps titles that is for him in his 40 years at Princeton?
That would be 40. That's 40 Ivy League championships, between cross country and indoor and outdoor track and field.
Forty? That's nuts.
As for the championships, the celebrations are always genuine, always emotional, always special.
There's a lot that goes into winning a championship. Hey, there's a lot to putting a team together before you ever have Practice No. 1.
There are countless hours and hours of preparation that go into competing and ultimately winning (technically they're countable by NCAA rules, but you get TigerBlog's point).
That's why each championship is unique and none will ever be taken for granted. And that's why celebrating them is always such a wonderful moment.
You can see it in the faces of the athletes.
Check out the softball players HERE after their win. You can see the highlights and the celebrations as they unfolded.
But look at their faces in the celebration picture. It's like they want to grab the moment and hold on forever.
And why not?
They earned it.
Whether you've won twice or 40 times, they're all amazing.
First, almost everyone in attendance acted like it was 10-15 degrees warmer than it was, with shorts and t-shirts the norm on a day that was close but wasn't quite there. Second, every Princeton fan there acted like it was a late spring celebration more than playoff game.
The Princeton softball team took care of the second part. Nobody seemed to mind about the first part.
The occasion was the Ivy League championship series between Princeton and Harvard, a best-of-three event that called for two games Saturday and then an if-necessary game yesterday. It would not be necessary.
Princeton won the first game 1-0, scratching out a run in the bottom of the seventh on an infield hit, a walk, a fly out, a fielder's choice that didn't get an out and then the game-winning single by Allison Harvey.
There was one run in Game 1. There'd be two in the top of the first of Game 2 and 17 in all, as Princeton would win 13-4. The Tigers led 6-0 before Harvard made a run to get to 6-4. Princeton then put up seven runs in the final two innings, and that was that.
The result was a second-straight Ivy League championship for Princeton and another trip to the NCAA regionals.
At one point during Game 2, TigerBlog was standing next to his colleague Cody Chruschiel when the subject came to whether or not the two of them could make bat hit ball were they to stand in the batter's box. If, TB asked, Cody got to see 10 pitches, could he hit one in fair territory?
No, Cody said. TB would like to think he could, but Cody is probably right. TB isn't saying get a hit. He's saying simply put the bat on the ball (bunting wouldn't count).
Perhaps another way to put it would be to wonder how many pitches he'd have to see before he put one in play?
As for the Tigers, with the final out of Game 2 came the celebration that everyone came to see. The NCAA draw is this coming Sunday, followed by the regionals for the 64-team tournament the following weekend.
So that's two Ivy League titles for Lisa Van Ackeren, the Princeton head coach.
Here's another rite of spring at Princeton. Each spring, someone says Princeton won't win the Ivy League Heptagonal outdoor men's track and field championships. More often than not, Princeton wins anyway.
That was the case this weekend at Yale, where the Tigers rallied to win their latest Heps championship, this time scratching out their own win on the final event of Day 2 in the final event of Day 2. That, by the way, would be the last event of the two-day decathlon, which was the last event of the two-day meet.
Princeton would overtake Cornell thanks to the points from its three freshmen decathletes and win 156-149. Once again, Princeton got the crucial points when it needed them.
At some point, it must have dawned on men's track and field coach Fred Samara that this day was going to break his way. Maybe it was Saturday. Maybe it was yesterday.
At some point, though, he had to start to figure out that it was going to be close and then after that that his team would win.
This wasn't, after all, his first time at this. Or even, like Van Ackeren, his second. In fact, and TigerBlog means this as a total compliment, but Fred Samara has been winning Ivy League championships at Princeton since before Lisa Van Ackeren was born.
Hmmm. Reading that over, it might not exactly sound like a compliment. But it is.
Actually, it's more of testament than a compliment. It's a testament to the incredible career that Fred Samara has put together at Princeton - and continues to add onto each year.
You know how many Heps titles that is for him in his 40 years at Princeton?
That would be 40. That's 40 Ivy League championships, between cross country and indoor and outdoor track and field.
Forty? That's nuts.
As for the championships, the celebrations are always genuine, always emotional, always special.
There's a lot that goes into winning a championship. Hey, there's a lot to putting a team together before you ever have Practice No. 1.
There are countless hours and hours of preparation that go into competing and ultimately winning (technically they're countable by NCAA rules, but you get TigerBlog's point).
That's why each championship is unique and none will ever be taken for granted. And that's why celebrating them is always such a wonderful moment.
You can see it in the faces of the athletes.
Check out the softball players HERE after their win. You can see the highlights and the celebrations as they unfolded.
But look at their faces in the celebration picture. It's like they want to grab the moment and hold on forever.
And why not?
They earned it.
Whether you've won twice or 40 times, they're all amazing.
Friday, May 5, 2017
Second Chances
TigerBlog wrote you 900 words for today. Then he read through it and though: "wow, this is awful."
Seriously. It was terrible. It was by far the worst blog he'd ever written.
Why is that?
Maybe the stars were not aligned. Maybe he was out of sync with his muse. Maybe he was entitled to a bad one every now and then.
Whatever the reason, it was really bad.
It started out with animal crackers. He was eating animal crackers, and there were four different animals on the package, but there were about 10 different kinds inside the package.
From there, he talked about the word "hippopotamus," which is the second-best word a kid just learning to talk can say, just ahead of "Indianapolis" - trust TB, or try it yourself if you have a toddler - and just behind the all-time winner, "octopus."
There was one good paragraph in the original version of this. It came after he was talking about how a tree branch fell on the driveway Wednesday afternoon, landing right where Miss TigerBlog parks her car:
His first thought was that he was glad the car wasn't destroyed by the falling branch. His second thought was that his first thought should have been that he was glad that MTB wasn't in the car in the driveway when the branch fell.
While he's on the subject of MTB's driving, her sense of direction continues to astonish him. Nobody can be that lost so many times. She has to be doing this on purpose.
There have been about five times where TB has been facing one way expecting his daughter to come down the road, only to have come from the complete opposite direction about 10 minutes later.
Anyway, he took the rest of what he wrote and did the only thing he could. He deleted it.
He didn't just delete it. Usually he continually copies and pastes into a backup document, just in case something happens to the original version. This is a lesson that he has learned the hard way, with stories through the years gone in a blink, never having been saved. Now he overdoes it.
This time, he deleted, without copying it. Then he closed out of his browser, so he couldn't hit "undo."
As an aside, it was Chuck Sullivan, once an intern in the Office of Athletic Communications and now the head of communications for the American Athletic Conference
Then he set out to write another one. This one, as it turns out.
As he did so, he was struck by a slight irony. This is, after all, a weekend for second chances.
For Princeton. And for Princeton's opponents.
Before he gets to that, TB should mention that this weekend is also about first chances, and only chances. The men's and women's track and field teams will be at Yale for the Ivy League Heptagonal championships, and the Ivy League champions will be crowned there Sunday.
Want more on the women's event? HERE.
Want more on the men's event? HERE.
As for the second chances, there are NCAA automatic bids on the line for three Princeton teams beginning today.
The one at home will be the Ivy League softball championship series, where Princeton will host Harvard. The Tigers swept Harvard during the regular season in Cambridge, but that hardly matters this time around.
Again, second chances are for Princeton's opponents too, right?
The preview story for the series is HERE.
If you don't want to read it, TigerBlog can give you two highlights:
* Princeton is in its third Ivy League championship series and has played Harvard each time
* Princeton has won 18 Ivy League championships; Harvard is second, with six
Then there are the Ivy League lacrosse tournaments.
As second chances go, there are no shortage of storylines.
On the women's side, Princeton gets another shot at Penn, who beat Princeton 17-12 during the regular season. Should Princeton win that game, then it would possibly be Cornell's shot at a second chance at Princeton, unless Harvard would take advantage of its second chance against Cornell in the other semifinal.
Should Penn win, it would get its own second chance if Cornell wins, as Cornell beat Penn very early in the season.
If you want the basics, here's how it goes:
Princeton vs. Penn today at 4
Harvard vs. Cornell today at 7
Championship game Sunday at 11 a.m.
Oh yeah, the whole tournament is at Cornell.
As for the men, it's at Yale. It goes like this:
Princeton vs. Brown, today at 3:30
Penn vs Yale, today at 6
Championship game Sunday at noon.
So far this season, Princeton has beaten Brown and Yale has beaten Penn. Through the first seven Ivy tournaments, comprising 21 games, the team that has won the regular season game is just 10-11 in the rematch.
Anyway, that's the blog for today.
It's not the best one ever, but it's way better than the original.
Second chances sometimes make a real difference. In sports and in blogs.
TB will back next week. Hopefully the stars will align. He and his muse can get back on the same page.
Maybe he just needs a vanilla chai latte. And some animal crackers.
Seriously. It was terrible. It was by far the worst blog he'd ever written.
Why is that?
Maybe the stars were not aligned. Maybe he was out of sync with his muse. Maybe he was entitled to a bad one every now and then.
Whatever the reason, it was really bad.
It started out with animal crackers. He was eating animal crackers, and there were four different animals on the package, but there were about 10 different kinds inside the package.
From there, he talked about the word "hippopotamus," which is the second-best word a kid just learning to talk can say, just ahead of "Indianapolis" - trust TB, or try it yourself if you have a toddler - and just behind the all-time winner, "octopus."
There was one good paragraph in the original version of this. It came after he was talking about how a tree branch fell on the driveway Wednesday afternoon, landing right where Miss TigerBlog parks her car:
His first thought was that he was glad the car wasn't destroyed by the falling branch. His second thought was that his first thought should have been that he was glad that MTB wasn't in the car in the driveway when the branch fell.
While he's on the subject of MTB's driving, her sense of direction continues to astonish him. Nobody can be that lost so many times. She has to be doing this on purpose.
There have been about five times where TB has been facing one way expecting his daughter to come down the road, only to have come from the complete opposite direction about 10 minutes later.
Anyway, he took the rest of what he wrote and did the only thing he could. He deleted it.
