Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Iced

TigerBlog will start out by saying this: The women's basketball game against Dartmouth Friday night has been moved from 7 to 6.

The game is being picked up by the American Sports Network, who will syndicate it to various affiliates. A complete list will be available tomorrow, probably, and will be on goprincetontigers.com.

In the meantime, if you're going to the game, it's a 6:00 tip.

The men's game against Brown last Friday was switched from 7, which it said on the tickets, to 8, in order to accommodate the ASN. This begs the question of whether or not you'd rather show up at 7 and have missed the first half or 7 and find out that there's still an hour to tip.

With four days until the game, though, TigerBlog is hopeful that anybody who is coming to Jadwin will get the word by then.

And so that's the first thing TigerBlog wanted to say today.

Then there's the Ithaca visitors bureau, which has a website called visitithaca.com.

If you go there, you'll get this pop-up message:
That's it. We surrender. Winter, you win. Key West anyone?
Due to this ridiculously stupid winter, Ithaca invites you to visit The Florida Keys this week. Please come back when things thaw out. Really, it's for the birds here now. (Still want to Visit Ithaca? Are you sure? Ok, click here.) P.S. Send us a postcard.

Now how great is that?

The last few weeks have been awful here. They've been even worse in Ithaca.

TigerBlog would like to salute whoever came up with that. It's perfect.

Of course, TB will be in Ithaca April 25 for Princeton-Cornell men's lacrosse. Hopefully it will have thawed out by then.

TigerBlog writes about the weather a lot. What he'll say about it today is that it's pretty cold here. It's one of those days that make you think about how hot it gets in the summer and how you complain about how hot and humid it is and then you wonder why you do that when it's this cold out now because you'd much rather be hot than cold.

Here, TigerBlog will give you the high and low temperatures for two different places in the United States. See if you can guess which is which.

Place A:  27/10, 32/10, 17/-1, 19/3
Place B: 38/24, 33/21, 32/25, 36/32.

Give up?

Place A is Princeton. Place B is Anchorage. As in Alaska.

TigerBlog spent this past weekend mostly chilled, since he spent much of it in Baker Rink, where he saw Princeton play Clarkson and St. Lawrence in men's hockey.

Keep in mind, this is a Princeton team that came into the weekend in last place in the ECAC with a record of 1-14-1. And that Clarkson was in sixth and St. Lawerence second.

So what did the Tigers do?

They beat Clarkson 2-1 and tied St. Lawrence 1-1 in a game that they came within an eyelash of winning when Tucker Brockett came close enough to the game-winner 58 seconds into OT that the refs stopped the game to check the replay.

Princeton goalie Colton Phinney was great in both games, but it's not like he was the only reason his team was successful. In fact both games were completely even contests, and Princeton deserved all three points it got, equaling, by the way, it's previous ECAC season total.

Princeton is in Year 1 under head coach Ron Fogarty, an immensely likeable person with a great sense of humor and a commitment to rebuilding the hockey program, along with his staff. He's one of those coaches that you just know will be successful when you spend five minutes around him, and you can tell by watching Princeton play that it is hardly a team that has given up on the season.

The Tigers played hard all weekend. That much was clear. And they went toe-to-toe with two of the best teams in the league.

To show you the progress Princeton is making, the Tigers lost to St. Lawrence and Clarkson by a combined 7-0 on its trip up there back in November.

Princeton has two regular season weekends remaining, home with Brown and Yale this weekend and then at Dartmouth and Harvard. Then there is the ECAC playoffs.

This past weekend could be a pretty big one in the evolution of the program. Princeton won its league opener against Cornell back on Nov. 7 and then went 0-14-1 in its next 15 ECAC games, with only a 2-2 tie with Brown on Jan. 31 to earn a point.

And then Princeton went 1-0-1 this past weekend. It's one thing to know you're improving; it's another to have some tangible proof to know you're going in the right direction. That's what Princeton got this weekend.

Maybe one day, the Tigers will look back on this past weekend as the starting point of a resurgence.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If he were still alive (along with Sabol pere et fils), John Facenda could be describing the Delaware Valley as "the frozen tundra."