Sad News, A Happy Birthday Wish, And A Trip To Happy Valley

If you worked in the Department of Athletics at Princeton anywhere around 2010 or 2011, then this news will hit you hard:

Barnaby the dog has passed away. 

Losing a pet is not easy. In this case, the bond between pet and owner was so strong that anyone who knew them both had the same heartbroken reaction at the news. 

Barnaby was a rescue dog who was adopted by Scott Jurgens when he was the athletic department head  of marketing. You won't meet too many move lovable people in your life than Scott Jurgens.

Man's best friend? In this case, it was more than true. Scott and Barnaby were a duo. There was no Scott without his dog nearby. 

TB and Scott have stayed in touch through the years. Any picture that Scott ever sent along had Barnaby in it. They traveled together. Lived in a bunch of different parts of the country together. And now, at around 13 or so years old, Scott finally had to put Barnaby to sleep Tuesday. 

He sent this in a text to TB:

I had to say good bye this afternoon to my best friend Barnaby as he went over the Rainbow Bridge! I loved him so much but he is not in pain anymore and can chase squirrels and get up and bark at Amazon and UPS trucks as much as he wants to…

TB was immediately crushed. He told a few of the others who are here who knew Scott, and they had similar reactions, especially with an understanding of just how much Scott loved his dog. 

On the other side of the emotional spectrum, today is the birthday of Craig Sachson, who spent 19 years working in the Princeton Office of Athletic Communications, the first two as an intern and then, after two years at Cornell, the final 17 as the contact for something like 12 sports. 

 Since two of his sports were football and rowing, TigerBlog will say that nobody who has ever worked in Princeton athletic communications ever was the contact for more athletes than Craig was. This is unverifiable, but TB will say yes, it's probably true.

Craig's approach here was exactly what you'd want from someone who covered so many sports. He loved all his teams, and his enthusiasm for all of his sports was the same.

Yes, he spent way more time on football than squash, but he made sure that every squash athlete here during his time felt valued. Most importantly, everything he did enhanced the experience of the athletes on those teams.

Happy birthday to Craig. 

Meanwhile, back in the present of Princeton Athletics, there's a big game on the women's soccer schedule tonight. If you happen to be in Central Pennsylvania, you can see a matchup of teams who come into the game a combined 9-0-2.

Both teams are ranked sixth by the United Soccer Coaches. The host team, Penn State, is ranked sixth in Division I. Princeton, the visitor, is ranked sixth in the East Region poll. 

Interestingly, both teams have one tie to date, and both of those games were 0-0 finals. Penn State's came with second-ranked North Carolina. Princeton's was with Rutgers.

Penn State has one-goal wins over No. 16 TCU, as well as West Virginia and Central Florida. Princeton and Penn State have one common opponent, Monmouth, who both schools beat by three goals (the Tigers 3-0; Penn State 4-1).

Princeton's most recent game was a 4-3 win over Army-West Point Saturday in a game in which Tiger sophomore Pietra Tordin scored all four of the goals. A year ago, while winning the Ivy Rookie of the Year Award, Tordin scored eight goals; she has seven in four games so far this year. She leads Division in goals per game (1.75). 

Without looking, how many times do you think Princeton and Penn State have played in women's soccer? If you guessed three, you'd be right.

Three? That's it? 

TB was actually at the most recent, which was a 2-0 Penn State win over the Tigers in the first round of the 2002 NCAA tournament, in a game played at the University of Maryland. 

Remarkably, given the great histories that both programs have, this is the first time Princeton will ever play at Penn State. The other two games in the series were both in Princeton, back in the very, very early days of the program, 1980 and 1981. The teams split those games.

Tonight's game starts at 7:30 and can be seen on BTN+.

School Bell

It's possible that TigerBlog has never been more confused about what day of the week it's been than he has in the last few days. 

It started on Thursday morning, when he thought he'd forgotten to take the garbage cans to the curb, because he thought it was Friday, which is collection day. Why'd he think it was Thursday? Because he had a game to cover the next day, which made him think the next day was Saturday.

By Sunday, he was all confused. Then came a Monday holiday, which felt like Sunday. He also woke up Sunday thinking he'd forgotten to write an entry, before he realized that it was indeed Sunday and then the Monday holiday.

All day yesterday, of course, felt like a Monday, because it was the back-to-work day after the weekend. He even wrote "Monday TigerBlog" on his tweet and had to delete it and change it to Tuesday. It didn't help that he was writing yesterday about Jimmy Buffett and had the song "Come Monday" in his head, even though it wasn't Monday.

Today, TB is pretty sure, is Wednesday. Yesterday, he's positive, was the first day of classes at Princeton.