He didn't just delete it. Usually he continually copies and pastes into a backup document, just in case something happens to the original version. This is a lesson that he has learned the hard way, with stories through the years gone in a blink, never having been saved. Now he overdoes it.
This time, he deleted, without copying it. Then he closed out of his browser, so he couldn't hit "undo."
As an aside, it was Chuck Sullivan, once an intern in the Office of Athletic Communications and now the head of communications for the American Athletic Conference
Then he set out to write another one. This one, as it turns out.
As he did so, he was struck by a slight irony. This is, after all, a weekend for second chances.
For Princeton. And for Princeton's opponents.
Before he gets to that, TB should mention that this weekend is also about first chances, and only chances. The men's and women's track and field teams will be at Yale for the Ivy League Heptagonal championships, and the Ivy League champions will be crowned there Sunday.
Want more on the women's event? HERE.
Want more on the men's event? HERE.
As for the second chances, there are NCAA automatic bids on the line for three Princeton teams beginning today.
The one at home will be the Ivy League softball championship series, where Princeton will host Harvard. The Tigers swept Harvard during the regular season in Cambridge, but that hardly matters this time around.
Again, second chances are for Princeton's opponents too, right?
The preview story for the series is HERE.
If you don't want to read it, TigerBlog can give you two highlights:
* Princeton is in its third Ivy League championship series and has played Harvard each time
* Princeton has won 18 Ivy League championships; Harvard is second, with six
Then there are the Ivy League lacrosse tournaments.
As second chances go, there are no shortage of storylines.
On the women's side, Princeton gets another shot at Penn, who beat Princeton 17-12 during the regular season. Should Princeton win that game, then it would possibly be Cornell's shot at a second chance at Princeton, unless Harvard would take advantage of its second chance against Cornell in the other semifinal.
Should Penn win, it would get its own second chance if Cornell wins, as Cornell beat Penn very early in the season.
If you want the basics, here's how it goes:
Princeton vs. Penn today at 4
Harvard vs. Cornell today at 7
Championship game Sunday at 11 a.m.
Oh yeah, the whole tournament is at Cornell.
As for the men, it's at Yale. It goes like this:
Princeton vs. Brown, today at 3:30
Penn vs Yale, today at 6
Championship game Sunday at noon.
So far this season, Princeton has beaten Brown and Yale has beaten Penn. Through the first seven Ivy tournaments, comprising 21 games, the team that has won the regular season game is just 10-11 in the rematch.
Anyway, that's the blog for today.
It's not the best one ever, but it's way better than the original.
Second chances sometimes make a real difference. In sports and in blogs.
TB will back next week. Hopefully the stars will align. He and his muse can get back on the same page.
Maybe he just needs a vanilla chai latte. And some animal crackers.
Thursday, May 4, 2017
The Honorable Gavin McBride
TigerBlog will give you the stats of two men's lacrosse players. You tell him who had a better season.
Ready?
Player A - 15 games, 53 goals, 19 assists, 72 points, 128 shots
Player B - 14 games, 51 goals, 15 assists, 66 points, 123 shots
Player B had one fewer game, so give him one more game at the pace he's had for himself, and Player B gets to this:
15 games, 55 goals, 16 assists, 71 points, 132 shots
In other words, these are two very, very similar seasons, right?
Who is Player A?
That would be Princeton's Jesse Hubbard in 1996. And what did that season get for Hubbard? Back in 1996, Hubbard was a unanimous first-team All-Ivy selection, the Ivy League Player of the Year and a first-team All-America.
The 53 goals he scored that year remain, by the way, the school single season record.
So who would be Player B? Who would have put up numbers that are very, very similar to Hubbard's best season (and numbers that definitely eclipse Hubbard's other seasons)?
Keep in mind that Jesse Hubbard was TigerBlog's pick as the No. 1 Princeton men's lacrosse player in TB's first 25 years with the program. Keep in mind that any objective ranking would put Hubbard among the 50 greatest college lacrosse players of all time. He's a member of the USILA Hall of Fame.
So yeah, who is Player B?
Gavin McBride, this year.
And what did McBride's season get for him? Honorable mention All-Ivy League.
Want some other information about McBride's season?
Well, how about some of these numbers:
* he leads Division I in goals scored and goals scored per game
* he has played 14 games this season and has five or more goals in six of them
* in his six Ivy League games, he had these goal totals: five, five, five, two, seven, five
* his 29 goals in six conference games is one off the all-time league record, held by another Hall-of-Fame and legendary player, Cornell's Mike French, in 1974 ... that's nineteen-seventy-four, or 43 years ago ... think of all the great players who played in the Ivy League the last 43 years who never came close to that number
So how did McBride end up as an honorable mention selection?
Well, the first thing you have to know is that this is an incredibly deep year for Ivy League attackmen.
It was already going to be that way anyway, with the return of the reigning Tewaaraton Trophy winner (Brown's Dylan Molloy) and another Tewaaraton finalist (Yale's Ben Reeves).
That was an Ivy League first.
Add to that last year's co-Rookie of the Year (Penn's Simon Mathias) and a second-team All-Ivy returnee from a year ago (Harvard's Morgan Cheek), and the field is even deeper.
And then there were the two incoming freshmen, Princeton's Michael Sowers and Cornell's Jeff Teat. They were supposed to make massive impacts on the league - and they did.
And there you have the six players who were first- and second-team on attack, ahead of McBride. First-team, for the record, was Sowers, Molloy and Reeves (who also was the Player of the Year).
Obviously none of the six has more goals than McBride. Three of them have more points (Sowers, Teat, Cheek).
For some reason, certain players just fly under the radar in terms of individual recognition. TigerBlog, though, has never seen a player get less individual recognition relative to his contributions than Gavin McBride.
There are a few reasons why. First, he had no goals or assists as a freshman, so he didn't build a reputation from Day 1. Second, he's played with offensive superstars like Mike MacDonald, Kip Orban, Ryan Ambler and now Sowers. Third, much of the attention for Princeton lacrosse has gone to his fellow senior Zach Currier.
The fourth - and most important - actually plays off the second. TB thinks McBride is penalized because he plays with Sowers. There is precedent for this, and actually it goes back to last year in the Ivy League.
This is actually the second straight year that the leading goal-scorer in the country was only an honorable mention All-Ivy selection. A year ago, it was Kylor Bellistri of Brown, who may have been undervalued because he played alongside Molloy.
It's all combined to make McBride the most underrated player in Division I, especially this year.
A year ago, McBride was the Ivy League player with the most goals who didn't make any of the All-Ivy teams. Last year, his 26 goals did not get him first- or second-team or even honorable mention. The same is true, by the way, of the year before that, when his 24 goals didn't earn him anything.
Beyond the All-Ivy teams, McBride was named Ivy Player of the Week only once this season, despite his six games of at least five goals. Ironically, the Ivy Player of the Week after McBride's seven-goal game against Harvard was Molloy.
Not every player could handle the personal slights as gracefully as McBride. TB is sure it must bother him on some level, but it doesn't slow him down. TB has absolutely no doubt that McBride would never have traded a spot in the Ivy tournament - which begins tomorrow for the second-seeded Tigers against third-seeded Brown at 3:30 at Yale - for first-team All-Ivy.
Ask him if he'd rather be first-team All-America or have Princeton in the NCAA tournament, and he wouldn't even flinch before saying the NCAA tournament.
Hey, it's possible all of this bothers TigerBlog more than it bothers McBride.
It's not a knock on any of the six attackmen who were voted ahead of him. Nor is it a knock on the coaches who did the voting.
It's more a statement on Gavin McBride's career.
McBride has the fourth-longest streak in Division I in consecutive games with at least one goal - 22 - and the 10th longest in consecutive games with at least one point - 42. That shows a remarkable consistency.
Of course, consistency is having one goal, two goals, two goals, one goal, five goals, one goal, two goals and so on. His brand of consistency this year has been to have five as many times as he doesn't.
That's absurd stuff.
Should McBride get two goals against Brown, he'd tie Hubbard's single-season program record. Even if he doesn't, consider all of the great players who have played at Princeton. Think of all the All-Americas, NCAA champs, all-time greats.
Only two have gotten to 50 goals in a season. Jesse Hubbard and Gavin McBride.
Only 12 players have reached 100 goals at Princeton. The list is dominated by players who were three- and four-time first- or second-team selections.
And now Gavin McBride.
Maybe he's not a first-team All-Ivy pick. Maybe he's not a second-team pick.
What he is is an all-time great Princeton men's lacrosse player. And he's had an all-time great season, whatever label you want to assign to it.
He's also one of the main reasons the team is still playing into May this season.
Ultimately, that's all that really matters, right?
Not completely. Maybe it's explainable as to how he ended up as just an honorable mention selection.
Still, it does feel like he got shortchanged here.
Ready?
Player A - 15 games, 53 goals, 19 assists, 72 points, 128 shots
Player B - 14 games, 51 goals, 15 assists, 66 points, 123 shots
Player B had one fewer game, so give him one more game at the pace he's had for himself, and Player B gets to this:
15 games, 55 goals, 16 assists, 71 points, 132 shots
In other words, these are two very, very similar seasons, right?
Who is Player A?
That would be Princeton's Jesse Hubbard in 1996. And what did that season get for Hubbard? Back in 1996, Hubbard was a unanimous first-team All-Ivy selection, the Ivy League Player of the Year and a first-team All-America.
The 53 goals he scored that year remain, by the way, the school single season record.
So who would be Player B? Who would have put up numbers that are very, very similar to Hubbard's best season (and numbers that definitely eclipse Hubbard's other seasons)?
Keep in mind that Jesse Hubbard was TigerBlog's pick as the No. 1 Princeton men's lacrosse player in TB's first 25 years with the program. Keep in mind that any objective ranking would put Hubbard among the 50 greatest college lacrosse players of all time. He's a member of the USILA Hall of Fame.
So yeah, who is Player B?
Gavin McBride, this year.
