If you know TigerBlog, it probably doesn't surprise you to learn that he has memorized the codes that go along with the fruits and vegetables he buys each week.
He likes to go to the self checkout line, which means he needs to keep entering the codes for fruits and vegetables. And he always gets the same stuff, so it didn't take long to get the numbers down.
For instance, bananas are 4011. Avocados are 4225. Eventually he's started referring to the items not by their names but by their numbers, as in "salad with a little 4225."
When he mentioned this to his colleague Warren Croxton the other day, he said something along the lines of having a "4131," which is a Fuji apple. Croxton, a diehard Eagles fan, said he'd rather have a "4133," sight unseen.
Eagles fans are obsessed with the number 4,133. That was the final score of the Super Bowl the Eagles won over the New England Patriots.
What TB didn't realize is that these numbers aren't unique to his supermarket or even that supermarket chain. They are called PLU codes, which stands for "Product Look Up" codes.
They start with either "3" or "4," though they will have a "9" in front of them if they are organic items or an "8" if they are genetically engineered. The numbers are randomly assigned.
As it turns out, a 4133 would be a small gala apple.
Princeton fans should know the meaning of the number 4341. If you don't, that was the score of Princeton's 1996 NCAA tournament win over UCLA. A 4341 would be a yellow seedless watermelon.
This is obviously Super Bowl weekend, as the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers play Sunday in Miami.
TigerBlog would be rooting for Kansas City anyway, because he's a fan of Chiefs' quarterback Pat Mahomes. Throw in the fact that Princeton alum John Lovett is a member of the team, and that makes it even more so.
Lovett, the only two-time Bushnell Cup winner in Princeton football history, has spent the season on injured reserve with Kansas City. He had a strong preseason before getting hurt, and he seemed to make a strong impression on the team.
TigerBlog will be talking to Lovett this afternoon to get his thoughts on the experience to date, at the Super Bowl and throughout the season. TB's goal is to have that story on goprincetontigers.com before the start of men's hockey and men's basketball tonight.
This is the start of the run from the return from exams through the end of the regular season and then into the postseason. The teams - not just in basketball and hockey - will go from not very busy to very, very busy, starting tonight.
If TB is counting correctly, there are 38 Princeton events scheduled from today through Sunday. That's a lot.
If he's also counting correctly, there are 16 teams who are competing. That's also a lot.
And it's not even crossover season yet. That's coming soon. If this weekend's schedule isn't enough for you, tomorrow is also Day 1 of spring practices, not to mention the first actual Division I lacrosse games - 13 of them to be exact.
The men's hockey team is home this weekend against Colgate and Cornell, with face-off at 7 both nights. Princeton was playing well before the breaking, having tied Harvard and beaten St. Lawrence (on a goal with 0.6 seconds left in OT of a scoreless game).
The Tigers have eight regular season games left as they try to get some momentum going and possibly get home ice in the playoffs.
The men's basketball team has 12 league games left - two each for the next six weekends. That run starts this weekend with home games against Dartmouth (tonight at 7) and Harvard (tomorrow at 6).
Each league team has played both of its games against its travel partners to date. Princeton, Harvard and Yale all swept those two games, while Columbia and Cornell split.
There are also home events in men's and women's tennis, men's and women's squash and men's and women's swimming and diving, which hosts the H-Y-P meet at DeNunzio Pool.
The full schedule is HERE.
And TB's Super Bowl prediction?
Chiefs win. Final score: Fava beans.
You know. That's 45-28.
Friday, January 31, 2020
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Take Three
TigerBlog hopes you enjoy this week's edition of "Conversations With Carla," the weekly podcast with head women's basketball coach Carla Berube.
This was an extra special edition, mostly because it took three tries to get it done.
The first only went a minute or so before TB sensed something wasn't right with the sound. The second time was the full 12-minute version, only the sound problem hadn't been fixed. When you listed to that version, all you heard was something similar to Charlie Brown's teacher. Or maybe a combination of that and the sound an MRI makes.
Fortunately, Berube is a good sport, and she agreed to record another version, after TB's colleague Cody Chrusciel fixed the problem. And what was the solution to the problem?
Restart the computer, of course.
Anyway, thanks again to Carla for being so good about things. You can hear the actual, listenable version HERE.
This week's conversation had a lot of ground to cover.
First, there was the fact that Princeton hasn't played since Jan. 11, which was the 75-55 win over Penn in the Ivy opener. That game was Princeton's only game since Dec. 29 - more than a month ago - which means the Tigers will have played only that one game in 33 days when they take on Dartmouth Friday in Hanover (and then head to Harvard Saturday).
The reason for the big gap was first-semester exams, which for the final time were in January. For Berube, the last time for an exam break was the first time for her, since she is in her first season at Princeton.
Her school for the last 17 years was Tufts, which places in the NESCAC, which plays Friday night/Saturday afternoon games and does so all through January. For Berube, this was a pretty big adjustment.
Then there's the new schedule that the Ivy League announced earlier this week.
The traditional travel-partner format of six Ivy weekends of back-to-backs dates to the 1958 seasons, or the third official year of Ivy men's basketball. In the first two seasons, the schedule was somewhat random, with only two weekends of back-to-backs and no real order to the sequence of playing teams.
The current format stayed that way through this year. As the world evolves, especially with the change to Princeton's academic schedule, the 2020-21 season will see a whole new way of doing things.
This time, each team will start on Jan. 2 and play three on the same days throughout. There will be three weekends with back-to-backs and a fourth with a game Saturday and then the Monday of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. TB really likes that idea.
Carla gives her thoughts on all of this as well in the podcast.
As for the current season, Princeton and Penn have played each other once while the other six schools have all played both of their travel-partner games so far. Each of the next six weekends will feature back-to-backs, and Princeton and Penn will play their other game at Jadwin on Feb. 25.
