Clean Numbers

TigerBlog's cousin Janet is on record as saying that she doesn't really need to talk to him to find out how he is or what he's been doing because she can just read about it here and find out.

TB feels the same way about a number of people he follows on Twitter. He sees them once or twice a year, or maybe not at all, and yet he still knows what they're up to on a daily basis simply by following their social media, which, admittedly, is part of the point.

That list includes Eddie Timanus and Patrick Stevens, two national lacrosse writers who cover a lot of other stuff all year long and who flavor their feeds with daily updates of their travels and, in Eddie's case, Final Jeopardy.

Another person in this category is John Nolan, who is the play-by-play voice of the Fort Wayne Tin Caps in Minor League Baseball, the Fort Wayne Mad Ants and IUPU-Fort Wayne basketball. John did some work for Princeton after graduating from Syracuse, and TB wanted to hire him to do more until the offers in Indiana came his way.

TB anticipates that one day in the not too distant future, Nolan will join the growing list of broadcasters who started out at Princeton and ended up on the national stage. He's outstanding.

Anyway, at one point when he was here, TB and John had a conversation about milestones, to which John suggested that America has "an obsession with round numbers." For some reason, that has really stood out for TigerBlog.

Chris Sailer, the women's lacrosse coach, entered the season with 399 wins and then got No. 400 on Opening Day against Temple. Does getting to 400 mean that much more than getting to 399? No, but there is something special about the round numbers. Maybe it's the cleanliness of it?

For instance, Sailer was just as much one of two Division I coaches to reach 399 wins as she was 400 - or 402, which she now has. But 400 sounds so much cleaner.

This past weekend, two more Princeton head coaches reached clean-sounding milestones.

The baseball team opened its season with a 5-3 win at George Mason Saturday in the first of three for the weekend. Scott Bradley, like Chris Sailer had done last month, entered the season with 399 career wins - and he was already the second Princeton baseball coach ever to have reached 399.

The win over Mason Saturday was No. 400 for the Tigers head coach. The only Princeton baseball coach who has ever had more was Bill Clarke, the first head baseball coach back in 1900, who won 564 during three different tenures at Princeton, from 1900-17, 1919-27 (Fred Dawson went 2-4 in the 1918 season) and then from 1936-44.

That 1918 season, by the way, saw Princeton play Harvard twice and Yale twice, as well as the Pelham Bay Station and the Newport Naval Reserves. Princeton had played 23 games in 1916 and then three in 1917, the four in 1918 and then 19 more in 1919, presumably because of World War I.

Baseball was actually the first sport at Princeton, starting back in 1864. There has been a head coach every year since 1900. To have the second best win total in that time, as Bradley does, is impressive. Getting to 400 makes it even nicer.

Bradley has led Princeton to seven Ivy League titles, seven NCAA tournament appearances and 11 20-win seasons.

Courtney Banghart's two wins this weekend gave her 250 for her career. She long ago became the Princeton women's basketball coach with the most career wins, and in fact she actually has more wins than the next two best totals combined.

Joan Kowalik is in second with 163, followed by Richard Barron with 74. That's 237 between them, or not as many as Banghart has now.

Banghart is now 250-102 overall at Princeton, which is a .710 winning percentage. That becomes even more amazing when you take out the 16-37 start to her career, which makes her 234-65, or just short of an 80 percent winning percentage in her last 299 games, which is extraordinary.

Her Ivy League record is 135-31, which is a .813 percentage. Again, after an 8-15 start, that would make her 127-16 since, or .889.

So congratulations to Scott Bradley and Courtney Banghart on their milestones.

Those clean numbers always sound really good, but more than that, they mean a lot when you look at the history of those sports here.