And what did McBride's season get for him? Honorable mention All-Ivy League.
Want some other information about McBride's season?
Well, how about some of these numbers:
* he leads Division I in goals scored and goals scored per game
* he has played 14 games this season and has five or more goals in six of them
* in his six Ivy League games, he had these goal totals: five, five, five, two, seven, five
* his 29 goals in six conference games is one off the all-time league record, held by another Hall-of-Fame and legendary player, Cornell's Mike French, in 1974 ... that's nineteen-seventy-four, or 43 years ago ... think of all the great players who played in the Ivy League the last 43 years who never came close to that number
So how did McBride end up as an honorable mention selection?
Well, the first thing you have to know is that this is an incredibly deep year for Ivy League attackmen.
It was already going to be that way anyway, with the return of the reigning Tewaaraton Trophy winner (Brown's Dylan Molloy) and another Tewaaraton finalist (Yale's Ben Reeves).
That was an Ivy League first.
Add to that last year's co-Rookie of the Year (Penn's Simon Mathias) and a second-team All-Ivy returnee from a year ago (Harvard's Morgan Cheek), and the field is even deeper.
And then there were the two incoming freshmen, Princeton's Michael Sowers and Cornell's Jeff Teat. They were supposed to make massive impacts on the league - and they did.
And there you have the six players who were first- and second-team on attack, ahead of McBride. First-team, for the record, was Sowers, Molloy and Reeves (who also was the Player of the Year).
Obviously none of the six has more goals than McBride. Three of them have more points (Sowers, Teat, Cheek).
For some reason, certain players just fly under the radar in terms of individual recognition. TigerBlog, though, has never seen a player get less individual recognition relative to his contributions than Gavin McBride.
There are a few reasons why. First, he had no goals or assists as a freshman, so he didn't build a reputation from Day 1. Second, he's played with offensive superstars like Mike MacDonald, Kip Orban, Ryan Ambler and now Sowers. Third, much of the attention for Princeton lacrosse has gone to his fellow senior Zach Currier.
The fourth - and most important - actually plays off the second. TB thinks McBride is penalized because he plays with Sowers. There is precedent for this, and actually it goes back to last year in the Ivy League.
This is actually the second straight year that the leading goal-scorer in the country was only an honorable mention All-Ivy selection. A year ago, it was Kylor Bellistri of Brown, who may have been undervalued because he played alongside Molloy.
It's all combined to make McBride the most underrated player in Division I, especially this year.
A year ago, McBride was the Ivy League player with the most goals who didn't make any of the All-Ivy teams. Last year, his 26 goals did not get him first- or second-team or even honorable mention. The same is true, by the way, of the year before that, when his 24 goals didn't earn him anything.
Beyond the All-Ivy teams, McBride was named Ivy Player of the Week only once this season, despite his six games of at least five goals. Ironically, the Ivy Player of the Week after McBride's seven-goal game against Harvard was Molloy.
Not every player could handle the personal slights as gracefully as McBride. TB is sure it must bother him on some level, but it doesn't slow him down. TB has absolutely no doubt that McBride would never have traded a spot in the Ivy tournament - which begins tomorrow for the second-seeded Tigers against third-seeded Brown at 3:30 at Yale - for first-team All-Ivy.
Ask him if he'd rather be first-team All-America or have Princeton in the NCAA tournament, and he wouldn't even flinch before saying the NCAA tournament.
Hey, it's possible all of this bothers TigerBlog more than it bothers McBride.
It's not a knock on any of the six attackmen who were voted ahead of him. Nor is it a knock on the coaches who did the voting.
It's more a statement on Gavin McBride's career.
McBride has the fourth-longest streak in Division I in consecutive games with at least one goal - 22 - and the 10th longest in consecutive games with at least one point - 42. That shows a remarkable consistency.
Of course, consistency is having one goal, two goals, two goals, one goal, five goals, one goal, two goals and so on. His brand of consistency this year has been to have five as many times as he doesn't.
That's absurd stuff.
Should McBride get two goals against Brown, he'd tie Hubbard's single-season program record. Even if he doesn't, consider all of the great players who have played at Princeton. Think of all the All-Americas, NCAA champs, all-time greats.
Only two have gotten to 50 goals in a season. Jesse Hubbard and Gavin McBride.
Only 12 players have reached 100 goals at Princeton. The list is dominated by players who were three- and four-time first- or second-team selections.
And now Gavin McBride.
Maybe he's not a first-team All-Ivy pick. Maybe he's not a second-team pick.
What he is is an all-time great Princeton men's lacrosse player. And he's had an all-time great season, whatever label you want to assign to it.
He's also one of the main reasons the team is still playing into May this season.
Ultimately, that's all that really matters, right?
Not completely. Maybe it's explainable as to how he ended up as just an honorable mention selection.
Still, it does feel like he got shortchanged here.
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
Olivia And Julia
There's a plastic cup on the round desk in TigerBlog's office, opposite the desk at which TB sits.
He's not 100 percent sure who put it there. He knows he didn't.
He thinks it might be Luis Nicolao, the women's water polo coach. Luis stopped in yesterday and seemed a bit down.
It's understandable. You would be too if you'd coached Ashleigh Johnson for the last time.
Johnson's remarkable Princeton career ended this past weekend in the CWPA championship game, where the Tigers fell to Michigan 5-4. Johnson made 12 saves in her final game as a Princeton athlete and was, in her coach's word, "extraordinary."
With that, Luis became her former coach, not her current coach. It's how it works in college athletics.
The interesting thing is that Luis is not the only Princeton women's coach who will be feeling this way, though hopefully he will be the only one to leave a half-full cup of water on TB's other desk.
As far as women's athletes go, you can't really do much better than Princeton's Class of 2017. This has to be, by far, the class with the most great top-of-the-line women athletes Princeton has ever had.
Think about it.
There's Johnson, the Olympic gold medalist who came back to compete again for the Tigers. She is not the only one though.
There are any number of women athletes who are seniors who are either the best or clearly in the top handful of players their sport has ever seen here.
Just go sport-by-sport. You can see for yourself. It's an amazing group. Just wait until the von Kienbusch Award finalists are announced in the coming weeks.
He does want to mention two others besides Johnson, while he's at it now though.
The first is Olivia Hompe of the women's lacrosse team.
Hompe has had an extraordinary career and upped things her senior year. She enters this weekend's Ivy League tournament at Cornell with a Princeton lacrosse (men's or women's) season total of 60 goals, and she is tied for the program record (again, men's or women's) with 85 points this season.
Hompe has a minimum of two games left as a Tiger. Princeton takes on Penn in the Ivy League tournament Friday and even with a loss would still reach the NCAA tournament. Princeton, with wins in either tournament, would obviously play more games.
Hompe is trying to chase down some pretty long-standing records in Princeton lacrosse history. The longer a record stands, the more it seems daunting for someone to reach it.
Some Princeton records seem like they'll never be broken. Bill Bradley's for instance, have stood for more than 50 years. But hey, maybe one of these years someone will come along and score more than 2,503 points. TB doesn't think so, but maybe.
The current record for points in a career for a Princeton lacrosse player is 270, set by Crista Samaras, who graduated in 1999. Samaras also has 189 career goals, best ever at Princeton.
If you're wondering about the men's records, they are 1) 247 points (Kevin Lowe ’94) and 163 goals (Jesse Hubbard ’98) and 2) vulnerable, if Michael Sowers stays healthy for four years (TB will now knock on any and all wood substances anywhere near him).
By the way, Kevin Lowe wore No. 16 here from 1991-94 and then Jesse Hubbard wore it from 1995-98. That's a pretty good run for the No. 16.
Anyway, back at Hompe, she takes 260 points and 183 goals into the Ivy tournament. She is currently second in both, behind Samaras.
When Samaras graduated, she had a 50-point lead on the old record. Other than Hompe, no other player has come within 48 of Samaras in the nearly 20 years since, so it's possible that Samaras and Hompe will be 1-2 for a long time to come.
Then there's Julia Ratcliffe.
The greatest hammer thrower in Ivy League history - by a distance that probably is greater than she can throw the hammer. Ratcliffe has already been an NCAA champion and an NCAA runner-up, and she's a threat to win it again this year.
Ratcliffe won the women's hammer throw at the Penn Relays last weekend. This is not surprising.
TB wants to add two little notes to her win.
First, any of her four throws would have won the event, since her "worse" effort was better than anyone else's best.
Second, she has now won the Penn Relays collegiate hammer throw three times. You know who else has done that in the 123 year history of the Penn Relays?
Nobody. That's fairly impressive.
Oh, by the way, Olivia Hompe and Julia Ratcliffe both have nearly perfect GPAs.
Anyway, in a ridiculous year to be a great senior women's athlete at Princeton, these two are near the head of the class, in more ways than just their GPAs.
He's not 100 percent sure who put it there. He knows he didn't.
He thinks it might be Luis Nicolao, the women's water polo coach. Luis stopped in yesterday and seemed a bit down.
It's understandable. You would be too if you'd coached Ashleigh Johnson for the last time.
Johnson's remarkable Princeton career ended this past weekend in the CWPA championship game, where the Tigers fell to Michigan 5-4. Johnson made 12 saves in her final game as a Princeton athlete and was, in her coach's word, "extraordinary."
With that, Luis became her former coach, not her current coach. It's how it works in college athletics.
The interesting thing is that Luis is not the only Princeton women's coach who will be feeling this way, though hopefully he will be the only one to leave a half-full cup of water on TB's other desk.
As far as women's athletes go, you can't really do much better than Princeton's Class of 2017. This has to be, by far, the class with the most great top-of-the-line women athletes Princeton has ever had.
Think about it.
There's Johnson, the Olympic gold medalist who came back to compete again for the Tigers. She is not the only one though.
There are any number of women athletes who are seniors who are either the best or clearly in the top handful of players their sport has ever seen here.
Just go sport-by-sport. You can see for yourself. It's an amazing group. Just wait until the von Kienbusch Award finalists are announced in the coming weeks.