Yale is the only 2-0 team, having swept Brown. Harvard and Dartmouth and Cornell and Columbia all split their games.
Princeton is 13-1 on the season, with only a loss in overtime at No. 18 Iowa, who is 17-3 on the year, in the way of an unbeaten record so far.
Princeton leads the Ivy League in 11 statistical categories and is in the top 10 in Division I in five, including ranking third in scoring defense at 50.6. You get extra credit if you knew that Campbell leads Division I at 49.3.
Georgia Tech, by the way, is second at 50.5 heading into its game at Miami tonight. Should Miami get at least 56 points, then Princeton would move into second.
Campbell, by the way, is putting up insane defensive numbers. The Camels are 14-5 overall and 9-1 in the Big South, and the last six opponents have all been held to 47 or fewer. The last two have been held to 36 and 32.
Berube has been talking about defense since Day 1 at Princeton. The numbers Campbell is putting up impress her.
Of course, TB didn't ask her about that until version No. 3. Of the three versions, he thinks the last one was the best one.
At the very least, it was the only audible one.
This was an extra special edition, mostly because it took three tries to get it done.
The first only went a minute or so before TB sensed something wasn't right with the sound. The second time was the full 12-minute version, only the sound problem hadn't been fixed. When you listed to that version, all you heard was something similar to Charlie Brown's teacher. Or maybe a combination of that and the sound an MRI makes.
Fortunately, Berube is a good sport, and she agreed to record another version, after TB's colleague Cody Chrusciel fixed the problem. And what was the solution to the problem?
Restart the computer, of course.
Anyway, thanks again to Carla for being so good about things. You can hear the actual, listenable version HERE.
This week's conversation had a lot of ground to cover.
First, there was the fact that Princeton hasn't played since Jan. 11, which was the 75-55 win over Penn in the Ivy opener. That game was Princeton's only game since Dec. 29 - more than a month ago - which means the Tigers will have played only that one game in 33 days when they take on Dartmouth Friday in Hanover (and then head to Harvard Saturday).
The reason for the big gap was first-semester exams, which for the final time were in January. For Berube, the last time for an exam break was the first time for her, since she is in her first season at Princeton.
Her school for the last 17 years was Tufts, which places in the NESCAC, which plays Friday night/Saturday afternoon games and does so all through January. For Berube, this was a pretty big adjustment.
Then there's the new schedule that the Ivy League announced earlier this week.
The traditional travel-partner format of six Ivy weekends of back-to-backs dates to the 1958 seasons, or the third official year of Ivy men's basketball. In the first two seasons, the schedule was somewhat random, with only two weekends of back-to-backs and no real order to the sequence of playing teams.
The current format stayed that way through this year. As the world evolves, especially with the change to Princeton's academic schedule, the 2020-21 season will see a whole new way of doing things.
This time, each team will start on Jan. 2 and play three on the same days throughout. There will be three weekends with back-to-backs and a fourth with a game Saturday and then the Monday of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. TB really likes that idea.
Carla gives her thoughts on all of this as well in the podcast.
As for the current season, Princeton and Penn have played each other once while the other six schools have all played both of their travel-partner games so far. Each of the next six weekends will feature back-to-backs, and Princeton and Penn will play their other game at Jadwin on Feb. 25.
Yale is the only 2-0 team, having swept Brown. Harvard and Dartmouth and Cornell and Columbia all split their games.
Princeton is 13-1 on the season, with only a loss in overtime at No. 18 Iowa, who is 17-3 on the year, in the way of an unbeaten record so far.
Princeton leads the Ivy League in 11 statistical categories and is in the top 10 in Division I in five, including ranking third in scoring defense at 50.6. You get extra credit if you knew that Campbell leads Division I at 49.3.
Georgia Tech, by the way, is second at 50.5 heading into its game at Miami tonight. Should Miami get at least 56 points, then Princeton would move into second.
Campbell, by the way, is putting up insane defensive numbers. The Camels are 14-5 overall and 9-1 in the Big South, and the last six opponents have all been held to 47 or fewer. The last two have been held to 36 and 32.
Berube has been talking about defense since Day 1 at Princeton. The numbers Campbell is putting up impress her.
Of course, TB didn't ask her about that until version No. 3. Of the three versions, he thinks the last one was the best one.
At the very least, it was the only audible one.
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
The Creative Process
Okay, write about the women's tennis team. It's Wednesday, and you wanted to do that Monday and yesterday and never got around to it.
They had a huge weekend. Beat two top 25 teams from the Power Five. That's awesome. They're really good.
They were in Seattle last weekend. They were in Seattle of for the NCAA tournament too last spring.
When was that? May. So how many months ago was that? Eight. Wait, it's almost February, so maybe more nine than eight.
Well, when exactly was the NCAA tournament. Check the schedule. Okay.
GoPrincetonTigers.com. Loading. Loading.
Seattle. BrotherBlog lives there, as opposed to TB, who has lived his whole life in a 45-mile radius of Jadwin Gym.
Hey, a Carla Berube mic'd up video story. Gotta watch that. Mic'd up videos are always good. And it's a little more than two minutes. Perfect.
That was really good. But wait a second. Why is GPT open in the first place? Looking for ... looking for ... oh yeah. Women's tennis. It was May 3-4 last year, so it's sort of closer to nine months.
Okay, got it. Time to write about women's tennis. But that video was good. Find a way to link that. And the basketball schedule change was announced by the Ivy League. Should get that in too, though it's only Wednesday, so maybe wait on that til later in the week, before the games this weekend?
Exhale.
Anyway, that was basically a three-minute run through TigerBlog's mind yesterday at one point (minus the part where he was thinking in the third-person).
He goes through that pretty much every day. It's what he calls "the creative process."
Some weeks it's pretty easy to figure out what to write and in what order. Others it isn't.
