Another July Friday

TigerBlog feels like the coming athletic year starts to get real with four weeks to go until the first event.

That day is two weeks away. If you are good at math, or even if you aren't, that makes today six weeks short of the first event of 2017-18, which would be a home women's soccer game against Monmouth on Aug. 25.

Today? It's a Friday in July. It's about as quiet as it gets around here.

It's right around the midway point from last year to next year. Actually, let's figure that out.

If the last event from last year was the NCAA track and field championships on June 9 and the first event from next year is Aug. 25, then that's a 77-day gap, right? The last 21 days of June, all 31 days of July (which makes 52), and then 25 more in August, taking you to 77.

The halfway point of 77 would be Day 39. The means that the exact halfway point would be July 18, if TB's math is on.

Today is July 14. That means this coming Tuesday would be the exact halfway point. Either way, it's right around the middle.

And that means TigerBlog has very little to say right now. Well, actually, he has a lot of things he could talk to you about, and hey, you're obviously reading this, so maybe you actually want to hear some of them?

Princeton Athletics? Not a lot of that for today.

The English team, which features Olivia Hompe, won its first game at the World Cup for women's lacrosse, defeating Wales 12-6. Tom Schreiber advanced past the first cut to the final 49 players for the U.S. team for the 2018 World Championships, which will be held in Israel. That list of 49 will eventually have to be cut in half, but it would shocking if Schreiber wasn't on the team.

Speaking of women's lacrosse, there's a new assistant coach in town. Her name is Kerrin Maurer, who happens to be one of the best players Duke women's lacrosse has ever had. She's actually second all-time at Duke with 280 points, which left her exactly two short of the number that Hompe put up to set the Princeton career record before graduating this year.

If you want to read the entire story about Maurer, it's right HERE.

The women's hockey team released its schedule, for Season 1 under head coach Cara Morey. Perhaps more ridiculous than the fact that the 2017-18 season begins in six weeks, the women's hockey season begins in little more than three months, with a pair of games against Providence on Oct. 20 and Oct. 21.

That's a winter sport, people. Time churns along.

What else can he tell you today? Hopefully you're not expecting something serious right now. It's a Friday in July. How serious do you expect TB to be?

In fact, he'll leave you with three stories that have nothing to do with anything. 


The women's volleyball team also released its schedule. The Tigers, who've won two straight Ivy titles, open Sept. 1. That's seven weeks away.

TigerBlog was at one of Miss TigeBlog's lacrosse events a few weeks ago when he saw the women's lacrosse coach from Vassar. Or at least, he saw a coach wearing a "Vassar" shirt and figured it was her, though he's never met her.

It dawned on TigerBlog that he was wearing a "Princeton Volley" shirt at the time. It could be his most comfortable shirt, a bright orange dri-fit with long sleeves. He loves those shirts.

Anyway, it dawned on him that Sam Shweisky, the head men's volleyball coach, is a Vassar grad. When TB texted Sam to see if her knew the women's lacrosse coach, he replied that he had taken a class she had taught a long time ago. TigerBlog thought about introducing himself and trying to convince her that he was Sam and that he had taken her class at Vassar a long time ago. As he thought it through, he realized that there were a lot of holes in that plan, not the least of which was he didn't know her name, so he said nothing.

That's one. Here's the next:

For TigerBlog, Fridays in July for six years of his youth meant being at a sleepaway camp in the Catskills in New York. For the first five years, it was a camp called Camp Toledo. After a one-year non-camp summer, he then went to a different camp, called Camp Echo, because Toledo had closed down.

He'd spend eight weeks per summer away at sleepaway camp. His first year away was when he was six years old.

As he remembers being told, he and BrotherBlog (who was two years older; actually, he still is) went to camp that summer because their parents were going on a three-week trip the following summer to Japan and Hong Kong and they wanted to see if TB and BB would be okay at the camp without them.  The logic was that if they weren't okay, then their parents would be about three hours away that summer, as opposed to a whole world away the next.

In that respect, it was a very nice thing for them to do. Told another way, though, it's possible that they were simply abandoning their kids.

Lastly, TigerBlog was talking to someone yesterday who mentioned that he had heard that U.S. Lacrosse had considered building Tierney Field right in the Inner Harbor in Baltimore before cost estimates and such moved it to its actual location, outside the city. The Inner Harbor would have been a pretty cool location for the facility.

That got TB thinking about the time he stayed in one of the hotels right on the harbor. He was coming up in the elevator holding a bunch of stuff, including a drink in a cup with a lid on it. Before he got to his floor, he bobbled everything and ended up squeezing the cup, which flew out of his hands and spilled everywhere.

TigerBlog felt badly, so he wanted to at least clean up some of the mess. To do so, he went to his room and got a towel. Then he went back to the elevator. Except there were a bunch of elevators, and the one that came to the floor wasn't the one that he'd dropped the drink in. So he tried again, but again the wrong elevator came. TB took that as a sign that he had tried his best, and he got on that elevator and downstairs. You should always follow the signs. And he's pretty sure someone cleaned it up by now.

Why tell those stories now? Because it's a Friday in July and they're just lighthearted stories.

It's the summer. There's not a game in sight just yet. Why be serious today?

Have a great summer weekend everyone.