With the still relatively new academic calendar, classes at Princeton begin the Tuesday after Labor Day. If you didn't have access to a calendar, you'd have no trouble figuring it out if you simply drove down Washington Road from Nassau Street yesterday morning. 

As TB made his way towards Faculty Road, Washington Road was a sea of Princeton students on Day 1 of classes. It took him back to what the first day of classes was always like, which was a bit of uncertainty, a bit of excitement, a new syllabus, a renewal of the academic rigors of being a college student.

Just as there are friendships that form on athletic teams, there are also friendships that come from being in the same class, or classes, that endure forever. 

There are any number of Princeton freshman athletes who have played multiple games before taking a college class. 

One of them is Sydney Draper of the women's volleyball team, who was named the Ivy League Rookie of the Week after Princeton defeated Niagara and Bucknell 3-0 each at the Bison's tournament. Draper made the all-tournament team after leading Princeton with 66 assists and tied with another freshman, Sydney Bold, in digs with 21. 

The men's water polo team scored 32 goals this weekend to open its season, and four of those came from freshmen: three for Will Swart and one from Tigran Sennett. Kristof Kovacs, another freshman, started the 18-3 win over George Washington in goal.

Princeton had two freshmen who played every minute of its overtime loss to North Carolina in field hockey Sunday (Hope Delaney and Ottilie Sykes) and a third who started the overtime (Ella Cashman). Sykes has played every minute of both games so far.

As for sophomores, they probably can't figure out a good way to measure just how far ahead of where they were a year ago they are now. Juniors are relishing the fact that they are entrenched now in their Princeton experience but don't quite have to worry about a thesis yet. Seniors can't believe how fast the time has been going.

In the mid-afternoon yesterday, the marketing and communications staffs set up a backdrop outside Caldwell Field House and invited any athletes or coaches, or pretty much anyone who walked by, to hold the "First Day Of School" sign and get a picture taken. It's become a fun opening day of school tradition here.

And now it's a new semester. Princeton University has been educating students since 1746. It took 118 years after that to have the first intercollegiate athletic event. The school was first known as the College of New Jersey, until changing its name to Princeton University in 1896, which also means that it's still 23 years away from being called by its current name longer than its former one.

Ask any Princeton athlete why he or she chose to come here, and they will all say the same thing: It's the combination of athletics and academics. It's a true student-athlete experience, neither side of the hyphen more important than the other to the overall education, and the sum of them together are what it means to experience Education Through Athletics.

Good luck to all Princeton students this year, athletes and non-athletes. 

You're at a school that is not easy — but you made the right choice to come to it.

A Son Of A Son Of A Sailor

When TigerBlog saw the news that Jimmy Buffett had passed away, the first two people he thought of were his favorite Parrot Heads, his colleagues Kim Meszaros and Jon Kurian. 

He's not sure how many Buffett concerts they've been to, though he's fairly certain it's a high number. He texted both of them his condolences, and it's obvious that they, and pretty much every Buffett fan anywhere, were stunned by the news.

TigerBlog has never met anyone who didn't like Buffett's music. He's probably the only about whom TB can say that. 

His songs, like those of the Beach Boys, are the definition of summer happiness and fun. They're about growing older without any regrets. They're breezy songs that conjure up beaches, boats, oceans — and of course margaritas and cheesburgers in paradise. Wherever you are when you hear one of his songs, it's 5 o'clock.

TB's favorite Buffett song was probably "Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude." He found this line particularly relevant this weekend: 

Visions of good times that brought so much pleasure, makes me want to go back again.

That was Buffett. He created the good times that brought so much pleasure. TB is guessing anyone who ever saw one of his concerts wants to go back again.

As it turned out, by the way, Buffett died from a rare form of skin cancer. If you haven't been to a dermatologist in a while, or ever, schedule an appointment. 

He leaves behind so many great songs with so many great lyrics. His life was cut short, but he certainly left a mark on the world. 

As a tribute, TB will rely on some of Buffett's lyrics to talk about some Princeton Athletics happenings: 

* "Some people claim that there's a woman to blame."

If you were the Army-West Point women's soccer team, then there certainly was a woman to blame for your 4-3 loss to Princeton Saturday.

That woman was Pietra Tordin, who scored all four Princeton goals in the game. It was a performance that led to a great goprincetontigers.com headline by TB's colleague Andrew Borders: Pietra Four-Din.

Tordin scored a goal eight minutes into the game and then, after Princeton trailed 2-1, scored three straight in a 20-minute span of the second half.