For this week, he wanted to write about women's tennis, because what they did was special. The Tigers were competing as part of the ITA Kick-off Weekend, which had preliminary rounds on 16 different campuses.
Princeton was at the University of Washington (where BB teaches in the law school, as an aside), where the first opponent would be the host Huskies, who were ranked 17th in the country.
It was Washington who defeated Princeton in the second round of the NCAA tournament last spring, after the Tigers took out Northwestern.
This time, in the rematch, it would be 4-3 Princeton. The deciding point came at No. 5 singles from junior Stephanie Schrage, who dropped the first set 6-1 and then won 6-3, 6-4 from there to clinch it.
That put Princeton in the next round against 11th-ranked USC, which became another 4-3 Princeton win. This time, it would be sophomore Grace Joyce who won the clinching match, 6-3, 7-5.
Here's the winning point:
The wins advance Princeton to the final 16 of the ITA Indoor National Championships, which will be held in Chicago in two weeks.
Princeton has won five of the last six Ivy titles, including the last two. It's an impressive record of sustained success, and all five of those championships have come since Laura Granville became head coach in 2012.
The Tigers will be busy from now on, starting Saturday, also in Chicago, to take on Northwestern. Between then and the Ivy opener March 28, there will be trips to, among other places, Chicago again and then Alabama, Florida, Virginia and Michigan.
There will even be some home matches, including Towson and FDU on Feb. 15.
As TB said, he wanted to talk about the women's tennis team earlier in the week. They certainly deserve any praise for their performance out there.
Also, if you want to see the Berube video, click HERE.
As he said, TB likes the mic'd up videos. They give a really good feel for what it's like to be there and insight into the coach.
And the basketball schedule change?
That can wait for another day, and another creative process.
They had a huge weekend. Beat two top 25 teams from the Power Five. That's awesome. They're really good.
They were in Seattle last weekend. They were in Seattle of for the NCAA tournament too last spring.
When was that? May. So how many months ago was that? Eight. Wait, it's almost February, so maybe more nine than eight.
Well, when exactly was the NCAA tournament. Check the schedule. Okay.
GoPrincetonTigers.com. Loading. Loading.
Seattle. BrotherBlog lives there, as opposed to TB, who has lived his whole life in a 45-mile radius of Jadwin Gym.
Hey, a Carla Berube mic'd up video story. Gotta watch that. Mic'd up videos are always good. And it's a little more than two minutes. Perfect.
That was really good. But wait a second. Why is GPT open in the first place? Looking for ... looking for ... oh yeah. Women's tennis. It was May 3-4 last year, so it's sort of closer to nine months.
Okay, got it. Time to write about women's tennis. But that video was good. Find a way to link that. And the basketball schedule change was announced by the Ivy League. Should get that in too, though it's only Wednesday, so maybe wait on that til later in the week, before the games this weekend?
Exhale.
Anyway, that was basically a three-minute run through TigerBlog's mind yesterday at one point (minus the part where he was thinking in the third-person).
He goes through that pretty much every day. It's what he calls "the creative process."
Some weeks it's pretty easy to figure out what to write and in what order. Others it isn't.
For this week, he wanted to write about women's tennis, because what they did was special. The Tigers were competing as part of the ITA Kick-off Weekend, which had preliminary rounds on 16 different campuses.
Princeton was at the University of Washington (where BB teaches in the law school, as an aside), where the first opponent would be the host Huskies, who were ranked 17th in the country.
It was Washington who defeated Princeton in the second round of the NCAA tournament last spring, after the Tigers took out Northwestern.
This time, in the rematch, it would be 4-3 Princeton. The deciding point came at No. 5 singles from junior Stephanie Schrage, who dropped the first set 6-1 and then won 6-3, 6-4 from there to clinch it.
That put Princeton in the next round against 11th-ranked USC, which became another 4-3 Princeton win. This time, it would be sophomore Grace Joyce who won the clinching match, 6-3, 7-5.
Here's the winning point:
The wins advance Princeton to the final 16 of the ITA Indoor National Championships, which will be held in Chicago in two weeks.
Princeton has won five of the last six Ivy titles, including the last two. It's an impressive record of sustained success, and all five of those championships have come since Laura Granville became head coach in 2012.
The Tigers will be busy from now on, starting Saturday, also in Chicago, to take on Northwestern. Between then and the Ivy opener March 28, there will be trips to, among other places, Chicago again and then Alabama, Florida, Virginia and Michigan.
There will even be some home matches, including Towson and FDU on Feb. 15.
As TB said, he wanted to talk about the women's tennis team earlier in the week. They certainly deserve any praise for their performance out there.
Also, if you want to see the Berube video, click HERE.
As he said, TB likes the mic'd up videos. They give a really good feel for what it's like to be there and insight into the coach.
And the basketball schedule change?
That can wait for another day, and another creative process.
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
Back On The Ice
Have you ever heard of Violet Palmer?
Is her name familiar? How about Kelly Cooke's?
Kelly Cooke, of the Princeton Class of 2013, was a four-time All-ECAC Academic selection in women's hockey.
She was also the Tiger captain as a senior. As a junior, she was named the team's most improved player, and she followed that a year later by being named team MVP.
After graduation she became a professional hockey player. And now? She is one of the top referees in the women's game.
And possibly the men's game at some point?
There have been women refs in the NBA since 2006, when, if you guessed correctly, Violet Palmer became the first female to officiate a regular season game. The NHL has not yet allowed that to happen, but the time is coming.
And Cooke could be the ref.
She has already refereed NHL men in preseason scrimmages. And this past weekend, she was part of the NHL's All-Star weekend in St. Louis, where she officiated the U.S. vs. Canada women's all-star showcase.
Being the first woman to do anything that has traditionally been all-male is not easy. It would be great to see Cooke get the chance.