He does want to mention two others besides Johnson, while he's at it now though.
The first is Olivia Hompe of the women's lacrosse team.
Hompe has had an extraordinary career and upped things her senior year. She enters this weekend's Ivy League tournament at Cornell with a Princeton lacrosse (men's or women's) season total of 60 goals, and she is tied for the program record (again, men's or women's) with 85 points this season.
Hompe has a minimum of two games left as a Tiger. Princeton takes on Penn in the Ivy League tournament Friday and even with a loss would still reach the NCAA tournament. Princeton, with wins in either tournament, would obviously play more games.
Hompe is trying to chase down some pretty long-standing records in Princeton lacrosse history. The longer a record stands, the more it seems daunting for someone to reach it.
Some Princeton records seem like they'll never be broken. Bill Bradley's for instance, have stood for more than 50 years. But hey, maybe one of these years someone will come along and score more than 2,503 points. TB doesn't think so, but maybe.
The current record for points in a career for a Princeton lacrosse player is 270, set by Crista Samaras, who graduated in 1999. Samaras also has 189 career goals, best ever at Princeton.
If you're wondering about the men's records, they are 1) 247 points (Kevin Lowe ’94) and 163 goals (Jesse Hubbard ’98) and 2) vulnerable, if Michael Sowers stays healthy for four years (TB will now knock on any and all wood substances anywhere near him).
By the way, Kevin Lowe wore No. 16 here from 1991-94 and then Jesse Hubbard wore it from 1995-98. That's a pretty good run for the No. 16.
Anyway, back at Hompe, she takes 260 points and 183 goals into the Ivy tournament. She is currently second in both, behind Samaras.
When Samaras graduated, she had a 50-point lead on the old record. Other than Hompe, no other player has come within 48 of Samaras in the nearly 20 years since, so it's possible that Samaras and Hompe will be 1-2 for a long time to come.
Then there's Julia Ratcliffe.
The greatest hammer thrower in Ivy League history - by a distance that probably is greater than she can throw the hammer. Ratcliffe has already been an NCAA champion and an NCAA runner-up, and she's a threat to win it again this year.
Ratcliffe won the women's hammer throw at the Penn Relays last weekend. This is not surprising.
TB wants to add two little notes to her win.
First, any of her four throws would have won the event, since her "worse" effort was better than anyone else's best.
Second, she has now won the Penn Relays collegiate hammer throw three times. You know who else has done that in the 123 year history of the Penn Relays?
Nobody. That's fairly impressive.
Oh, by the way, Olivia Hompe and Julia Ratcliffe both have nearly perfect GPAs.
Anyway, in a ridiculous year to be a great senior women's athlete at Princeton, these two are near the head of the class, in more ways than just their GPAs.
Tuesday, May 2, 2017
What's On TV?
TigerBlog needs a new show.
Or at least the new seasons of some of his old ones.
Why is it that some shows just jump out at you from the first episode and others that are very similar just never click? How many times have you heard someone say that they couldn't get into one show or another when you loved it from the go, or the opposite, that they rave about a show that you never got past the first few episodes.
Here's a short list of shows that TB couldn't get into, for whatever reason:
"Mad Men"
"Game of Thrones"
"The Walking Dead"
"The Wire"
"Friday Night Lights"
The list could go on and on. But hey, those are some of the most popular shows of the last few years, and TB never got past the first episode or two - or even less than one.
And have you ever tried to get into a new show? Netflix and Amazon have become what the video store used to be. Instead of walking around stacks and stacks of movies trying to pick one, it's scrolling through rows and rows of shows, never knowing which one might be a good one to try out.
Then you finally settle on one and it does nothing for you.
The concept of the video store seems like a quaint one now. For a few years, they were everywhere. You'd walk in, walk around the aisles, see all these movies you always meant to watch but never went to and then finally circle back to one. You'd pick up the box, take it to the check out counter, get popcorn, go home - and then immediately wonder why you even considered for a second that this would be a good movie.
Seriously. If you got one good movie in 10 tries, that was a good average. At least these days, you can try out a show, give up in five minutes and try another one - all without ever leaving your couch.
Viewing habits evolve all the time. If TB had to use a word to describe it, he would use "impatient." People want to see what they want to see immediately. That's where the whole "binge-watching" concept originates.
Who wants to watch a show that's on once a week at a set time? Just release the whole season, and people will watch it whenever they want.
Maybe the place this has most exploded, thanks to social media, is in watching sports highlights. Certainly that's how TB thinks.
He watches very little sports on television. He's said this before, but he definitely watches more streamed college sports than he does live professional sports. He would much rather see the highlight of the game-winning shot of an NBA game on social media than he would watch the entire game.
He hasn't watched any of the NBA playoffs. He's watched a little NHL hockey, mostly Ottawa, as he continues to root for Mike Condon to get a Stanley Cup ring. And bring the Stanley Cup to Princeton.
But hey he's getting way ahead of things there.
The NBA playoffs won't end until June. The NHL will probably run that late too, right?
For now, TB will focus on the coming weekend of college sports, especially - but not limited to - Princeton.
This coming weekend features, among other things, the Ivy League men's and women's lacrosse tournaments, Heptagonal track and field and the Ivy League softball championship series. Princeton will be heavily involved in all of those.
The women's lax tournament, as TB said yesterday, is at Cornell. The men are at Yale, as is the track meet. And a forecast of rain.
The softball championships are right here at Princeton.
The matchup will be the champion of the South Division, Princeton, against the North Division champ, Harvard. It's a rematch of last year's series at Harvard, which Princeton won in three games.
For the winner, there will be the Ivy League championship and a spot in the NCAA regionals.
Princeton swept Harvard in Cambridge earlier this season. A year ago, the teams split during the regular season. TB is pretty sure he can go back and find years where a team that swept during the regular season got swept in the championship series.
Princeton sprinted away from the South Division to earn its spot in the series. Harvard did it the hard way, sweeping Dartmouth in the final weekend to win its side.
Princeton has a team batting average of .304, making the Tigers the only team in the league above .300 as a team. Harvard is second in the league in ERA, at .370. Princeton ranks fifth in pitching; Harvard ranks sixth in hitting.
The teams do rank 1-2 in the league in fielding.
What do the stats suggest? Nothing.
Lisa Van Ackeren, in her fifth year as Princeton head coach, has done a great job with the program. The Tigers had not won a South Division since 2008; now the team has won two in two years.
Van Ackeren is one of the easiest coaches here to work with, and one of the easiest to root for. Actually, TB hasn't spent much time around the softball team, but from what he sees, they're a close group, from the coaching staff through the players. They all seem easy to root for.
This weekend, with an Ivy title at stake against a big rival, it's even easier.
Or at least the new seasons of some of his old ones.
Why is it that some shows just jump out at you from the first episode and others that are very similar just never click? How many times have you heard someone say that they couldn't get into one show or another when you loved it from the go, or the opposite, that they rave about a show that you never got past the first few episodes.
Here's a short list of shows that TB couldn't get into, for whatever reason:
"Mad Men"
"Game of Thrones"
"The Walking Dead"
"The Wire"
"Friday Night Lights"
The list could go on and on. But hey, those are some of the most popular shows of the last few years, and TB never got past the first episode or two - or even less than one.
And have you ever tried to get into a new show? Netflix and Amazon have become what the video store used to be. Instead of walking around stacks and stacks of movies trying to pick one, it's scrolling through rows and rows of shows, never knowing which one might be a good one to try out.
Then you finally settle on one and it does nothing for you.
The concept of the video store seems like a quaint one now. For a few years, they were everywhere. You'd walk in, walk around the aisles, see all these movies you always meant to watch but never went to and then finally circle back to one. You'd pick up the box, take it to the check out counter, get popcorn, go home - and then immediately wonder why you even considered for a second that this would be a good movie.
Seriously. If you got one good movie in 10 tries, that was a good average. At least these days, you can try out a show, give up in five minutes and try another one - all without ever leaving your couch.
Viewing habits evolve all the time. If TB had to use a word to describe it, he would use "impatient." People want to see what they want to see immediately. That's where the whole "binge-watching" concept originates.
Who wants to watch a show that's on once a week at a set time? Just release the whole season, and people will watch it whenever they want.
Maybe the place this has most exploded, thanks to social media, is in watching sports highlights. Certainly that's how TB thinks.
He watches very little sports on television. He's said this before, but he definitely watches more streamed college sports than he does live professional sports. He would much rather see the highlight of the game-winning shot of an NBA game on social media than he would watch the entire game.
He hasn't watched any of the NBA playoffs. He's watched a little NHL hockey, mostly Ottawa, as he continues to root for Mike Condon to get a Stanley Cup ring. And bring the Stanley Cup to Princeton.
But hey he's getting way ahead of things there.
The NBA playoffs won't end until June. The NHL will probably run that late too, right?
For now, TB will focus on the coming weekend of college sports, especially - but not limited to - Princeton.
This coming weekend features, among other things, the Ivy League men's and women's lacrosse tournaments, Heptagonal track and field and the Ivy League softball championship series. Princeton will be heavily involved in all of those.
The women's lax tournament, as TB said yesterday, is at Cornell. The men are at Yale, as is the track meet. And a forecast of rain.
The softball championships are right here at Princeton.
The matchup will be the champion of the South Division, Princeton, against the North Division champ, Harvard. It's a rematch of last year's series at Harvard, which Princeton won in three games.
For the winner, there will be the Ivy League championship and a spot in the NCAA regionals.
Princeton swept Harvard in Cambridge earlier this season. A year ago, the teams split during the regular season. TB is pretty sure he can go back and find years where a team that swept during the regular season got swept in the championship series.
Princeton sprinted away from the South Division to earn its spot in the series. Harvard did it the hard way, sweeping Dartmouth in the final weekend to win its side.
Princeton has a team batting average of .304, making the Tigers the only team in the league above .300 as a team. Harvard is second in the league in ERA, at .370. Princeton ranks fifth in pitching; Harvard ranks sixth in hitting.