Tordin became the sixth Princeton women's soccer player ever to score four goals in game, and the second to do so against Army-West Point, after Linda DeBoer did so in 1983. The other four are:  

Cheryl A. Terwilliger, vs. Franklin & Marshall, Sept. 20, 1989
Eleanor J. Platt, vs. Lehigh, Oct. 14, 1998
Vicki D. Anagnostopoulos, vs. Harvard, Oct. 21, 2006
Tyler T. Lussi, vs. Harvard, Oct. 25, 2014

* Where it all ends I can't fathom my friends, if I knew I might toss out my anchor."

Who knows how the field hockey season will end for Princeton. The Tigers are only two games into it, both of which were 2-1 losses. What came out of this weekend, though, was much more than an 0-2 start.

Princeton's two losses came to No. 9 Louisville and then No. 1 (and defending NCAA champion) North Carolina at the ACC/Ivy Crossover at Penn. The UNC loss came in overtime, when the Tar Heels converted a penalty stroke.

What did Princeton learn this weekend? First and foremost, this is a team top to bottom. Every healthy field player played in the UNC game, and there is no one true superstar in the group. 

Even more than that, this is a team that played incredibly hard, especially on the defensive end. With a top-notch goalie (Robyn Thompson, who made a career-high 10 saves against UNC) and an interchangeable group, this is a team that will 1) continue to get better and 2) will be very much in the hunt for the league's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament come the first Ivy tournament in November.

*  As a dreamer of dreams and a travelin' man, I have chalked up many a mile

The long, long season of distance of running at Princeton began with the inaugural Jersey Jam for the Princeton men's and women's cross country teams. The Tigers dominated both races, which featured in-state rivals Monmouth, Rider and Rutgers.

There are a lot of miles to go for the Tigers, and that's just to get to the end of the cross country season in November. Beyond that will be indoor and outdoor track and field. 

In fact, there will be plenty of miles to cover just to get to the Ivy Heptagonal championships on Oct. 28. This year's meet for both the women and men will be held in Boston, as opposed to at Princeton or New York City's Van Cortlandt Park.

* Oh, yesterdays are over my shoulder, so I can't look back for too long. There's just too much to see waiting in front of me.

The men's water polo team opened its season ranked in the top 10 nationally and then scored 32 goals in its first two games. This is a team that wants to finish this season where it did last year, which was in the NCAA tournament.

Of course, yesterdays are over their shoulder, so these Tigers need to keep looking ahead to see what's waiting in front of them. Up next is this weekend's Princeton Invitational, which will bring Cal Baptist, Santa Clara and Chapman to Princeton from California. Fordham, whom Princeton defeated in the opening round of the NCAA tournament last year, and Wagner will also be there. 

* And you can have the rest of everything I own 'cause I have found me a home. 

The men's soccer team started its season with two tough games, one against defending Big Ten champion Rutgers and then the second against third-ranked Duke. The Tigers came through that gauntlet 1-1, with a 2-1 win over the Scarlet Knights and then a 2-0 loss to the Blue Devils. 

It's a strong start for Princeton, with a young team that will continue to grow as the year goes along. The games, of course, were a showcase for the new Roberts Stadium, which is in Year 2 now and is just a great place to watch a game. 

* California has worn me quite thin; I just can't wait to see you again

The women's volleyball team has long had a home, and a great home at that. Tonight at 7 in Dillon Gym, the Tigers welcome in a visitor from the West Coast, Santa Clara. 

The Broncos are 5-1 on the year, with the lone loss to Villanova at the Wildcats' tournament over the weekend. 

Princeton opened its season this weekend with wins over Niagara and host Bucknell.

Attendance 92,003

If you didn't see any of the videos or pictures from the women's volleyball match at Nebraska Wednesday night, then you might want to go and check it out.

The occasion was an outdoor match between Nebraska and Omaha, held in Memorial Stadium. It's long been said that on football Saturdays, Memorial Stadium becomes the third largest city in Nebraska. 

If that's the case, then on Wednesday night, women's volleyball moved into No. 3 and dropped football to No. 4. 

It's actually the case, by the way. Capacity for Nebraska football is 85,000. The third-largest city in the state is Bellevue, with a population of 67,000.

In an effort to set a world record for the largest attendance ever at a women's sporting event, Nebraska added seats on the field. The previous record was 91,648, set in 2022 during a UEFA Women's Champions League soccer semifinal between Barcelona and Wolfsburg.

The match Wednesday night drew 92,003 fans. The scenes were extraordinary. Here's the post-match video from Nebraska:

A day we’ll never forget.⁰
Be proud Husker Nation, we just did that.

