Welcome Chas And Elliott

TigerBlog received an email from his former colleague Craig Sachson last week asking him if things in the Office of Athletic Communications had "normalized."

Just writing the words "former colleague" to describe Craig Sachson is still weird, by the way.

TigerBlog's response was that he wasn't sure that a world in which Chas Dorman works at Princeton can every really be normal.

He was kidding, of course. Eventually it'll be normal.

It's just that it does take a little getting used to.

Chas came to Princeton recently after working for 13 years in the athletic communications office at Penn. Yup. A Penn-to-Princeton guy.

Who can imagine such a thing?

Well, TigerBlog can, obviously. His alma mater is Penn, and as he's said many times, he had a great experience there. It's just that he's now spent more than seven times as long at Princeton then he did at Penn, and he long ago came to consider himself much more Tiger than Quaker.

In fact, he has not one single piece of Penn apparel.

Besides, TB has never really been "the Penn guy" at Princeton. Maybe when he first started, but that was a long, long time ago.

Of course, it hasn't been that long that he doesn't remember what Pete Carril said to him. First he asked him what he got on his SATs. When TB responded, Carril shot back - "you can get two guys into Penn for that."

He was kidding obviously. But yeah, he took the rivalry very seriously.

For more than a decade, well more than a decade for that matter, the OAC staff included TigerBlog, Sachson, Kristy McNeil and Andrew Borders. Also for all of that time, Chas Dorman has worked at Penn.

Now Craig has left athletics and Kristy is working at the University of Michigan. In their place have come Elliott Carr, who if nothing else is the tallest person to work in athletic communications at Princeton in TB's 30-plus years here.

Elliott stands around 6-6, TB would guess. He came to Princeton from LIU and North Carolina State before that. Oh, and he's also the first OAC staffer who was born and raised in Australia.

Elliott has immediately established himself as 1) skilled, 2) hard-working and 3) very likeable. Those are great qualities to bring to the table.

He's used to working with a lot of teams from his time at LIU. He's fit in nicely already.

As for Chas, he was certainly a known rather than an unknown. He knows Ivy League athletics inside and out, and he knows athletic communications inside and out as well.

He was also really good friends with Craig and Kristy.

Also, he has a wardrobe that runs toward the, um, sensational, including his bright red pants. Upon first meeting Chas, Mollie Marcoux Samaan suggested that Princeton needed to get him some orange ones.

TB has always liked Chas, and his Penn colleague Mike Mahoney. Chas was the Quakers' men's lacrosse contact last year, and for years before that he covered women's lacrosse, among other sports. He was someone who clearly was smart, focused, sharp and on top of where the profession was going.

Those qualities have only come out even more during the interview process and in his first three weeks here.

The last event for Chas at Penn was the last game of the football season, which just happened to be against Princeton, at Franklin Field. Chas has been Penn's football contact. TB is Princeton's football contact.

It was one of those "winner gets Chas" games. Princeton won 28-7.

Chas joked before the game that there should be one of those exchanges at halftime, like they do at the Army-Navy game. As the final seconds ticked away at Franklin Field, Penn made a nice announcement wishing Chas the best.

And now he's at Princeton, as part of a completely rebuilt OAC.

It's definitely different. Even the furniture has been moved around.

And, to be honest, it's still a bit weird, having Penn's Chas Dorman at Princeton. Weird, but nice.

And exciting. It's a fun time to be part of things here.