Alumni Days

There is one weekend left in the ECAC women's hockey regular season, two left in the ECAC men's hockey regular season and three left in the men's and women's Ivy League basketball regular seasons.

And before TigerBlog gets into any of that, there's a video to watch. You can see it HERE.

This past weekend was the alumni weekend for the women's basketball team. The video gives you a pretty good sense of the family spirit that makes up the women's basketball program, and really so many other programs here at Princeton.

When you watch it, you can't help but get a sense of how important the current team is to those who played before and how much the current players appreciate that support. And how much they appreciate what went into building women's basketball at Princeton.

The most telling part for TB was the talk about how the earliest women's basketball teams, back in the 1970s, had to buy t-shirts at the U-store and then iron on their uniform numbers. One former player was wearing that shirt in the video.

Oh, and there was the story about having to chase off guys who wanted to play pickup games at Dillon in order to get the court for practice.

If you contrast that with the current state of women's basketball, or women's athletics in general, it's inconceivable that any of those things would even remotely be permitted today.

Now, the task of bringing alums who predate your tenure into such a close-knit group of your former players might not be easy if the head coach was somebody other than Courtney Banghart, who is the beneficiary of all of their efforts and who operates in a world that the older alums never would have imagined. TigerBlog asked Courtney Banghart about that on the most recent "The Court Report," and you can see in the video that she seems to have figured out exactly how.

It is Banghart who is the face of Princeton women's basketball. She's the one whose drive built the program, and it's easy to see how anyone who has ever played here responds to her.

Courtney made a great point in the podcast, that it's not easy for alums to get back to campus multiple times per year. Her group came back from all over the country for this past weekend.

This weekend there will be no basketball in Jadwin Gym, which is a total rarity, though something TB wouldn't mind seeing a few more times. Princeton hosted Cornell and Columbia in doubleheaders in January, which means that there are doubleheaders in Ithaca tonight and New York City tomorrow night.

The men's team will be looking to snap a four-game losing streak and vault itself back into the Ivy League tournament picture. 

The women are rolling again, after stumbling against Yale two Fridays ago. The Tigers since have beaten Brown, Harvard, Dartmouth and Penn, all convincingly, and now own a one-game lead over the Quakers after the 60-40 win Tuesday night at Jadwin.

For Princeton, this weekend is the last of what will be five games in eight days, and these will be the first two games in that run that are away. The Cornell/Columbia trip is not an easy one to make, with four hours between the schools.

There are going to be a lot of serious challenges for Princeton between now and March 11, with the goal of a league title and a tournament title that would send Banghart to her seventh NCAA tournament in 11 seasons for a program that had never been to one before.

So that's the women's basketball team.

The men's hockey team is also playing with an eye on the postseason, and this weekend it's doing what the women's basketball team did last weekend, as the Tigers will welcome back to Baker Rink the ECAC championship teams from 1998 and 2008 for ceremonies tomorrow night in the game against Union. It'll be Princeton and RPI tonight at Baker Rink, with face-off both nights at 7.

TigerBlog was at the 2008 semifinal in Albany. The men's lacrosse team played up there in a day game that Friday and then he went to the hockey game. His two biggest memories of that day were that is was unbelievably cold and windy for the lacrosse game and that Zane Kalemba was incredible in goal in a 3-0 shutout of Colgate.

As TB went back and checked, he was surprised that Kalemba only had 27 saves. It seemed like he had 127 or so.

The two championship teams will be honored between periods, with the 1998 team after the first and the 2008 team after the second.

As for the current Tigers, each of the remaining four games are huge. Princeton is currently in a log-jam of teams who hope to earn home ice for the first round of the playoffs, with five teams - Princeton, Colgate, Dartmouth, Yale and Quinnipiac - separated by just two points. Barring something extraordinary, four of those teams will be the home teams for the first round, and the fifth will have to go on the road.

Princeton will finish the regular season next weekend at Clarkson and St. Lawrence.

Elsewhere this weekend, the women's hockey team needs one point in four games at Brown and Yale to earn an ECAC playoff spot. The women's squash team is at the Howe Cup national championships. The women's swimming and diving championships continue at Harvard. The lacrosse season opens.

There are all kinds of events.

The whole schedule is HERE.