Good night and Go Big Red. pic.twitter.com/AtDGH7dpdc

— Nebraska Volleyball (@HuskerVB) August 31, 2023

TigerBlog saw a bunch of videos, including one where the team was walking through the stadium tunnel and then out onto the field. The players were trying to have on their game faces, but they were failing miserable. Instead, they were all smiles.

The largest crowd for a women's volleyball match prior to Wednesday, by the way, was 18,755, between Nebraska and Wisconsin in 2021. Nebraska has an active sell-out streak of 306 straight in the Devaney Center, which seats 7,909.

TB also read that 1) all of the seats for the match Wednesday night sold out in 48 hours in April and 2) the school canceled classes for the day to encourage students to attend.

The Princeton women's volleyball team will open its season in Bucknell's tournament this weekend. Attendance in Lewisburg might not approach what it was in Lincoln, but there aren't too many better atmospheres in the Ivy League than a packed Dillon Gym for Tiger volleyball.

TB wrote all summer about how the women's soccer team would open its season the last weekend in August and then seven more Princeton teams would kick it off one week later. He wrote this each Friday for the last six or so weeks, and as always, that time flew by.

The other teams who get going this weekend are:

*  the field hockey team, who plays Louisville today at 11 and North Carolina Sunday at 10:30 at Penn.

* the men's and women's cross country teams, who are hosting the Jersey Jame

* the men's soccer team, who hosts Rutgers tonight (7) and then Duke Monday (4)

* the women's rugby team, who is at Brown tomorrow

* the men's water polo team, who hosts an invitational. The Tigers take on LIU, a second-year program, tomorrow at 12 in their first match.

There is also home women's soccer tomorrow against Army. 

Each team has its storylines for 2023. 

The women's volleyball team is trying to get back into the Ivy tournament and then into the NCAA tournament, where perhaps it could get a chance at Nebraska. The soccer teams and field hockey teams are looking to get to the NCAA tournament via the first Ivy tournaments in those sports. 

The women's rugby team is trying to take a step forward in Year 2. The men's water polo team is trying to get back to where it ended last year, in the NCAA tournament. The men's and women's cross country teams are getting off to an early start on the long grueling road that is collegiate distance running, which goes through three seasons. 

Opening day for Ivy League football is two weeks from tomorrow. Autumn begins in three weeks. Classes at Princeton start Tuesday.

It's September already. September? No month seems to go by faster than August, right? One day in August is like six days in January. 

Where did the summer go?

Pressure Is A Privilege

Tonight is the start of a two-day Princeton-Rutgers soccer carnival on Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium.

It starts this evening at 7, when the women's teams play. Tomorrow night, also at 7, it'll be the men's teams. 

As you know from a few weeks ago, Princeton is 551-334-28 all-time against Rutgers in all sports. This year the Princeton women are 2-0, while the Rutgers women are 2-1-1. The Princeton men will be playing their first game, and Rutgers is 0-1-1.

All of this will happen not that far from Queens, which is the site of the U.S. Open tennis championships, which started this week. The main character so far is someone who isn't even playing.

That would be Billie Jean King, who gave so much of her career to the advancement of women's tennis as a whole. If you've been watching the matches, you've seen that the USTA is proudly commemorating that this is the 50th anniversary of equal pay for women's players at the Open.

King, of course, is the person most responsible for that, and for pretty much every advancement that current women athletes enjoy. She is most deserving of the commercial that celebrates her career that has been playing on the telecasts.

If you look closely, you can see the "Pressure Is A Privilege" sign that flashes. When TigerBlog saw that, he was instantly reminded of last fall, when King met with the Princeton field hockey team prior to a game. 

During her talk, she emphasized those words, "Pressure Is A Privilege," which was basically the keystone of her message. That, and her other favorite saying: "Champions Adjust."

The start of the U.S. Open always coincides with the end of the summer and the beginning of the NFL season. In fact, the tournament ends on the opening Sunday of the NFL season, which in this case is a week from Sunday.

As TB has been saying, this past Tuesday was the deadline for NFL teams to cut their rosters down to 53. In years past, teams had a first cut and a second cut, but this year teams went from 90 to 53 in one shot. 

For Princeton football, there were four players in training camps this summer, two of whom made active rosters and two of whom were cut. The two who made their teams were Andrei Iosivas of Cincinnati, who was a total lock after the summer he's had, and Jesper Horsted, who battled through injuries to make the Las Vegas roster. 

The raves for Iosivas continue to pour in, including this from a Sports Illustrated story:

All in all, Iosivas oozes natural ability as a receiver. His athleticism and body control are top notch and together make for a deadly combination. While he’s not yet fully developed as a receiver, he’s further along than many expected him to be at this stage in his career. 

As TB said the other day, it'll be very interesting to see how the Bengals use him on game days. 

