Melanie Moore, an assistant women's basketball coach at Princeton from 2007 through 2012, during Courtney Banghart's first five seasons. Since leaving Princeton she has been an assistant coach at Michigan, until she was hired as the head coach at Xavier Friday.
Mel will do a great job in Cincinnati. She was part of Courtney's staff during the turnaround of the program, going from 7-23 to 14-14 and now 10 straight postseasons since, including eight NCAA tournaments in that time, the first three of which came in Mel's last three years.
Beyond being a great coach and the kind of competitor who would have been the first person Courtney called when she became a head coach, Mel is also as nice as it gets. Her presence adds Xavier women's basketball to TigerBlog's approved list of teams to root for moving forward.
Congratulations to her and her family. TB is very happy for her.
Sticking with the basketball theme, that's a really tough way for a team to lose a game, especially an NCAA tournament semifinal game. TB is of course talking about Auburn.
Was that a foul at the end? Nope. Not in that spot it wasn't. Sorry. It just doesn't work that way. Was that a double-dribble? Yup.
Ask yourself this question - had no foul been called there on Auburn, would there have been outrage the other way? Of course not.
TigerBlog wasn't rooting for anyone in the game, and he really wasn't all that interested. In fact, he completely forgot it was Final Four Saturday.
Still, he can't help but feel for Auburn. How can you not?
What he will say is that he was incredibly impressed with the poise and the composure that the head coach - Bruce Pearl - and his players showed after the game. This was especially true of Samir Doughty, who was called for the foul.
TigerBlog was driving back from the men's lacrosse game at Stony Brook Saturday night with Cody Chruschiel, his broadcast partner, and they were listening to the Michigan State-Texas Tech game as they drove. When it was over, the postgame show included a number of people, including Bill Walton, who perfectly summed up the situation, saying that he was very impressed with the composure of the Auburn coach and players, even if "they obviously didn't mean a word of what they were saying."
That's about right.
So tonight it's Virginia-Texas Tech for the title. At the end of last year's NCAA tournament, TigerBlog picked Virginia to win this year's tournament - except that was in men's lacrosse, something he'll stick with at this point and apply to men's basketball.
Well that's Xavier women's basketball and NCAA men's basketball, so TB will stay with basketball for the rest of today. Or at least baskeball/baseball overlap.
Among those in attendance on a 70-degree April Sunday at Princeton baseball was the athlete that TigerBlog has said is the most universally loved of any he has seen at Princeton. If you polled Princeton fans, his approval rating would be somewhere around 100 percent.
TB speak of Chris Young, the former Princeton baseball and men's basketball player who only played for two years as a Tiger before being drafted and then pitching for 14 years in the Major Leagues. He is the ultimate "what-if" guy at Princeton, which adds to his mystique. So does his larger than life persona, fueled by being 6-11.
Would Young have been an NBA player for that had he focused on that sport? Nobody will ever know. How good would he have been at Princeton in the 2001 and 2002 seasons? Nobody will ever know. Will he have reached 2,000 career points? Nobody will ever know.
It wouldn't have been that much different than if Bella Alarie had turned pro in a different sport after her sophomore year.
The fact that Young is so well thought of by Princeton fans even after not playing his final two years speaks to his likeability. He was always approachable, always had time for everyone, always had a kind word.
He was always the very best of what Princeton Athletics always wants to be. He was a great athlete and someone who valued the quality of the education he was getting, respecting it to the point of finishing his senior thesis while riding buses in the minors so he could graduate on time.
Young was at the game with his wife Liz and their three kids. Liz was a women's soccer captain at Princeton.
His Major League career included a World Series championship with the Kansas City Royals, in which he was the winning pitcher in Game 1, a Comeback Player of the Year Award and an All-Star Game appearance. These days he works for Major League Baseball on player relations, rules to improve the game and other such areas.
To TigerBlog, though, he'll always be the dominant basketball big man who outplayed more than one future NBA player while at Princeton. And the college kid who lifted a very young TigerBlog Jr. up on his shoulders to allow him to shoot a basketball into the hoop on a side court at Jadwin.
TBJ was thrilled that day. The same was true for any Princeton fan who came in contact with Chris Young.
Nothing will ever change about that.
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