The teams do rank 1-2 in the league in fielding.
What do the stats suggest? Nothing.
Lisa Van Ackeren, in her fifth year as Princeton head coach, has done a great job with the program. The Tigers had not won a South Division since 2008; now the team has won two in two years.
Van Ackeren is one of the easiest coaches here to work with, and one of the easiest to root for. Actually, TB hasn't spent much time around the softball team, but from what he sees, they're a close group, from the coaching staff through the players. They all seem easy to root for.
This weekend, with an Ivy title at stake against a big rival, it's even easier.
Monday, May 1, 2017
And That's Another Women's Lacrosse Title
TigerBlog has been to Skillman Park, a little north of Princeton, a bunch of times in the last year.
It's almost always fairly deserted. It's one of his favorites things about the place.
It was a bit different yesterday morning, when he set out for a bike ride and instead stumbled onto a 5K race in the park. It was wall-to-wall people.
TB still isn't sure how he managed to find John McPhee, who was supposed to meet him in their regular parking lot, which was blocked off by cones and police cars. Eventually he did.
Mr. McPhee offered a secondary location to ride. This one was in the hills of Hunterdon County, and this one was a tad arduous. Like all kinds of hills.
TigerBlog did learn something though. When you're pedaling up hills, you should shift the gears all the way down, not up. It did make the hills easier.
At some point, someone pedaled past them heading up the steepest upgrade. It was like he was on a motorcycle, only he wasn't. TB was about 25 yards behind Mr. McPhee, who seemed startled at the thought that it could possibly have been TB who zoomed by him.
Mr. McPhee turned back around and said something that TB could barely hear. He surmises it was something like: "What was I thinking; it couldn't have been you."
TigerBlog also learned how the Sourland Mountain formed, from a lake that used to run from New York City to Reading, Pa., about 250,000,000 years ago. It was fairly fascinating.
Speaking of fascinating, TigerBlog watched the last two episodes of "13 Reasons Why" yesterday. Up until about two weeks ago, he'd never even heard of it.
When he first heard the title, he thought it was a Netflix light comedy. Boy was he wrong.
The show "13 Reasons Why" tells the story of the fictional Hannah Baker, a high school student who commits suicide and leaves 13 cassette tapes explaining why she did - and who drove her to it.
This show is beyond intense. It's scary. It's thought-provoking. It's frightening. And it's graphic.
TigerBlog would say that this show is a must-see for anyone who has children whose ages end in "teen," or will in the next few years. Your reaction will be "no way, not my kid," but pay close attention anyway.
TB wasn't wild about the last five minutes of the last episode. Still, the entirety of the 13 episodes is designed to make you ask a lot of questions, many of which have no answers.
He's not making light of the serious issues raised when he says that after it was over, he needed to see something very breezy to get past the shock of the last two episodes. Fortunately he stumbled onto two episodes of "Gilmore Girls." Seriously. That's how gripping the show is.
So that was yesterday.
As for Saturday, TigerBlog was at Schoellkopf Field for the men's lacrosse team's 18-17 loss to Cornell.
That game was the second game of a doubleheader. The first one was Cornell-Harvard women's lacrosse.
Cornell defeated the Crimson 13-6, clinching a share of the Ivy League title. Back on the Princeton campus, the Tigers were clinching their share as well, by virtue of an 18-11 win over Columbia. For Princeton it was the fourth straight year that the women's lacrosse team has won at least a share of the Ivy championship.
Because of the Penn Relays, the game between Penn and Yale was moved to Sunday, and the number of champions - and the host role for the upcoming Ivy tournament - depending on the outcome of that game.
Penn would do what it figured to do, which was to defeat the Bulldogs 18-7, earning itself a share of what becomes a three-way tie for the championship.
Princeton, Penn and Cornell are all 1-1 against each other and 5-0 against the rest of the league. The tiebreaker in that situation became goal-differential in the head-to-head meetings, which favored Cornell and makes the Big Red the host.
That left Princeton and Penn to beak the tie for second, which matters only for which team will wear its home uniforms in the semifinal. In this case, that'll be Penn, who beat Princeton during the regular season.
Harvard is the fourth team in the tournament, in a season in which the Crimson went 4-0 against the rest of the league and 0-3 against the other three.
As for the top three teams, they went a combined 15-0 against the rest of the league, outscoring them 191-98.
Beginning Friday in Ithaca, it'll be Princeton-Penn and, for the second time in six days, Harvard-Cornell. The final is Sunday at 11 a.m., and the winner will get an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament. Princeton, Penn and Cornell - who have been ranked in or near the top 10 all season - should all be in the NCAAs, regardless of who wins this weekend.
Princeton is a team that will be a very tough out in a few weeks. The Tigers have a first-team All-America goalie in Ellie DeGarmo and a really good balance on offense and defense. They have played a brutal schedule and have done very well. They have a lot of postseason experience.
Olivia Hompe has already set the Princeton single-season record with 60 goals. That's the most ever by a Princeton player, male or female.
In fact, in Princeton lacrosse history, there have been 10 seasons in which a player has had 50 or more goals. Of those 10 seasons, eight have been by women's players. The two men's players, by the way, are Jesse Hubbard, who had 53 goals in 1996, and Gavin McBride, who has 51 goals this year.
McBride has had at least five goals in a game six times this year. Hompe has done it seven times.
Both players will get to add to their totals this weekend in the Ivy tournament. The men will be at Yale, playing Brown in the semifinals Friday.
Yale will be the fifth different host for the men's tournament. Cornell will be the third different host for the women's.
Princeton could still be at home for the NCAA women's tournament should it get two wins this weekend.
Home or away, though, it doesn't matter.
The fun part of the season is here for Princeton.
It's almost always fairly deserted. It's one of his favorites things about the place.
It was a bit different yesterday morning, when he set out for a bike ride and instead stumbled onto a 5K race in the park. It was wall-to-wall people.
TB still isn't sure how he managed to find John McPhee, who was supposed to meet him in their regular parking lot, which was blocked off by cones and police cars. Eventually he did.
Mr. McPhee offered a secondary location to ride. This one was in the hills of Hunterdon County, and this one was a tad arduous. Like all kinds of hills.
TigerBlog did learn something though. When you're pedaling up hills, you should shift the gears all the way down, not up. It did make the hills easier.
At some point, someone pedaled past them heading up the steepest upgrade. It was like he was on a motorcycle, only he wasn't. TB was about 25 yards behind Mr. McPhee, who seemed startled at the thought that it could possibly have been TB who zoomed by him.
Mr. McPhee turned back around and said something that TB could barely hear. He surmises it was something like: "What was I thinking; it couldn't have been you."
TigerBlog also learned how the Sourland Mountain formed, from a lake that used to run from New York City to Reading, Pa., about 250,000,000 years ago. It was fairly fascinating.
Speaking of fascinating, TigerBlog watched the last two episodes of "13 Reasons Why" yesterday. Up until about two weeks ago, he'd never even heard of it.
When he first heard the title, he thought it was a Netflix light comedy. Boy was he wrong.
The show "13 Reasons Why" tells the story of the fictional Hannah Baker, a high school student who commits suicide and leaves 13 cassette tapes explaining why she did - and who drove her to it.
This show is beyond intense. It's scary. It's thought-provoking. It's frightening. And it's graphic.
TigerBlog would say that this show is a must-see for anyone who has children whose ages end in "teen," or will in the next few years. Your reaction will be "no way, not my kid," but pay close attention anyway.
TB wasn't wild about the last five minutes of the last episode. Still, the entirety of the 13 episodes is designed to make you ask a lot of questions, many of which have no answers.
He's not making light of the serious issues raised when he says that after it was over, he needed to see something very breezy to get past the shock of the last two episodes. Fortunately he stumbled onto two episodes of "Gilmore Girls." Seriously. That's how gripping the show is.
So that was yesterday.
As for Saturday, TigerBlog was at Schoellkopf Field for the men's lacrosse team's 18-17 loss to Cornell.
That game was the second game of a doubleheader. The first one was Cornell-Harvard women's lacrosse.
Cornell defeated the Crimson 13-6, clinching a share of the Ivy League title. Back on the Princeton campus, the Tigers were clinching their share as well, by virtue of an 18-11 win over Columbia. For Princeton it was the fourth straight year that the women's lacrosse team has won at least a share of the Ivy championship.
Because of the Penn Relays, the game between Penn and Yale was moved to Sunday, and the number of champions - and the host role for the upcoming Ivy tournament - depending on the outcome of that game.
Penn would do what it figured to do, which was to defeat the Bulldogs 18-7, earning itself a share of what becomes a three-way tie for the championship.
Princeton, Penn and Cornell are all 1-1 against each other and 5-0 against the rest of the league. The tiebreaker in that situation became goal-differential in the head-to-head meetings, which favored Cornell and makes the Big Red the host.
That left Princeton and Penn to beak the tie for second, which matters only for which team will wear its home uniforms in the semifinal. In this case, that'll be Penn, who beat Princeton during the regular season.
Harvard is the fourth team in the tournament, in a season in which the Crimson went 4-0 against the rest of the league and 0-3 against the other three.
As for the top three teams, they went a combined 15-0 against the rest of the league, outscoring them 191-98.
Beginning Friday in Ithaca, it'll be Princeton-Penn and, for the second time in six days, Harvard-Cornell. The final is Sunday at 11 a.m., and the winner will get an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament. Princeton, Penn and Cornell - who have been ranked in or near the top 10 all season - should all be in the NCAAs, regardless of who wins this weekend.
Princeton is a team that will be a very tough out in a few weeks. The Tigers have a first-team All-America goalie in Ellie DeGarmo and a really good balance on offense and defense. They have played a brutal schedule and have done very well. They have a lot of postseason experience.
Olivia Hompe has already set the Princeton single-season record with 60 goals. That's the most ever by a Princeton player, male or female.