The two who were not as fortunate were Stephen Carlson and Henry Byrd. There's still hope, though, as the cuts do not mean the end of roster movement. Far from it.

First of all, there is the waiver period, when teams can sign players other team's released. Of course, if you sign someone, then you have to release someone else. TB guesses this is worse than getting cut Tuesday; you think you've made it, and suddenly you haven't.

There is also the practice squad. What are the rules for the practice squad, which is exactly what you'd think it would? Teams can have as many as 16 practice squad players, of which 10 have to be players with less than two years of service. The others can be veterans of any tenure.

How much do they make? The first group makes $12,000 per week. The second group makes between $16,100 and $20,600 per week. More than that, it also keeps you in the game.

Players on practice squads can be signed by other teams to their active rosters. There are also rules about moving players up and down between active rosters and practice squads and signing players off the practice squad of your next opponent, simply to get information.

Carlson was signed to the Bears' practice squad the minute the signing period opened. Byrd was not signed to the Broncos' practice squad but he seems likely to be picked up by another team.

Out Of The Trap

Math question: If a picture is worth 1,000 words and the average word count here each day is between 700 and 800 words, how much of a picture does TigerBlog need to post?

In this case, he'll paste the whole picture, which should in turn tell the whole story about how his foursome did at the Princeton Friends of Lacrosse golf outing. TB will say that it's possible that he and his group made golf history:

 

In case you can't tell, that's a sand trap, and those are four golf balls that all made their way into said bunker late in the round. Has that ever happened before? Anywhere? On any level? 

Hey, for the record, all four got out of the trap on the first try, so that's something at least. 

What did TB shoot? He has no idea. He stopped counting after about 14 holes. He can say that he hit enough good shots to make him think he could be good and so many bad shots that he knows he never will be.

He also knows that other than three shots (two with a 3-wood on par-5s and a six-iron on a par-3), he played the entire round with just three clubs: a 5-wood, a pitching wedge and a putter. The two shots with the 3-wood went about 30 yards or so combined, and the tee shot with the 6-iron, which came on the closest to the pin hole, drifted about

His group included Phil Gaffney of the Class of 1965 and the Ughetta brothers, Rob (Class of 1989) and Ted (Class of 1990). 

They didn't exactly win anything, though Ted came close to Mark Whaling, Class of 1998 and an All-Ivy pick in football and lacrosse, for longest drive. Had there been contests for "longest round," then they would have won, as they ended up as the only ones on the course after about five hours. The same is true for "most words spoken between shots," and, as TB thinks about it, the latter explains the former (and also explains why two groups played through).

The golf outing isn't about playing big-time golf, of course. These are highly competitive athletes, though, and the desire to win every time out never goes away. 

But no, it wasn't about who won. It was about friendships, those that formed from being teammates either recently or decades ago, and those that formed on the course. It's what being part of a program is all about — relationships.

Prior to Monday, TB had never met Gaffney or the Ughettas. They had never met each other (the brothers obviously had). By the end of the round, they had talked about countless people they all had in common, even sometimes separated by a generation or two.

For instance, a teammate of Phil's, also Class of 1965, had a daughter who went to Andover with the two brothers. It was that kind of day.

By the time the round was over, the other three had figured out that TB was something of an expert on the history of the lacrosse program. Or perhaps a little odd, in that each time an alum's name came up and they asked TB if he knew where they were from, he obviously did. 

The day began with lunch and ended with dinner. There wasn't much in the way of a formal program, just a few words from head coach Matt Madalon and Friends' Group president Greg Seaman. Ford Family Director of Athletics John Mack was there before the golf to say hello and meet some of the alums whose names he knew but had never actually met. TB is reasonably sure that if he had it to do all over again, Mack would have tried lacrosse instead of track and field. 

Most importantly, at least from TB's standpoint, was the love shown by everyone there for Bryce Chase, who has been with the program for more than 60 years, and Bryce's late wife Phyllis. You could tell the emotions were genuine, and you could also tell just how much Bryce and Phyllis mean to everyone there. How big is that for Bryce as he goes forward? Very.  

TigerBlog, as you have probably surmised, is no golfer, but the lacrosse golf outing is one of his favorite days of the year. He knew most of the people there long before Monday, and now he's added some others to the group.

Now multiply this out by alumni functions in every Princeton sport, and you start to get a pretty good idea of how positive, how formative, how long-lasting the athletic experience is. 

Game Week

TigerBlog needed to copy 57 rather large video files from one server to another over the weekend.

If he tried to do this from a spot off-campus, it might have taken until November or so. As it was, as he started copying them, the progress bar started calculating how long it would take. An hour. Two hours. Three hours. 