Sarah Thomas, by the way, was the first woman to officiate in the NFL, something she did in the 2015 season. Before that she was the first woman to officiate in a college bowl game and in the Big Ten.
As far as TigerBlog can tell, no woman has ever umpired a Major League Baseball regular season game. Pam Postema did work Major League exhibition games and spent 13 years working in the Minors, and she wrote about her experiences, and frustration with the lack of promotion to the Majors, in what was a relatively interestingly titled book.
Anyway, Cook's college team plays tonight for the first time since the break for exams, which means the Tigers will be on the ice for the first time in 17 days. Most recently Princeton was at Dartmouth and Harvard for a three-point weekend.
Princeton is at Quinnipiac tonight, with face-off in Hamden at 6.
Right now Princeton is in fourth place in the ECAC, which brings with it a home series in the first round of the playoffs next month.
As is always the case this time of year, the standings are a bit bunched throughout. Cornell is in first with 26 points, followed by Harvard at 21 and then three more teams - Clarkson, Princeton and Yale - all within three.
It drops back to 15 for sixth-place Colgate, as the teams chase home ice. Teams need to be in the top eight to get into the postseason, and after Colgate you have Union, Quinnipiac and St. Lawrence with 13 or 12 each. From there it's Dartmouth with seven points in 10th place, so you can pretty much see how it's all shaping up.
Princeton has nine regular season games left, with five away and four at home. The next three, starting tonight, are on the road, with a trip to Yale and Brown scheduled for this weekend. It's the first of two meetings between Princeton and those two, and keep in mind that Princeton is one up on Yale right now.
Princeton is also ranked sixth in the country as the team looks for a second-straight trip to the NCAA tournament.
When you talk about Princeton, you of course talk about sophomore Sarah Fillier, who has 13 goals and 21 assists for 34 points. She ranks second in Division I in points per game and third in assists per game, and she is threat to do something spectacular every time she's on the ice.
Her classmate Maggie Connors leads the team with 15 goals and ranks fourth in Division I in goals per game.
In addition, there are other Princeton players who are moving up career lists. From the preview story:
Among Tigers climbing program record lists, senior Claire Thompson has climbed to fifth place on the program's list for career points by a defenseman with 78, 13 back of Laura Watt '07 (91) for fourth. Classmate Carly Bullock's 79 career goals stand seventh on the program's list, eight back of Gretchen Anderson '04 (87) for sixth. Fellow senior Steph Neatby's 11 career shutouts are good for fourth all-time, two back of Rebecca Potter '83 (13) and three behind Rebecca Young '09 and Rachel Weber '12 (14) for the record. Neatby's 1,746 career saves have her closing in Weber's 1,787 for fifth on the program's all-time list.
You can read the whole story HERE.
There will be a lot of women's hockey played by Princeton in the next several weeks. Will Princeton get home ice in the postseason? Will Princeton return to the NCAAs?
Those questions start to get answered tonight.
Is her name familiar? How about Kelly Cooke's?
Kelly Cooke, of the Princeton Class of 2013, was a four-time All-ECAC Academic selection in women's hockey.
She was also the Tiger captain as a senior. As a junior, she was named the team's most improved player, and she followed that a year later by being named team MVP.
After graduation she became a professional hockey player. And now? She is one of the top referees in the women's game.
And possibly the men's game at some point?
There have been women refs in the NBA since 2006, when, if you guessed correctly, Violet Palmer became the first female to officiate a regular season game. The NHL has not yet allowed that to happen, but the time is coming.
And Cooke could be the ref.
She has already refereed NHL men in preseason scrimmages. And this past weekend, she was part of the NHL's All-Star weekend in St. Louis, where she officiated the U.S. vs. Canada women's all-star showcase.
Being the first woman to do anything that has traditionally been all-male is not easy. It would be great to see Cooke get the chance.
Sarah Thomas, by the way, was the first woman to officiate in the NFL, something she did in the 2015 season. Before that she was the first woman to officiate in a college bowl game and in the Big Ten.
As far as TigerBlog can tell, no woman has ever umpired a Major League Baseball regular season game. Pam Postema did work Major League exhibition games and spent 13 years working in the Minors, and she wrote about her experiences, and frustration with the lack of promotion to the Majors, in what was a relatively interestingly titled book.
Anyway, Cook's college team plays tonight for the first time since the break for exams, which means the Tigers will be on the ice for the first time in 17 days. Most recently Princeton was at Dartmouth and Harvard for a three-point weekend.
Princeton is at Quinnipiac tonight, with face-off in Hamden at 6.
Right now Princeton is in fourth place in the ECAC, which brings with it a home series in the first round of the playoffs next month.
As is always the case this time of year, the standings are a bit bunched throughout. Cornell is in first with 26 points, followed by Harvard at 21 and then three more teams - Clarkson, Princeton and Yale - all within three.
It drops back to 15 for sixth-place Colgate, as the teams chase home ice. Teams need to be in the top eight to get into the postseason, and after Colgate you have Union, Quinnipiac and St. Lawrence with 13 or 12 each. From there it's Dartmouth with seven points in 10th place, so you can pretty much see how it's all shaping up.
Princeton has nine regular season games left, with five away and four at home. The next three, starting tonight, are on the road, with a trip to Yale and Brown scheduled for this weekend. It's the first of two meetings between Princeton and those two, and keep in mind that Princeton is one up on Yale right now.
Princeton is also ranked sixth in the country as the team looks for a second-straight trip to the NCAA tournament.
When you talk about Princeton, you of course talk about sophomore Sarah Fillier, who has 13 goals and 21 assists for 34 points. She ranks second in Division I in points per game and third in assists per game, and she is threat to do something spectacular every time she's on the ice.
Her classmate Maggie Connors leads the team with 15 goals and ranks fourth in Division I in goals per game.
