Those Were The Days

TigerBlog grew up in New Jersey.

In fact, he's lived his entire life in a 50-mile radius of where his desk currently sits, in the basement of Jadwin Gym. Born in New York City. Grew up in New Jersey. College in Philadelphia. Been around here ever since.

When TB was a kid, there were two area codes in the state of New Jersey - 201 and 609. Now there are about a hundred, though Princeton University is still 609.

One thing that is relatively new for phone calls in New Jersey is the need to dial the area code for a 609 to 609 call from a landline, such as the one that sits on TigerBlog's desk. So far, he has not once remembered to do it, though he doesn't make many calls from his desk.

There was a time when TB would spend a lot of time each day simply on returning voicemails. During peak seasons, he'd get more than a thousand per month.

Back then, you'd get a report from the telephone office that detailed all of your phone information for the month - calls, time spent on the phone, voicemails, etc. Those numbers were staggering compared to now.

If you pay the cell phone bill of your average teenager, then you probably see that in most months, they push the limits of their data usage (or exceed it), send and receive several thousand text messages (or, if they don't, it's because they're using Snapchat or a different app) - and have about four minutes of talking on the phone, most of which is to you.

TigerBlog hardly talks on the phone anymore. He probably receives between five or 10 voicemails in an average month, and most of those start off with "you're probably not the person I need to be talking to but ..."

TigerBlog doesn't really like voicemails. Unless it's something urgent, it's better to simply hang up when you get to voicemail, so that the phone says there's a missed call from a specific person. Simple.

As TB has said often, the evolution of his profession has been dramatic, and the challenges to creativity are constantly changing. If the sports information business was the same now as it was in the early 1990s,  TB never would have lasted this long.

At the same time, there are things that he misses. One of them is a charming little slice of nostalgia that used to happen this week each year - Ivy League sports information meetings and then Ivy football media day.

Ah, those were the days. You had to make sure the media guide was back from the printer, because you couldn't be the only one to show up without one. This resulted in a lot of stress as deadlines loomed each July.

Each year, it would be the meetings on a Monday, with dinner for all the sports information types Monday night, followed by media day Tuesday morning, followed by golf and box lunches Tuesday afternoon.

Each SID meeting, by the way, would start with a reminder from Kathy Slattery, the late and legendary head of Dartmouth athletic communications, that no matter how heated the discussion, everyone had to remember that they were there for "the good of the clan."

At some point during the meeting, the subject of standardized rosters would come up, seemingly to make TB even nuttier than the year before. Seriously, he has spent several hours of his life embroiled in contentious conversation over whether it should be hometown/high school or high school/hometown or postal vs. AP state abbreviations.

On the other hand, there was always the amazingly amiable John Veneziano of Harvard, who would say things like "here at Harvard, where we invented crew" when the subject turned to how best to calculate coaches' records.

Johnny V.  TB hasn't seen him in years, but he's still an all-time favorite.

Yes, there are still Ivy meetings. They're just not the same as they were back in the 1990s.

Then again, back in the 1990s, there were no podcasts. TigerBlog just did his most recent one with Courtney Banghart yesterday. You can listen to that HERE.

Or you can read about Caraun Reid's signing with the Dallas Cowboys HERE.

It's good to be nostalgic, but it's also good to snap back to the present.

Speaking of the present,  TigerBlog was in a meeting yesterday in which he and his Office of Athletic Communications colleagues discussed some new initiatives for 2018-19, as the need to be creative continues its evolution. He'll have more on that shortly, but here's a hint:

It doesn't involve a return to media guides.