No big deal, right? Progress bars always do that. Then they usually make their way down, usually ending up somewhere between two minutes and 20 minutes. This time? It got to two hours and stayed there.

For the next two hours, TigerBlog sat on a bench in front of Morrison Hall, doing some work and watching the people go by. During his time there, five different people came and sat down on the bench opposite his, and four of them had brought food with them. Each time TB asked the what they'd gotten for him. He got one "it's a surprise" and four strange looks. 

It was also a parade of dogs, one after another, ranging from tiny dogs with tiny legs to the biggest poodle TB has ever seen. Turns out it was a combination poodle/Bernese mountain dog. Either way, he was a big dog. There was also one little dog who was being pushed along in a baby stroller, while another dog walked on a leash and thought "hey, why does he get to sit in there and I have to do all this work?"

The videos were the ones that were taken during picture day two weeks ago of the field hockey players. TB will be turning them into short clips to use on social media as the season goes along. 

The total size of all of them combined was 21GB. When TB first started here, he was pretty happy when they came out with 44MB floppy disks. That's MB, not GB. Those were the days — of very small files. Graphics? Not yet a staple of every day for athletic communications.

These days, graphics are very much the norm, and TB would guess that 90 percent or so of people who work in college athletic communications spend more time making graphics than they do writing (TB would be in the 10 percent). He does make his share of graphics, including a series for the field hockey team for this week entitled "Meet The Tigers," where each of the 21 players on the team gets a graphic. 

Included for each player is a "fun fact," and these have ranged from "I have eaten the same thing for lunch every day since I've been at Princeton" to "I was a national chess champion at age 10" to "I still sleep with my baby blanket" to "I can juggle" and even "I can juggle while on a skateboard." 

This is game week for the field hockey team, the first of the 2023 season, as the Tigers open their season at Penn against Lousville (Friday at 11) and North Carolina (Sunday at 10:30). 

It's also game week No. 1 for the men's soccer team, the men's water polo team, the women's volleyball team, the men's and women's cross country teams and the women's rugby team.

In all, there will be 14 events between Thursday and Tuesday, starting with the third women's soccer game of the season. The women's soccer team is the only team to have started its season to date, and the Tigers put together a 2-0 start over the weekend by outscoring Monmouth and La Salle by a combined 8-0.

Next up for Princeton is Rutgers Thursday night at 7. The Scarlet Knights are l-1-1 on the year, with a win over Holy Cross, a loss to Hofstra and a tie with North Carolina State. 

Of the 14 events, a total of six are at home, with two cross country meets and four soccer games. The men will host Rutgers Friday night at 7 in their first game, and then the women will host Army Saturday. What? No game on Myslik Field Sunday? That's okay: Duke's men will be there Monday at 4. 

The women's volleyball team, who plays at Bucknell over the weekend, hosts Santa Clara a week from today. 

The preseason for any team is an interesting dynamic. It begins with hellos, hugs and how-was-your-summers. Then it gets serious quickly, but there is always something missing — until it's actually game week. 

Then things get more intense and more real. The emotions get ratcheted up a bit. 

That's where most of Princeton's fall teams are this week. It's game week, and they can't wait to get started.

Lost And Found

TigerBlog is not a great golfer.

He's not even a good golfer. Apparently, he's also an absent-minded golfer.

TB's golf game would be better if he played more than once a year, he assumes. On the other hand, that one day is today, when TB makes his annual appearance at the Friends of Princeton Lacrosse golf outing.

It's a great day, really. It's a chance to see a lot of people he doesn't get to see that often. There is food and fun and looking ahead to the coming fall season, with the 2024 lacrosse seasons looming beyond.

And there is the matter of playing 18 holes. TB can hit an iron. He can make a putt every now and then. Beyond that? He can't hit a wood, and his short game is awful.

Of course, to improve, he'd actually have to own golf clubs, something he does not do. For his yearly appearance at Springdale, he borrows clubs from his friend Todd's son Matthew, who also doesn't play that often. 

Meanwhile, TigerBlog had this blue light pullover top that said "NCAA Lacrosse" on it. Other than his Princeton stuff, this was his favorite. And then one day it vanished.

He looked everywhere in his house. He thought it might be in his Jadwin office. Nope. Maybe in a suitcase in a closet. Nothing. It was just gone. In his mind, he wondered if Mrs. Blog had gotten rid of it in an act of trimming TB's wardrobe. She denied it, but maybe? ...

Yesterday morning, TigerBlog called up Todd to remind him that he needed the clubs for the golf outing. This was an actual conversation:

"Hey, by the way. Matthew played last week for the first time in a long time, and you know what he found in one of the pockets of the bag?"
"What?"
"A blue NCAA lacrosse pullover."