In addition, there are other Princeton players who are moving up career lists. From the preview story:
Among Tigers climbing program record lists, senior Claire Thompson has climbed to fifth place on the program's list for career points by a defenseman with 78, 13 back of Laura Watt '07 (91) for fourth. Classmate Carly Bullock's 79 career goals stand seventh on the program's list, eight back of Gretchen Anderson '04 (87) for sixth. Fellow senior Steph Neatby's 11 career shutouts are good for fourth all-time, two back of Rebecca Potter '83 (13) and three behind Rebecca Young '09 and Rachel Weber '12 (14) for the record. Neatby's 1,746 career saves have her closing in Weber's 1,787 for fifth on the program's all-time list.
You can read the whole story HERE.
There will be a lot of women's hockey played by Princeton in the next several weeks. Will Princeton get home ice in the postseason? Will Princeton return to the NCAAs?
Those questions start to get answered tonight.
Monday, January 27, 2020
Rest In Peace
The sports world, no, the world in general, was stunned yesterday by the death of Kobe Bryant.
It was Saturday that the LeBron vs. Kobe debate raged on Twitter after LeBron James moved past Kobe into third place all-time in scoring in NBA history. Many of the tweets, to be honest, were mocking Kobe as a ball-hog who never met a shot he didn't like.
Then, a few hours later, Bryant was gone, killed in a helicopter crash in California at the age of 41, along with his 13 year old daughter. First reports said five peopled had died, including one of Gianna Bryant's travel basketball teammates and the teammate's mother, who coached the team, as well as the pilot, but that total was later upped to nine.
Kobe was a larger than life figure who was known throughout the world. It's even more shocking when you consider that Kobe has been a staple in the public eye as much since he retired nearly four years ago.
In fact, he was seen in a few places just the day before he died, including with a video of him at his Mamba Sports Academy with lacrosse superstar Kyle Harrison and a few young players who flocked to meet him.
There were also numerous videos of him with his daughters on the basketball court.
That's how he was, a big presence, with a big personality who seemed really comfortable out in public, meeting people, talking to them, coaching his daughters. He was not without his issues, and he was not universally loved. He worked hard to fix his public image after he was accused of sexual assault in Colorado, and not everyone was willing to forgive him after that, which is up to each individual.
Through the years, Kobe Bryant was never one of TB's favorite players. He thought comparisons between him and Michael Jordan were understandable, since they played similarly (really hard at all times), but Jordan is the best ever by a wide margin. He did seem like a somewhat selfish player at times, and TB has never been a huge fan of the Lakers. And the incident in Colorado did leave a lot of questions about him for TB.
Still, Bryant died at 41 with one daughter, leaving behind three others, including one who is not yet a year old. It can't be described as anything other than tragic.
And don't forget the others on the plane. The woman who coached the team leaves behind two other children, and TB doesn't know anything about the pilot or the other passengers. It's important to remember this isn't just a Kobe story.
The Toronto Raptors and San Antonio Spurs traded 24-second violations when their game yesterday began, in tribute to Bryant. That was a very nice touch - and it had to be really weird to be at an NBA game yesterday.
TB remembers Bryant's father Joe (Jellybean) Bryant even back when he played at La Salle, and then later in his own long NBA career. Included in his time at La Salle was an 83-78 win over Princeton in the 1973-74 season.
Kobe went straight from Lower Merion High School to the NBA, and he played his entire career with the Lakers. TigerBlog remembers being at Lower Merion for a high school lacrosse game his son played in and thinking "this is where Kobe went."
And just like that, he's gone.
It takes a lot to shock TB, but this definitely did.
There is no segue from the death of Kobe Bryant into the return from exam break for the Princeton men's basketball team that is even remotely appropriate, so TB will just say RIP to Kobe and the other people on the helicopter.
As for Princeton, the Tigers defeated Rutgers-Camden 87-41, which is about what you'd expect. Princeton led 53-16 at the break.
Mitch Henderson played 14 players in the game, and all 14 scored. Freshman Keeshawn Kellman led the Tigers with 20.
More importantly for Princeton, the Ivy League schedule restarts this weekend, with home games against Dartmouth and Harvard. If you're interested in the Ivy standings in men's basketball right now, they look like this:
Princeton, Harvard, Yale 2-0
Cornell, Columbia 1-1
Penn, Brown, Dartmouth 0-2
Again, the top four teams will play at Harvard in the league tournament. Also again, the Ivy champ is the team that wins the regular season.
Princeton is holding in its back pocket a pair of wins over Penn, something not a lot of teams will probably be able to match. The Quakers will once again need every win to get into the Ivy tournament, and Penn knocked off Temple Saturday and looked good in the process.
There's a very long way to go in Ivy League basketball, and it will be a six-week, 12-game sprint to the finish on both the men's and women's side. Every game is important.
And that's it for today. The death of Kobe Bryant and the others on the helicopter have left at least five children without one parent and is just an unimaginable tragedy.
Nothing else seems in the sports world seems all that big at the moment.
It was Saturday that the LeBron vs. Kobe debate raged on Twitter after LeBron James moved past Kobe into third place all-time in scoring in NBA history. Many of the tweets, to be honest, were mocking Kobe as a ball-hog who never met a shot he didn't like.
Then, a few hours later, Bryant was gone, killed in a helicopter crash in California at the age of 41, along with his 13 year old daughter. First reports said five peopled had died, including one of Gianna Bryant's travel basketball teammates and the teammate's mother, who coached the team, as well as the pilot, but that total was later upped to nine.
Kobe was a larger than life figure who was known throughout the world. It's even more shocking when you consider that Kobe has been a staple in the public eye as much since he retired nearly four years ago.
In fact, he was seen in a few places just the day before he died, including with a video of him at his Mamba Sports Academy with lacrosse superstar Kyle Harrison and a few young players who flocked to meet him.
There were also numerous videos of him with his daughters on the basketball court.