In fact, in Princeton lacrosse history, there have been 10 seasons in which a player has had 50 or more goals. Of those 10 seasons, eight have been by women's players. The two men's players, by the way, are Jesse Hubbard, who had 53 goals in 1996, and Gavin McBride, who has 51 goals this year.
McBride has had at least five goals in a game six times this year. Hompe has done it seven times.
Both players will get to add to their totals this weekend in the Ivy tournament. The men will be at Yale, playing Brown in the semifinals Friday.
Yale will be the fifth different host for the men's tournament. Cornell will be the third different host for the women's.
Princeton could still be at home for the NCAA women's tournament should it get two wins this weekend.
Home or away, though, it doesn't matter.
The fun part of the season is here for Princeton.
Friday, April 28, 2017
Connor Fletcher, And The Rest Of The Weekend
TigerBlog actually has a CD player in his car. This is good, because he still has one CD.
It's actually a four-disc set of a live performance by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. TB listens to it over and over, usually, except for when he needs a break.
That happened yesterday, when he popped out the CD. When he did, the radio came on, a classic rock station, and here is what TB heard:
"From your front porch to my front seat. The door's open but the ride ain't free. And I know you're lonely for words that I ain't spoke ..."
Yup, it was The Boss again. This time, it was the studio version of "Thunder Road."
If you're a long-time reader, you know that "Thunder Road" is one of TB's two favorite songs of all time. The other? "Born to Run," of course.
He has no idea how many times he's heard the two songs. It's in the thousands. Lots of thousands.
TB wishes he could go back to when he first heard those two songs and remember what he thought. He thinks that about a lot of things.
He doesn't have to wonder about what he thought when he first saw Connor Fletcher play lacrosse.
Here is the scouting report on Fletcher, a Cornell freshman:
"Great natural athlete. Hard shot. Very good stick. Sees the field very well. Has a high lacrosse IQ."
Is that from the Princeton's men's lacrosse handout, in advance of the game tomorrow in Ithaca? Nah.
That was TB's report on Connor, back when TB had to do a review of each player he coached on the Lower Bucks Lacrosse 5th/6th grade team. This was back in 2009, by the way. Don't ask TB why he still has it on his computer. Don't ask him why he still has the stats from that season too.
TigerBlog actually first coached Connor Fletcher when Connor was in third grade and TigerBlog Jr. was in fourth. Connor's father Dan - an orthopedic surgeon, he was Dr. Dan to all of LBL - and TigerBlog coached a team together, which TBJ wanted to call the Lizards, after the Major League Lacrosse franchise.
In that season, TB put Connor on defense for the big games. It was Connor who wiped out Michael Major in a huge in-house LBL game that year; Michael now plays for St. Joe's.
In fact, the 5th/6th grade team that Connor and TBJ played on actually had seven players who would go on to play college lacrosse, one who would play college football and one who would be a college swimmer.
Connor, one of TB's favorite kids from Day 1, would go from Lower Bucks Lacrosse to Princeton Day School for high school. He would also go from being an average size third-grader to a giant, as he stands 6-3 and weighs in at 225.
In any other year, Connor would be in the running for Ivy League Rookie of the Year, with his 22 goals and nine assists, which rank him second on the Big Red in scoring. In fact, Princeton's last three Ivy Rookies of the Year averaged 33 points as freshmen, which leaves Connor two short of matching that in tomorrow's game.
This, though, is not any other year for Ivy League freshmen men's lacrosse players, not with Princeton's Michael Sowers (70 points, the Ivy League record for a freshman) and Cornell's Jeff Teat (60 points, third-best by an Ivy freshman).
The men's lacrosse game is a matchup of the two historic powers of Ivy League lacrosse. Between them, they've won 56 league championships; no other team has more than 10.
This weekend is an interesting one for Princeton Athletics. It's the end of the regular season for a few sports, three of whom have intriguing games this weekend but have their eyes firmly on the huge events of the coming weeks.
There's also postseason for women's water polo, who starts the CWPA playoffs at the University of Indiana as the second seed, taking on seventh-seeded Bucknell today. The top seed is Michigan.
Keep in mind, the end of this season will mark the end of the legendary career of Ashleigh Johnson, and the games this weekend begin a run of elimination games.
Both lacrosse teams are still hoping to get a share of the Ivy League championship - and yet both are firmly focused on the upcoming Ivy League and NCAA tournaments.
No matter what happens in the game at Cornell, the men's lacrosse team will be the No. 2 seed and play No. 3 Brown in the Ivy League tournament at Yale next Friday. Yale will be the top seed, and Penn will be the four.
The Tigers could get a share of the Ivy title, with a win over Cornell and a Yale loss to Harvard.
As for the women, they are home against Columbia at 1 tomorrow. A win in that game assures Princeton of at least a share of the Ivy League championship.
Right now the Tigers are tied with Cornell and Penn at 5-1 in the league. Each has a win and loss against the other, and each would get at least a share with a win tomorrow, when Penn plays Yale and Cornell plays Harvard. Princeton, Cornell and Penn are all in the Ivy League tournament, as is Harvard.
The question is where will the tournament be. The answer is Cornell if the Big Red win, Princeton if the Tigers win and Cornell and Penn both lose and Penn if Penn wins and Cornell loses.
Going further, a Cornell win assures that it'll be Princeton-Penn in the first round. If you're wondering why, by the way, Cornell would win head to head against Penn with its win over the Quakers and in the event of a three-way tie with its better goal-differential in the games between the three. Princeton would get the top seed with a two-tie with only Cornell, whom the Tigers beat a week ago.
Also, having said all that, all three teams are pretty much locks for the NCAA tournament.
The softball team ends the regular season this weekend too, with four games against Cornell. Princeton is assured the South Division championship and the spot in the Ivy League championship series that goes with it.
On the line this weekend are: 1) where the series will be and 2) who the opponent will be. Princeton would clinch the host role with two wins in four games this weekend, regardless of anything else.
As for the opponent, it'll be either Harvard, Dartmouth or Yale, and there could even be a three-way tie in the North Division, depending on how this weekend goes.
There is also rowing this weekend, with the heavyweights and women's open at home.
And of course there is the Penn Relays, which began yesterday and run through tomorrow in Philadelphia. Hey, the same is true of the NFL draft.
Did anyone else notice that?
It's actually a four-disc set of a live performance by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. TB listens to it over and over, usually, except for when he needs a break.
That happened yesterday, when he popped out the CD. When he did, the radio came on, a classic rock station, and here is what TB heard:
"From your front porch to my front seat. The door's open but the ride ain't free. And I know you're lonely for words that I ain't spoke ..."
Yup, it was The Boss again. This time, it was the studio version of "Thunder Road."
If you're a long-time reader, you know that "Thunder Road" is one of TB's two favorite songs of all time. The other? "Born to Run," of course.
He has no idea how many times he's heard the two songs. It's in the thousands. Lots of thousands.
TB wishes he could go back to when he first heard those two songs and remember what he thought. He thinks that about a lot of things.
He doesn't have to wonder about what he thought when he first saw Connor Fletcher play lacrosse.
Here is the scouting report on Fletcher, a Cornell freshman:
"Great natural athlete. Hard shot. Very good stick. Sees the field very well. Has a high lacrosse IQ."
Is that from the Princeton's men's lacrosse handout, in advance of the game tomorrow in Ithaca? Nah.
That was TB's report on Connor, back when TB had to do a review of each player he coached on the Lower Bucks Lacrosse 5th/6th grade team. This was back in 2009, by the way. Don't ask TB why he still has it on his computer. Don't ask him why he still has the stats from that season too.
TigerBlog actually first coached Connor Fletcher when Connor was in third grade and TigerBlog Jr. was in fourth. Connor's father Dan - an orthopedic surgeon, he was Dr. Dan to all of LBL - and TigerBlog coached a team together, which TBJ wanted to call the Lizards, after the Major League Lacrosse franchise.
In that season, TB put Connor on defense for the big games. It was Connor who wiped out Michael Major in a huge in-house LBL game that year; Michael now plays for St. Joe's.
In fact, the 5th/6th grade team that Connor and TBJ played on actually had seven players who would go on to play college lacrosse, one who would play college football and one who would be a college swimmer.
Connor, one of TB's favorite kids from Day 1, would go from Lower Bucks Lacrosse to Princeton Day School for high school. He would also go from being an average size third-grader to a giant, as he stands 6-3 and weighs in at 225.
In any other year, Connor would be in the running for Ivy League Rookie of the Year, with his 22 goals and nine assists, which rank him second on the Big Red in scoring. In fact, Princeton's last three Ivy Rookies of the Year averaged 33 points as freshmen, which leaves Connor two short of matching that in tomorrow's game.
This, though, is not any other year for Ivy League freshmen men's lacrosse players, not with Princeton's Michael Sowers (70 points, the Ivy League record for a freshman) and Cornell's Jeff Teat (60 points, third-best by an Ivy freshman).
The men's lacrosse game is a matchup of the two historic powers of Ivy League lacrosse. Between them, they've won 56 league championships; no other team has more than 10.
This weekend is an interesting one for Princeton Athletics. It's the end of the regular season for a few sports, three of whom have intriguing games this weekend but have their eyes firmly on the huge events of the coming weeks.
There's also postseason for women's water polo, who starts the CWPA playoffs at the University of Indiana as the second seed, taking on seventh-seeded Bucknell today. The top seed is Michigan.
Keep in mind, the end of this season will mark the end of the legendary career of Ashleigh Johnson, and the games this weekend begin a run of elimination games.
Both lacrosse teams are still hoping to get a share of the Ivy League championship - and yet both are firmly focused on the upcoming Ivy League and NCAA tournaments.
No matter what happens in the game at Cornell, the men's lacrosse team will be the No. 2 seed and play No. 3 Brown in the Ivy League tournament at Yale next Friday. Yale will be the top seed, and Penn will be the four.
The Tigers could get a share of the Ivy title, with a win over Cornell and a Yale loss to Harvard.