Oh yeah. That's where it was.

And so the blue pullover is back in the sea of orange and black that is TB's closet. He'll let you know tomorrow how he does as a golfer. 

Speaking of orange and black closets, TB presumes that nobody has more of it than Andrei Iosivas, who went from playing football and running track and field at Princeton to being a sixth-round pick of the Cincinnati Bengals. 

Will he be keeping his Bengals' gear after Tuesday, when NFL teams are required to cut down from a training camp-max of 90 players to 53 in advance of Week1? After the training camp and preseason that Iosivas had, he has a zero percent change of being released. Well, make that pretty much zero, but it would still be shocking to see his name on the waiver wire.

TigerBlog read a bunch of roster projections, and they all have Iosivas as one of the either six or seven wide receivers Cincinnati will keep. 

Here are two samples: 

"Something had to give when the Bengals drafted Charlie Jones and Andre Iosivas. The latter has looked way, way ahead of schedule."
"Both wide receivers Cincinnati drafted should easily make the roster. Iosivas has shown the ability to make contested catches and will give the Bengals extra depth at outside receiver."

Iosivas was one of five NFL wide receivers to have at least 12 preseason receptions, and he finished the three games with 12 catches for 129 yards and a TD, which came in the preseason finale against Washington Saturday night. He was millimeters away from another TD in Week 1, when one of his feet microscopically caught the sideline after a diving end zone grab.

For Iosivas, the question isn't whether he'll make the team; it's what his role on gamedays will be.

Princeton's other two receivers in NFL camps both made their cases to make the final cuts — which aren't necessarily final, by the way, since a ton of roster changes are made leading up to the opener once teams see who are available. 

Jesper Horsted, who has battled injuries in the preseason, was targeted three times and made receptions on all three, for 28 yards, in the Las Vegas Raiders' 31-16 loss to Dallas. Stephen Carlson had three catches of his own for 41 yards as the Chicago Bears lost to Buffalo 24-21.

Horsted looks like he'll be the team's third tight end. Carlson is the fourth tight end on a team that would probably keep three, but he's a veteran with an established record of being valuable on special teams. 

The fourth Princeton grad in an NFL camp has been offensive lineman Henry Byrd with the Broncos, who seems to be a lock to be cut and then signed to the practice squad.

Start Your Engines

When TigerBlog first broke into the newspaper business, he was covering local high school football.

Every Friday night and Saturday afternoon, he'd cover a game, and every time it ended, he'd get the same quotes from the coaches: 

* "They have a great team over there."
* "Our kids played hard."
* "Their kids played hard."
* "He runs a great program."

It didn't matter if the score was 21-20 or 56-0. It didn't matter if you won or lost. Every coach always said the same things, over and over and over. Eventually, TB stopped interviewing coaches.

Since that start, TB has been fortunate to be around some coaches who gave great quotes, funny quotes, off-beat quotes, eccentric quotes. What you don't usually get are honest quotes.

When Princeton was picked as a unanimous preseason favorite in the 1998 Ivy League men's basketball poll, Bill Carmody's simple response was "we should be." That was honest.

A few years earlier, Pete Carril was asked about his team's success in defending a high-scoring Dartmouth team. His quote: "They have guardable players, and we guarded them." Again, honest.

The problem with honesty is that it calls out someone, some team or some issue, and coaches never want to give the other team something to motivate them. That's why honesty stands out.

To that end, you really have to hand it to North Carolina women's soccer coach Anson Dorrance for his comments on whether or not he wants Stanford and Cal to join the ACC. Did you see what he said? 

Women’s Soccer HC Anson Dorrance acknowledges that adding Stanford and Cal to the ACC would be a “wonderful feather in the cap of our commissioner, but for us, with boots on the ground, no. This is going to be horrible for us. Our budgets aren’t extraordinary as it is, and now we would try to add in flights across the country to play these two schools, which will be incredibly expensive and then the fact that now we're exposing the whole country – not that Stanford and Cal don't have a national recruiting platform, of course they do – but if you put those two schools in the ACC, it's going to be so easy for them to recruit nationally. So, it'll just benefit them in my opinion, not us. We've built the best women's soccer conference in the country, and there's no way I want to share the glory of our conference with two schools that could do a very good job recruiting against us, and so basically I want Cal and Stanford to die on the vine. I look forward to seeing Stanford, which is a very difficult school to recruit against, I would look forward to them basically having it be so difficult for them to recruit the elite soccer player and then we would be in a position to obviously gain those kids and put the ACC in an even stronger position.”

