Ivy Champs

TigerBlog isn't sure exactly when summer officially ends, though he knows it's pretty soon.

A quick search seems to suggest that the first day of autumn is actually Sunday, the 23rd. TigerBlog has never heard that before.

The 23rd? He thought it was either the 20th or 21st, right?

The seasons have changed considerably around here, as winter on one end and summer on the other have closed in on spring, which hardly exists anymore, at least not in the way it used to, with sunny, 60-degree days the norm.

The summer of 2018 in this area was very hot and very humid, with a lot of thunderstorms and rain mixed in. It saved pretty much its worst for the end, since September has been one rainy day after another.

Whether it's today, tomorrow or Sunday, fall will be here soon. The 10-day Princeton forecast indicates that it's possible that that last of the 80-degree days are gone for the year, and it should be fairly pleasant out for the near future.

This is good news for the fall teams, who will be heading into Ivy League games relatively shortly. In fact, the weather won't matter for the first one, which is women's volleyball at Penn tomorrow night. Princeton, by the way, has won three straight Ivy women's volleyball titles.

There are two other defending Ivy champs who open their league schedules Saturday, both on the road. The field hockey team will play at Dartmouth, while the women's soccer team is at Yale.

There are 37 Princeton teams, of whom 33 compete for Ivy titles. The four who don't are women's lightweight rowing, men's volleyball and men's and women's water polo.

Princeton has been the dominant Ivy League athletic program by any historical metric. Princeton has won 483 Ivy League championships all-time, which is 65 more than second-place Harvard (418). From there, it goes to third-place Cornell with 232, which is less than half as many as Princeton.

In the last four years - since Mollie Marcoux Samaan became the Ford Family Director of Athletics - Princeton has won 47 Ivy titles to 38 for Harvard and then nobody else with more than 18.

Princeton and Harvard are the only two schools in the league to have reached double figures in Ivy titles in an academic year, something that Princeton has done 25 times and Harvard has done 10 times. They're also the only two league schools who have never gone an entire academic year without at least one Ivy title.

The first year of official Ivy League competition was 1956-57, a year in which Yale won seven league titles to Princeton's four. After 10 years, Princeton had 32 Ivy titles, behind both Harvard (46) and Yale (35).

Princeton finally caught Yale in the 1970-71 academic year. As for Harvard, that would take longer.

In fact, at one point, Harvard had a 43-title lead on Princeton. It actually wasn't until the 1990s that Princeton actually took the lead.

In the last 25 years, Princeton has a 278-187 lead over the Crimson. That's how Princeton has built this huge lead.

One piece of information that TigerBlog hasn't put together is the breakdown of Ivy titles by gender, and that's something he'll get to work on at some point. Even without the actual numbers, though, it's obvious that Princeton's women's teams have to have an overwhelming advantage historically.

All of this brings us to the present.

What is the significance of Princeton's historic dominance? It's great, but it doesn't ensure anything moving forward. The 2017-18 academic year was also a league first in that it was the first time in history that five schools won at least five Ivy titles, led by Princeton's 11.

That fact is not lost on anyone at Princeton. If anything, it's gotten Princeton to rededicate its efforts to maintaining and advancing the level of success it's enjoyed throughout the years.

By the time the end of the spring rolls around, there will be 33 teams - at a minimum - who can call themselves Ivy League champions. There are always a few ties along the way, so the actual number is more than 33.

Some of those championships take a long time to win, like in double round-robin sports. Others take a weekend (track and field, swimming and diving, rowing)  or even less than a half-hour (cross country).

Regardless, they're all special. And nobody ever takes any of them for granted, no matter how much of a prohibitive favorite a team might have been heading into its season.

And nobody ever forgets they were part of one.

You can ask any Princeton athlete who has ever had the experience. They'll tell you details, big games, big moments - and what it felt like when the goal had been achieved.

That's 483 Ivy League championship teams as of right now.

The quest for more begins this weekend.