As for the women, they are home against Columbia at 1 tomorrow. A win in that game assures Princeton of at least a share of the Ivy League championship.
Right now the Tigers are tied with Cornell and Penn at 5-1 in the league. Each has a win and loss against the other, and each would get at least a share with a win tomorrow, when Penn plays Yale and Cornell plays Harvard. Princeton, Cornell and Penn are all in the Ivy League tournament, as is Harvard.
The question is where will the tournament be. The answer is Cornell if the Big Red win, Princeton if the Tigers win and Cornell and Penn both lose and Penn if Penn wins and Cornell loses.
Going further, a Cornell win assures that it'll be Princeton-Penn in the first round. If you're wondering why, by the way, Cornell would win head to head against Penn with its win over the Quakers and in the event of a three-way tie with its better goal-differential in the games between the three. Princeton would get the top seed with a two-tie with only Cornell, whom the Tigers beat a week ago.
Also, having said all that, all three teams are pretty much locks for the NCAA tournament.
The softball team ends the regular season this weekend too, with four games against Cornell. Princeton is assured the South Division championship and the spot in the Ivy League championship series that goes with it.
On the line this weekend are: 1) where the series will be and 2) who the opponent will be. Princeton would clinch the host role with two wins in four games this weekend, regardless of anything else.
As for the opponent, it'll be either Harvard, Dartmouth or Yale, and there could even be a three-way tie in the North Division, depending on how this weekend goes.
There is also rowing this weekend, with the heavyweights and women's open at home.
And of course there is the Penn Relays, which began yesterday and run through tomorrow in Philadelphia. Hey, the same is true of the NFL draft.
Did anyone else notice that?
Thursday, April 27, 2017
Public Address
A crowd of 5,545 came to Jadwin Gym for a men's basketball game on the night of Dec. 9, 1999.
They were drawn, no doubt, as much by the promise of the new public address announcer, Bill Bromberg, as they were by the opponent, TCU. Princeton, by the way, would win in OT, 77-72, with double figure performances by three Tigers - TB will give you a few paragraphs to consider who they might have been.
As for Bromberg, that was Game No. 1 at Princeton. The men's lacrosse game against Harvard last weekend was Game No. 475 for Bromberg as a Princeton PA announcer.
He has at least one more this season to do, the women's lacrosse game Saturday against Columbia, which will take him to 476 for his Princeton career.
TigerBlog wishes he knew if this was some sort of record. He does know that next year, at some point during basketball season, Bromberg will reach 500 games as a PA announcer. That's a lot.
Bromberg came to Princeton from the Trenton Thunder minor league baseball team, and he was also doing Seton Hall basketball as well. The three Princeton players in double figures in his first game, by the way, were pretty good ones - Chris Young, Mason Rocca and Spencer Gloger. Interestingly, for wildly varied reasons, none of those three ever reached 1,000 career points at Princeton.
Meanwhile, back at Bromberg, he has done almost every men's basketball game since that first one more than 17 years ago. He added women's basketball and men's lacrosse in 2003 and women's lacrosse a year later.
He has been behind the mic for some of the coldest, most miserable nights you'd ever imagine for early-season lacrosse games. He has done doubleheaders in lacrosse and basketball, and he's done both sports on the same day in crossover seasons.
In fact, he's done at least one tripleheader, with men's lacrosse at noon, women's lacrosse at 3 and men's basketball at 6. That was back in 2014.
He's been the PA announcer for four men's basketball coaches, three men's lacrosse coaches, two women's basketball coaches and one women's lacrosse coach, not to mention several hundred athletes and even a few random football and hockey games.
Bromberg is not TigerBlog's favorite PA announcer of all time. Nope. TB is.
That game against TCU was the second home game of the 1999 season. The first was against Monmouth. TB is pretty sure he was the PA announcer for that game.
TigerBlog, in his time here, has been the PA announcer to various extents for men's and women's lacrosse, men's and women's basketball, both soccers and both hockeys. Mostly, he has spent the last 12 seasons as the football PA announcer here.
TB likes to do the PA at games. He likes doing radio also. Hey, maybe he just likes the sound of his own voice. You should hear him sing.
That, of course, is not the point.
TB's point is that he knows he's been the PA announcer for a lot of Princeton games. If he adds them all up, though, the total number probably doesn't come to 200. It probably doesn't even come to 150.
So what's the record for most games done as a PA announcer here? TB wishes there was a way to look it up.
He doesn't really know the history of PA announcers around here, other than that Jeb Stuart's father was the football voice at Palmer Stadium for a long time. Still, TB can't imagine anyone has come close to the number of games that Bromberg has done.
For one thing, there were no women's sports for a long time. He's done games of men and women.
Maybe he has a little too much, uh, personality for TB, who likes to be an unobtrusive complement to the games. Bromberg's whole "by rule" thing after the first media timeout of the second half isn't quite TB's taste, but hey, it works for him.
And, as TB has said before, Bromberg is great at improvising during the promotions during the game, especially the ones at basketball that involve kids.
What Bromberg is as a PA announcer is "welcoming." Everything he does says "hey, thanks for coming, have fun, enjoy the game, come back again." That's just his personality. He's just at his core a good guy, a friendly guy, a loyal guy.
At some point, Bill will hang up his mic. Replacing him will not be easy, when the time comes.
Do you know how hard is would be to find someone to do all four of those sports? TigerBlog doesn't even have to send Bill the schedule each year. He just goes to the webpage and then lets TB know if there is a game or two he can't make.
And then he shows up. Time changes? Bad weather? Odd start times? Doesn't matter.
He's always there, no need to remind him.
TB spoke to Bill the other day. He thanked TB again for the opportunity to work here, as he always does.
He also mentioned the announcement he'd made during the men's lacrosse game the other day, when Michael Sowers broke the Ivy League freshman scoring record. Bill was really happy with it - not because of anything to do with him but instead because of the loud ovation the crowd gave to Sowers.
Then he mentioned that Sowers seems like such a nice kid. He says that all the time about Princeton's athletes. If you asked him who his favorite Princeton athlete of all time is, he'd probably give you 100 names and still be going strong.
Mention his name to most of those athletes and they probably won't be able to tell you who he is, but that's okay. He has no ego problem. The games aren't about him.
He just happens to be a big part of them, and has been for nearly 20 years, and closing in on a remarkable 500 games.
The game against TCU in 1999?
It was the start of a beautiful friendship.
They were drawn, no doubt, as much by the promise of the new public address announcer, Bill Bromberg, as they were by the opponent, TCU. Princeton, by the way, would win in OT, 77-72, with double figure performances by three Tigers - TB will give you a few paragraphs to consider who they might have been.
As for Bromberg, that was Game No. 1 at Princeton. The men's lacrosse game against Harvard last weekend was Game No. 475 for Bromberg as a Princeton PA announcer.
He has at least one more this season to do, the women's lacrosse game Saturday against Columbia, which will take him to 476 for his Princeton career.
TigerBlog wishes he knew if this was some sort of record. He does know that next year, at some point during basketball season, Bromberg will reach 500 games as a PA announcer. That's a lot.
Bromberg came to Princeton from the Trenton Thunder minor league baseball team, and he was also doing Seton Hall basketball as well. The three Princeton players in double figures in his first game, by the way, were pretty good ones - Chris Young, Mason Rocca and Spencer Gloger. Interestingly, for wildly varied reasons, none of those three ever reached 1,000 career points at Princeton.
Meanwhile, back at Bromberg, he has done almost every men's basketball game since that first one more than 17 years ago. He added women's basketball and men's lacrosse in 2003 and women's lacrosse a year later.
He has been behind the mic for some of the coldest, most miserable nights you'd ever imagine for early-season lacrosse games. He has done doubleheaders in lacrosse and basketball, and he's done both sports on the same day in crossover seasons.
In fact, he's done at least one tripleheader, with men's lacrosse at noon, women's lacrosse at 3 and men's basketball at 6. That was back in 2014.
He's been the PA announcer for four men's basketball coaches, three men's lacrosse coaches, two women's basketball coaches and one women's lacrosse coach, not to mention several hundred athletes and even a few random football and hockey games.
Bromberg is not TigerBlog's favorite PA announcer of all time. Nope. TB is.
That game against TCU was the second home game of the 1999 season. The first was against Monmouth. TB is pretty sure he was the PA announcer for that game.
TigerBlog, in his time here, has been the PA announcer to various extents for men's and women's lacrosse, men's and women's basketball, both soccers and both hockeys. Mostly, he has spent the last 12 seasons as the football PA announcer here.
TB likes to do the PA at games. He likes doing radio also. Hey, maybe he just likes the sound of his own voice. You should hear him sing.
That, of course, is not the point.
TB's point is that he knows he's been the PA announcer for a lot of Princeton games. If he adds them all up, though, the total number probably doesn't come to 200. It probably doesn't even come to 150.
So what's the record for most games done as a PA announcer here? TB wishes there was a way to look it up.
He doesn't really know the history of PA announcers around here, other than that Jeb Stuart's father was the football voice at Palmer Stadium for a long time. Still, TB can't imagine anyone has come close to the number of games that Bromberg has done.
For one thing, there were no women's sports for a long time. He's done games of men and women.
Maybe he has a little too much, uh, personality for TB, who likes to be an unobtrusive complement to the games. Bromberg's whole "by rule" thing after the first media timeout of the second half isn't quite TB's taste, but hey, it works for him.
And, as TB has said before, Bromberg is great at improvising during the promotions during the game, especially the ones at basketball that involve kids.
What Bromberg is as a PA announcer is "welcoming." Everything he does says "hey, thanks for coming, have fun, enjoy the game, come back again." That's just his personality. He's just at his core a good guy, a friendly guy, a loyal guy.
At some point, Bill will hang up his mic. Replacing him will not be easy, when the time comes.
Do you know how hard is would be to find someone to do all four of those sports? TigerBlog doesn't even have to send Bill the schedule each year. He just goes to the webpage and then lets TB know if there is a game or two he can't make.