Now that's really honest. Maybe a bit too honest? Of course, when you've won as many NCAA titles as Dorrance has (21 of them), you can say things like that. Geno Auriemma with UConn women's basketball is the same, to his great credit.

One of the greatest moments in Princeton women's athletic history came with Dorrance on the losing end, when Sean Driscoll's Princeton team defeated UNC 2-1 in overtime in the round-of-16 of the 2017 NCAA tournament. 

Driscoll and his Tigers open their 2023 season tonight at 7:30 on Mylsik Field at Roberts Stadium when they host Monmouth. In addition to being the women's soccer opener, it's also the first of more than 600 events for the 2023-24 athletic year at Princeton.

Each year is its own animal, with more unlikely storylines than likely ones that will play out during the next nine-plus months. Who is the athlete who makes the biggest jump? What freshmen will make immediate impacts? Which teams will be the ones who make history? 

Come May, who will win the Roper Trophy and von Kienbusch Award? What will be the biggest game of the year? What will be the biggest heartbreak? 

Each year at Princeton has had more than its share of wins, championships, big moments, historical performances. As TB always says, it's not something to ever take for granted. It's not Princeton's right to win the way it traditionally has, and there have been some down years, at least by Princeton standards.

On opening night, though, anything is possible. 

Princeton's 1,000 athletes across 38 sports are all at the starting line tonight. It's time for the opening kickoff.

It's why you work in college athletics.

Graphic Language

The women's basketball team did something in Barcelona that the men's lacrosse team did not, though TigerBlog wishes it had.

What is it? Carla Berube's team, currently on the first leg of its 10-day European trip, did a paella cooking class. How great does that sound? 

Forget that. How great does this look?

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Had TB known they were going to do that, he might have flown back just to be a part of it. There aren't too many things he likes more than paella, especially genuine Spanish paella.

Much, much closer to home, if you walk from the Stadium Drive parking garage towards Jadwin Gym, you immediately come to the new soccer practice field. 

The best time to make this walk is when either the men's or women's team is practicing and the goalkeepers are doing drills at the goal closest to the Roberts Stadium side, as TigerBlog did yesterday. 

If that's the case, then you are about 10 feet away from the goal as the shooters take their shots. If gives you a great sense of what it would like to be the goalkeeper, for better and worse.

As TB walked by yesterday morning, he saw men's goalkeeper coach Sam Maira as he worked out the Tigers. In that short time, TB realized that the only saves he would make would be on really, really, really soft shots or if the ball happened to hit him. In the latter case, he'd probably prefer it didn't.

You may recall TB wrote a story this past spring about the lives and minds of goalkeepers. If not, you can read it HERE.

It includes this:

In the world of goalies, either you are one, or you are not one. 

After TB walked a few more yards past the soccer practice on his left, he came upon football practice on his right. Football practices are wild to watch. The level of organization that goes into putting together even one session to maximize its worth is wild. 

If you think it just happens accidentally, it doesn't. A playbook that has dozens and dozens of plays needs to be practiced to the most minute detail. What you see on gamedays is no fluke.

One thing you definitely see on gamedays nowadays is the Game Day graphic. You've seen these across all sports for years now, on the college and pro — and even high school — levels.

These graphics feature the posed shots of the athletes from the various teams, along with whatever the opponent, location and time are for that particular event. They've become a huge deal for everyone involved.

Last week on the Jadwin E Level tennis courts, photographers Greg Carroccio and Ryan Samson took thousands and thousands of pictures of Princeton's fall teams. Those pictures, once they're all sorted and organized, will be used on Game Day graphics and countless other items of content.

In fact, it was something of an assembly line of photography, and, on the other side of the fence, in the Pit, videography, where similar poses and smiles were being done at the same time. The general tone of the event is festive, and it was hard to go more than a minute or so without hearing laughter. 

For the athletes, there are few moments that they seem to enjoy as much as picture day. There are classic "look at the camera and smile" poses, and there are any range of colorful, creative and sometimes crazy poses involving individuals and groups of players.

There was this one, for instance, with Tiger junior field hockey players Clare Brennan, Aimee Jungfer and Lily Webb: 

For the fall freshmen, this was, TB presumes, the first time they got to wear their actual game uniforms. That's a big thrill.

For everyone else, it's a sign that they're all back together and the season and school are approaching. It creates a different feel on the campus, with an energy building as the summer draws to a close. 

Those pictures serve all sorts of important purposes, and not only for Princeton Athletics. TB is guessing that there are quite a few of them framed in houses and on desks.

Being an athlete at Princeton is about having a championship experience, in the classroom, on the field and off the field. It's about building relationships and having moments that you'll remember for decades.

Photo day fits into that profile perfectly.