That's how he was, a big presence, with a big personality who seemed really comfortable out in public, meeting people, talking to them, coaching his daughters. He was not without his issues, and he was not universally loved. He worked hard to fix his public image after he was accused of sexual assault in Colorado, and not everyone was willing to forgive him after that, which is up to each individual.
Through the years, Kobe Bryant was never one of TB's favorite players. He thought comparisons between him and Michael Jordan were understandable, since they played similarly (really hard at all times), but Jordan is the best ever by a wide margin. He did seem like a somewhat selfish player at times, and TB has never been a huge fan of the Lakers. And the incident in Colorado did leave a lot of questions about him for TB.
Still, Bryant died at 41 with one daughter, leaving behind three others, including one who is not yet a year old. It can't be described as anything other than tragic.
And don't forget the others on the plane. The woman who coached the team leaves behind two other children, and TB doesn't know anything about the pilot or the other passengers. It's important to remember this isn't just a Kobe story.
The Toronto Raptors and San Antonio Spurs traded 24-second violations when their game yesterday began, in tribute to Bryant. That was a very nice touch - and it had to be really weird to be at an NBA game yesterday.
TB remembers Bryant's father Joe (Jellybean) Bryant even back when he played at La Salle, and then later in his own long NBA career. Included in his time at La Salle was an 83-78 win over Princeton in the 1973-74 season.
Kobe went straight from Lower Merion High School to the NBA, and he played his entire career with the Lakers. TigerBlog remembers being at Lower Merion for a high school lacrosse game his son played in and thinking "this is where Kobe went."
And just like that, he's gone.
It takes a lot to shock TB, but this definitely did.
There is no segue from the death of Kobe Bryant into the return from exam break for the Princeton men's basketball team that is even remotely appropriate, so TB will just say RIP to Kobe and the other people on the helicopter.
As for Princeton, the Tigers defeated Rutgers-Camden 87-41, which is about what you'd expect. Princeton led 53-16 at the break.
Mitch Henderson played 14 players in the game, and all 14 scored. Freshman Keeshawn Kellman led the Tigers with 20.
More importantly for Princeton, the Ivy League schedule restarts this weekend, with home games against Dartmouth and Harvard. If you're interested in the Ivy standings in men's basketball right now, they look like this:
Princeton, Harvard, Yale 2-0
Cornell, Columbia 1-1
Penn, Brown, Dartmouth 0-2
Again, the top four teams will play at Harvard in the league tournament. Also again, the Ivy champ is the team that wins the regular season.
Princeton is holding in its back pocket a pair of wins over Penn, something not a lot of teams will probably be able to match. The Quakers will once again need every win to get into the Ivy tournament, and Penn knocked off Temple Saturday and looked good in the process.
There's a very long way to go in Ivy League basketball, and it will be a six-week, 12-game sprint to the finish on both the men's and women's side. Every game is important.
And that's it for today. The death of Kobe Bryant and the others on the helicopter have left at least five children without one parent and is just an unimaginable tragedy.
Nothing else seems in the sports world seems all that big at the moment.
Friday, January 24, 2020
Gradually Getting Going
Okay, everybody say it together: Eli Manning is a Hall-of-Famer.
Manning, who announced his retirement earlier this week, ranks seventh in NFL history in passing yards (57,023), touchdown passes (366) and completions (4,895). That's impressive enough - though you do have to consider that passing numbers are way up in his era.
What you don't have to adjust for is the fact that there are five players who have been the MVP of the Super Bowl twice. Three of them - Bart Starr, Terry Bradshaw and Joe Montana - are already in the Hall of Fame. The fourth is Tom Brady, who figures to have a reasonably good chance of getting there.
Brady and Bill Belichik are 6-3 all-time in Super Bowls. Of their three losses, two came against Manning's Giants, and both because Manning orchestrated late fourth-quarter comebacks - completing two of the most famous passes ever along the way.
So yes, that's a Hall-of-Fame resume.
TigerBlog is glad that Manning is retiring after spending his entire 16-year career with the Giants, as opposed to going to play a year for another team. There's a long list of players who look out-of-place (and past their expiration date) in another team's uniform, and that list includes players like Willie Mays, Joe Namath, Walt Frazier and even Montana and Manning's brother Peyton, if they had success at their last stops.
That list could also include Brady, if he goes to play for a team other than the Patriots. He would look really weird as a Raider, or a member of any other team.
So everyone is in agreement then. Eli is a Hall-of-Famer.
It's good to have that settled.
What else?
Well, today is the end of the the break for first semester exams. That means the athletic schedule gradually gets going this weekend, with the men's and women's track and field teams on the road, the women's tennis team really on the road (in Seattle) and three teams at home.
The women's swimming and diving team is home against Columbia tomorrow at noon. The Tigers enter the meet ranked 22nd in the country, which makes Princeton not only the lone Ivy team ranked but also the lone non-Power Five team ranked.
The two-day HYP meet will be at DeNunzio Pool next weekend. The big dates to circle are Feb. 19-22, when the Ivy League championships will be held at Brown.
The men's tennis team will host Buffalo and Drexel in Jadwin Gym Sunday as well, with the first match at 10 and the second at 3.
The men's basketball team returns from exams to take on Rutgers-Camden Sunday at noon. Raise your hand if you've covered games at Rutgers-Camden.
TigerBlog has, back when he was in the newspaper business. His most vivid memories of his games there, back when he was covering Trenton State College (which a long time ago became The College of New Jersey) was that Rutgers-Camden was the last place he worked that didn't have phone jacks. The gym there still had the phones where the wires went directly into the wall, as opposed to into the jack, and so to transmit a story, he needed the really, really old fashioned acoustic couplers to go with his really old fashioned TRS-80 word processor.
Princeton hasn't played since it beat Penn twice in six days to go to 2-0 in the league, which is a great start as the team chases the league title and the league tournament.