And then he shows up. Time changes? Bad weather? Odd start times? Doesn't matter.
He's always there, no need to remind him.
TB spoke to Bill the other day. He thanked TB again for the opportunity to work here, as he always does.
He also mentioned the announcement he'd made during the men's lacrosse game the other day, when Michael Sowers broke the Ivy League freshman scoring record. Bill was really happy with it - not because of anything to do with him but instead because of the loud ovation the crowd gave to Sowers.
Then he mentioned that Sowers seems like such a nice kid. He says that all the time about Princeton's athletes. If you asked him who his favorite Princeton athlete of all time is, he'd probably give you 100 names and still be going strong.
Mention his name to most of those athletes and they probably won't be able to tell you who he is, but that's okay. He has no ego problem. The games aren't about him.
He just happens to be a big part of them, and has been for nearly 20 years, and closing in on a remarkable 500 games.
The game against TCU in 1999?
It was the start of a beautiful friendship.
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Pushing Denna
Miss TigerBlog had a school event last night. National Honor Society inductions, to be exact.
TB would tell his daughter afterwards that he was proud of her but that it was a really dull ceremony.
First of all, he had to sit way, way up top in the auditorium, which is divided into three tiers. He was in the upper one, completely out of sight of anything other than the stage, whereas the inductees were in the first few rows of the orchestra section.
Also, the microphone at the podium barely worked, so it was next to impossible to hear the speakers.
So from where TB was sitting, he couldn't see or hear the ceremony. What did he do?
He watched the Navy-Holy Cross Patriot League men's lacrosse quarterfinal game on his phone. Or at least the second half. If you're wondering, Holy Cross won 11-7.
TB is reasonably sure that his own parents did not do the same when he was inducted into the NHS all those years ago. Maybe MTB can pull off the double that TB did not: National Honor Society in high school, Phi Beta Kappa in college.
TigerBlog always loves to watch Navy teams play. It takes someone very special to go to a service academy to compete and be a student, and those athletes - and everyone there, actually - sacrifice a lot of what most people expect of their college experiences.
The game last night was played on Navy-Marine Corps Stadium. If you've ever been there, or seen a game there on TV or video, you know that the list of battles that the Navy and Marines have fought throughout their history are denoted on the walls around the field.
TB has been to games there. It's an incredibly poignant setting, knowing how many people who have played there sacrificed much more than their college experience. You can't help but be touched by it.
Speaking of being touched by athletes, TB has been meaning to mention the story from the Boston Marathon last week that hits home for Princeton Athletics.
This story is about the incredible effort of former NHL player Bobby Carpenter, who for 26.2 miles and more than four hours pushed Princeton alum Denna Laing in her wheelchair throughout the entire course. It looked impossibly hard to do, and yet there he was, mile after mile, running and pushing Denna.
This was an amazingly inspirational moment, courtesy of two extraordinary people.
Bobby Carpenter was the first American-born hockey player ever to be a first-round NHL draft pick. TigerBlog remembers that.
He also had a near-career-ending knee injury that was described in an NBC Sports piece as "dropping fine china on a cement floor and then trying to put it back together." Carpenter came back from that to play nearly another decade, winning a Stanley Cup with the Devils in 1994-95. He'd play 18 seasons in the NHL.
Denna Laing, as you remember, played hockey at Princeton and then in the professional women's outdoor league, where she suffered a spinal cord injury in the Women's Winter Classic 16 months ago.
Since then, she has shared with the world the remarkable story of her drive to walk again, and the way her injury has not dampened her spirits, not to mention her smile. Any time TB has seen her profiled since, he has done nothing but marvel at her zeal. Her drive makes him shake his head in wonderment.
Her rehab regimen has allowed her to regain use of her shoulders, arms and hands,which came in handy during the marathon, as she was waving and waving and waving to the crowds who cheered them on.
The connection was Laing's father, who had played hockey with Carpenter when they were younger. Laing and Carpenter didn't train together, and in fact the Marathon last week was only the third time he ran and pushed her. Before that, he trained by pushing a chair with sandbags on it, simulating Denna's weight.
Carpenter ran the Marathon a year ago, in a time of 3:46. This time, pushing Denna for the 26.2 miles, their time was 4:30. Can you imagine doing that for 4:30?
Hey, can you imagine the sight of the two of them as they reached the finish? Incredible.
The day after Denna's injury, Princeton's Mike Condon played one of the biggest games of his career in the Winter Classic, beating the Boston Bruins as the goalie for the Montreal Canadiens. During the 2015-16 season, Condon was the primary starter for Montreal, as regular starter Carey Price missed basically the entire season, and Condon played very well, especially considering he was basically being thrown to the wolves.
This year, Condon has been on the Ottawa Senators, except for one game early in the season for the Penguins. Condon has started much of the season as Ottawa's usual starter, Craig Anderson, had been out caring for his wife during her battle with cancer.
Condon had a really good year for the Senators, and he has done a lot to establish himself as a legitimate NHL goalie. For now, though, he is Anderson's backup for the playoffs.
Ottawa defeated Boston in the first round in six games, all of which were played by Anderson. Maybe Condon will get in at some point.
Next up for Ottawa is the Rangers, who knocked off Montreal, also in six games. TB will be rooting for Ottawa, just as he did in the first round. He's never been a fan of the Bruins or the Rangers, and it would be great to see Condon get a Stanley Cup ring so early in his career.
Condon is very easy to root for, an underdog who is trying to make his way, and who is a Princeton alum to boot.
And then there's Denna Laing. And Bobby Carpenter.
What can TB say about them, other than just wow.
TB would tell his daughter afterwards that he was proud of her but that it was a really dull ceremony.
First of all, he had to sit way, way up top in the auditorium, which is divided into three tiers. He was in the upper one, completely out of sight of anything other than the stage, whereas the inductees were in the first few rows of the orchestra section.
Also, the microphone at the podium barely worked, so it was next to impossible to hear the speakers.
So from where TB was sitting, he couldn't see or hear the ceremony. What did he do?
He watched the Navy-Holy Cross Patriot League men's lacrosse quarterfinal game on his phone. Or at least the second half. If you're wondering, Holy Cross won 11-7.
TB is reasonably sure that his own parents did not do the same when he was inducted into the NHS all those years ago. Maybe MTB can pull off the double that TB did not: National Honor Society in high school, Phi Beta Kappa in college.
TigerBlog always loves to watch Navy teams play. It takes someone very special to go to a service academy to compete and be a student, and those athletes - and everyone there, actually - sacrifice a lot of what most people expect of their college experiences.
The game last night was played on Navy-Marine Corps Stadium. If you've ever been there, or seen a game there on TV or video, you know that the list of battles that the Navy and Marines have fought throughout their history are denoted on the walls around the field.
TB has been to games there. It's an incredibly poignant setting, knowing how many people who have played there sacrificed much more than their college experience. You can't help but be touched by it.
Speaking of being touched by athletes, TB has been meaning to mention the story from the Boston Marathon last week that hits home for Princeton Athletics.
This story is about the incredible effort of former NHL player Bobby Carpenter, who for 26.2 miles and more than four hours pushed Princeton alum Denna Laing in her wheelchair throughout the entire course. It looked impossibly hard to do, and yet there he was, mile after mile, running and pushing Denna.
This was an amazingly inspirational moment, courtesy of two extraordinary people.
Bobby Carpenter was the first American-born hockey player ever to be a first-round NHL draft pick. TigerBlog remembers that.
He also had a near-career-ending knee injury that was described in an NBC Sports piece as "dropping fine china on a cement floor and then trying to put it back together." Carpenter came back from that to play nearly another decade, winning a Stanley Cup with the Devils in 1994-95. He'd play 18 seasons in the NHL.
Denna Laing, as you remember, played hockey at Princeton and then in the professional women's outdoor league, where she suffered a spinal cord injury in the Women's Winter Classic 16 months ago.
Since then, she has shared with the world the remarkable story of her drive to walk again, and the way her injury has not dampened her spirits, not to mention her smile. Any time TB has seen her profiled since, he has done nothing but marvel at her zeal. Her drive makes him shake his head in wonderment.
Her rehab regimen has allowed her to regain use of her shoulders, arms and hands,which came in handy during the marathon, as she was waving and waving and waving to the crowds who cheered them on.
The connection was Laing's father, who had played hockey with Carpenter when they were younger. Laing and Carpenter didn't train together, and in fact the Marathon last week was only the third time he ran and pushed her. Before that, he trained by pushing a chair with sandbags on it, simulating Denna's weight.
Carpenter ran the Marathon a year ago, in a time of 3:46. This time, pushing Denna for the 26.2 miles, their time was 4:30. Can you imagine doing that for 4:30?
Hey, can you imagine the sight of the two of them as they reached the finish? Incredible.
The day after Denna's injury, Princeton's Mike Condon played one of the biggest games of his career in the Winter Classic, beating the Boston Bruins as the goalie for the Montreal Canadiens. During the 2015-16 season, Condon was the primary starter for Montreal, as regular starter Carey Price missed basically the entire season, and Condon played very well, especially considering he was basically being thrown to the wolves.
This year, Condon has been on the Ottawa Senators, except for one game early in the season for the Penguins. Condon has started much of the season as Ottawa's usual starter, Craig Anderson, had been out caring for his wife during her battle with cancer.
Condon had a really good year for the Senators, and he has done a lot to establish himself as a legitimate NHL goalie. For now, though, he is Anderson's backup for the playoffs.
Ottawa defeated Boston in the first round in six games, all of which were played by Anderson. Maybe Condon will get in at some point.
Next up for Ottawa is the Rangers, who knocked off Montreal, also in six games. TB will be rooting for Ottawa, just as he did in the first round. He's never been a fan of the Bruins or the Rangers, and it would be great to see Condon get a Stanley Cup ring so early in his career.
Condon is very easy to root for, an underdog who is trying to make his way, and who is a Princeton alum to boot.
And then there's Denna Laing. And Bobby Carpenter.
What can TB say about them, other than just wow.
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