Up To No. 4

TigerBlog and women's basketball head coach Courtney Banghart are in Year 2 of their weekly podcast, entitled "The Court Report."

Last year, the two did their podcast each week throughout the season except for a week between Christmas and New Year's and the first week of exams in January. This year, they were determined to get through every Tuesday.

What TB didn't check, and he assumes Courtney didn't either, was the fact that Christmas Day and New Year's Day were both Tuesdays this time around. Even so, they didn't skip either.

Those were actually easy talks to have, since the team was playing games before and after. Ah, but what about this week, or this month, for that matter, since Princeton's women's basketball team had only one January game scheduled, and that was already more than 10 days ago.

Well, the podcast must go on, and so it did again this week. For TigerBlog, it was a good chance to ask Courtney a bunch of non-basketball questions about her background and interests, and he actually thinks it's one of the best ones they've done.

Listen for yourself HERE.

The women's basketball team next plays Feb. 1, at Columbia and Cornell, which means that the Jan. 29 podcast can at least talk about the games coming up for that weekend. For this coming Tuesday?

TB will think of something.

In addition to being another podcast Tuesday, yesterday was also Dean's Date at Princeton, the day that all written assignments are due. First semester exams start today and run through a week from Saturday, at which time athletic events will resume.

The women's hockey team is off until Jan. 29, when Penn State comes to Hobey Baker Rink, and the Tigers can feel pretty good about where they stand heading into the break. In fact, Princeton's women's hockey team is sizzling right now, unbeaten in 18 straight and ranked a program-best fourth in Division I.

Princeton is an astonishing 10 points ahead of second-place Cornell in the ECAC standings. Yes, Princeton has played four more games than the Big Red, but still, a 10-point lead is extraordinary - and it provides at least a little margin for error for the Tigers. Even if Cornell wins all four of its games the next two weeks (at Dartmouth and Harvard and then two against Colgate), Princeton would still come back from break in first place in the league.

The prize for winning the ECAC regular season championship would be the host spot for the league's final four, provided the No. 1 seed won its quarterfinal series against the No. 8 seed. Princeton has never hosted that event.

Hosting it this year won't be easy, of course. Nothing is even close to settled yet, especially when you consider that ECAC rivals Clarkson, Cornell and Colgate are ranked sixth, seventh and eighth in this week's poll. Princeton is finished with the last two, but it still has to play Clarkson twice in its final eight league games.

And then there's the Ivy League race. The Ivy League champion is decided by ECAC games between the six Ivy schools, which means there are 10 games that double as ECAC and Ivy games. Princeton has played eight of those and is 6-0-2 in them, for 14 points. Cornell, in second with seven points, and Harvard and Yale can mathematically catch Princeton, but the Tigers would clinch that championship with nothing more than one win over either Brown or Yale (on the road) on the weekend of Feb. 8 and 9.

Princeton has great depth everywhere on the ice, and its push up the national rankings and its long unbeaten streak have been greatly helped by a pair of freshmen, Maggie Connors and Sarah Fillier, both of whom won big awards this past week. Connors was the ECAC Player of the Week after a four-goal performance in the win over Cornell and 4-4 tie against Colgate that made her the leading scorer in Division I for the week.

Fillier was named the national Rookie of the Month for December. From the goprincetontigers.com story:
Fillier led the nation's freshmen in scoring during December with six goals and two assists for eight points to help the Tigers post a 4-0-1 record. She scored more goals than any skater, of any year, with her six in five games. She scored in four of her team's five games and had three multi-point performances. For the month she was a +8 and won 49 face offs.

After the Penn State game, Princeton will have its final four ECAC weekends, including home-and-home weekends with Clarkson and St. Lawrence, the trip to Brown and Yale and home games against Union and RPI.

And then it'll be the ECAC playoffs. Those could end up being a lot of fun for this Princeton team.

That's fourth-ranked Princeton, TB should say.