Princeton will then go back into the Ivy schedule next weekend, hosting Dartmouth and Harvard. That will begin a run of 12 games in 37 days leading up to the end of the regular season.
This weekend will also see the second games in the travel partner matchups. Yale, Harvard and Columbia will all look to join Princeton at 2-0.
And of course, this marks the last year that Princeton Athletics will have these two weeks off in January for first semester exams. With the new academic calendar there will come new schedules, and this time of year will be largely different around here.
Manning, who announced his retirement earlier this week, ranks seventh in NFL history in passing yards (57,023), touchdown passes (366) and completions (4,895). That's impressive enough - though you do have to consider that passing numbers are way up in his era.
What you don't have to adjust for is the fact that there are five players who have been the MVP of the Super Bowl twice. Three of them - Bart Starr, Terry Bradshaw and Joe Montana - are already in the Hall of Fame. The fourth is Tom Brady, who figures to have a reasonably good chance of getting there.
Brady and Bill Belichik are 6-3 all-time in Super Bowls. Of their three losses, two came against Manning's Giants, and both because Manning orchestrated late fourth-quarter comebacks - completing two of the most famous passes ever along the way.
So yes, that's a Hall-of-Fame resume.
TigerBlog is glad that Manning is retiring after spending his entire 16-year career with the Giants, as opposed to going to play a year for another team. There's a long list of players who look out-of-place (and past their expiration date) in another team's uniform, and that list includes players like Willie Mays, Joe Namath, Walt Frazier and even Montana and Manning's brother Peyton, if they had success at their last stops.
That list could also include Brady, if he goes to play for a team other than the Patriots. He would look really weird as a Raider, or a member of any other team.
So everyone is in agreement then. Eli is a Hall-of-Famer.
It's good to have that settled.
What else?
Well, today is the end of the the break for first semester exams. That means the athletic schedule gradually gets going this weekend, with the men's and women's track and field teams on the road, the women's tennis team really on the road (in Seattle) and three teams at home.
The women's swimming and diving team is home against Columbia tomorrow at noon. The Tigers enter the meet ranked 22nd in the country, which makes Princeton not only the lone Ivy team ranked but also the lone non-Power Five team ranked.
The two-day HYP meet will be at DeNunzio Pool next weekend. The big dates to circle are Feb. 19-22, when the Ivy League championships will be held at Brown.
The men's tennis team will host Buffalo and Drexel in Jadwin Gym Sunday as well, with the first match at 10 and the second at 3.
The men's basketball team returns from exams to take on Rutgers-Camden Sunday at noon. Raise your hand if you've covered games at Rutgers-Camden.
TigerBlog has, back when he was in the newspaper business. His most vivid memories of his games there, back when he was covering Trenton State College (which a long time ago became The College of New Jersey) was that Rutgers-Camden was the last place he worked that didn't have phone jacks. The gym there still had the phones where the wires went directly into the wall, as opposed to into the jack, and so to transmit a story, he needed the really, really old fashioned acoustic couplers to go with his really old fashioned TRS-80 word processor.
Princeton hasn't played since it beat Penn twice in six days to go to 2-0 in the league, which is a great start as the team chases the league title and the league tournament.
Princeton will then go back into the Ivy schedule next weekend, hosting Dartmouth and Harvard. That will begin a run of 12 games in 37 days leading up to the end of the regular season.
This weekend will also see the second games in the travel partner matchups. Yale, Harvard and Columbia will all look to join Princeton at 2-0.
And of course, this marks the last year that Princeton Athletics will have these two weeks off in January for first semester exams. With the new academic calendar there will come new schedules, and this time of year will be largely different around here.
Thursday, January 23, 2020
So What's Next?
So it got pretty ugly at the end of the Kansas-Kansas State game the other night.
The brawl came at the end of the Jayhawks' 81-60 win at the Allen Field House. It was either all the fault of Kansas or Kansas State, depending on which team you like.
It was, of course, completely unnecessary, as it started when Kansas was dribbling out the clock. It was also pretty bad, with real punches thrown, a player who picked up a chair and almost launched it into the middle of the melee and even cheerleaders trying to act as peacemakers.
The repercussions of the fight will be significant. And they should be, since this has no place at all in college athletics.
For starters, referees need to be really diligent about calling technicals at the earliest sign of unsportsmanlike behavior. If you let any of it go, you risk having it build.
For those who think this kind of conduct is much more prevalent in sports now than it was 20 or more years ago, TigerBlog isn't so sure that's the case. It's just that when there is a brawl like this, you don't just hear about it - you hear about it immediately (through social media) and even see it immediately (via smartphones).
If both of those existed decades ago, then there would have been a lot of ugliness caught on video as well, he's pretty sure.
In 2020, though, that's 100 percent how it works. And so it was Tuesday night, when angle after angle began to emerge of the fight. Also in 2020, it's a race to see either who can get the best angle video up on their Twitter account first or who can best make fun of the situation.
Very little of what TB saw indicated that anyone was anything other than entertained by it. That's a bad sign.
For his part, TB went to the official athletic websites for both schools to see what they had to say, if anything, in their game stories. Kansas had nothing - not even its normal postgame story, just a postgame notes page that didn't talk about what happened.
K-State had a quote from head coach Bruce Weber way down at the bottom of the postgame page: "I didn't see what happened at the end of the game. Obviously, I'm disappointed it ended that way."
By yesterday morning, KU had added a statement from its Director of Athletics about the incident.
One by-product of the look at the Kansas site was that TB really liked the postgame notes page.
Interestingly, the look at that page came on the same day that TB was part of a meeting to talk about some of what the future of athletic communications at Princeton will include.
The Princeton Office of Athletic Communications has always been good at evolving, and part of that is abandoning what no longer has value. It's about constant re-evaluation and looking at whatever metrics can help you make decisions while relying on common sense and anecdotal feedback. And about checking out what other people are doing.
So is there a future for the postgame story? What about the pregame story? What do you want to read? How much time are you willing to invest in reading something? What's too long?
What do you want only to consume through social media? What video do you want to see?
These are the questions. The answers constantly change.
This year, Princeton went away from the traditional pregame stories, which had been a staple of goprincetontigers.com in the first 20 years of its existence, to the format of Gameday pages. Do you like those? Are you getting the information you need?
How about bio pages? They're among the most read. Maybe most of the information should be filtered through them?
This is what the meeting yesterday was about.
It's a conversation that has been going on since TB first came to Princeton. He can vividly remember a discussion about the printed seasonal schedules that the OAC used to produce - and how big a deal it was when they stopped being produced.
The issues keep changing. The discussions do not.
What's the best way to get the information out to the people who want it and need it?
Or, as TB always says, what would you do if you were starting athletic communications from scratch?
The brawl came at the end of the Jayhawks' 81-60 win at the Allen Field House. It was either all the fault of Kansas or Kansas State, depending on which team you like.
It was, of course, completely unnecessary, as it started when Kansas was dribbling out the clock. It was also pretty bad, with real punches thrown, a player who picked up a chair and almost launched it into the middle of the melee and even cheerleaders trying to act as peacemakers.
The repercussions of the fight will be significant. And they should be, since this has no place at all in college athletics.
For starters, referees need to be really diligent about calling technicals at the earliest sign of unsportsmanlike behavior. If you let any of it go, you risk having it build.
For those who think this kind of conduct is much more prevalent in sports now than it was 20 or more years ago, TigerBlog isn't so sure that's the case. It's just that when there is a brawl like this, you don't just hear about it - you hear about it immediately (through social media) and even see it immediately (via smartphones).
If both of those existed decades ago, then there would have been a lot of ugliness caught on video as well, he's pretty sure.
In 2020, though, that's 100 percent how it works. And so it was Tuesday night, when angle after angle began to emerge of the fight. Also in 2020, it's a race to see either who can get the best angle video up on their Twitter account first or who can best make fun of the situation.
Very little of what TB saw indicated that anyone was anything other than entertained by it. That's a bad sign.
For his part, TB went to the official athletic websites for both schools to see what they had to say, if anything, in their game stories. Kansas had nothing - not even its normal postgame story, just a postgame notes page that didn't talk about what happened.
K-State had a quote from head coach Bruce Weber way down at the bottom of the postgame page: "I didn't see what happened at the end of the game. Obviously, I'm disappointed it ended that way."
By yesterday morning, KU had added a statement from its Director of Athletics about the incident.
One by-product of the look at the Kansas site was that TB really liked the postgame notes page.
Interestingly, the look at that page came on the same day that TB was part of a meeting to talk about some of what the future of athletic communications at Princeton will include.
The Princeton Office of Athletic Communications has always been good at evolving, and part of that is abandoning what no longer has value. It's about constant re-evaluation and looking at whatever metrics can help you make decisions while relying on common sense and anecdotal feedback. And about checking out what other people are doing.
So is there a future for the postgame story? What about the pregame story? What do you want to read? How much time are you willing to invest in reading something? What's too long?
What do you want only to consume through social media? What video do you want to see?
These are the questions. The answers constantly change.
This year, Princeton went away from the traditional pregame stories, which had been a staple of goprincetontigers.com in the first 20 years of its existence, to the format of Gameday pages. Do you like those? Are you getting the information you need?
How about bio pages? They're among the most read. Maybe most of the information should be filtered through them?
This is what the meeting yesterday was about.
It's a conversation that has been going on since TB first came to Princeton. He can vividly remember a discussion about the printed seasonal schedules that the OAC used to produce - and how big a deal it was when they stopped being produced.
The issues keep changing. The discussions do not.
What's the best way to get the information out to the people who want it and need it?
Or, as TB always says, what would you do if you were starting athletic communications from scratch?
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Another Alarie Award
So if you're wondering what people in college athletic communications offices talk about when their teams are all shut down due to first semester exams, TigerBlog offers this conversation that took place in his office yesterday afternoon.
Who is a better player? Larry Bird or Kevin Durant?
There you have it. Those are the kinds of conversations that happen.
TB's colleague Warren Croxton says he'd take Durant. In fact, he said Durant is one of the 10 best basketball players of all time.
TB then rattled off a list of 10 players he thought were better than Durant: Jordan. Bird. Magic. Kareem. Lebron. Russell. Chamberlain. Robertson. West. Erving.
He actually texted the list to Warren, who looked at it and then said "if Durant and Bird played one-on-one, Bird would never score."
Ah, to be young. Warren is 32 years old, so he can be forgiven. And hey, at least he knew what team Jerry West played for (it's the Lakers).
TigerBlog started to try to explain David Thompson to Warren, but what was the point?
TB was very fortunate to have been able to see ever player on his list play, even if he was a kid for some of them. Certainly with the emphasis on the three-point shot these days, the NBA is a completely different world than it was back then, when the thought was that you couldn't win a championship without a dominant low-post center.
Still, the NBA that TB watched in the 1970s was a great one. It's not Warren's fault he wasn't born yet.
Anyway, that was the conversation yesterday afternoon.
Speaking of basketball, Bella Alarie was honored Monday night at the Philadelphia Sportswriters' Association as its amateur athlete of the year.
The PSWA website has a partial list of past winners, and there is nobody on that list who is from Princeton. On the other hand, the website also says that the awards go back to 1905, so somebody from Princeton must have won before.
Pete Carril? Dick Kazmaier? Bill Bradley?
For that matter, how about Hobey Baker if it goes all the way back that far?
Regardless of if she was the first Princetonian, Alarie is a most deserving winner.
She is the two-time Ivy League Player of the Year, and she'll certainly be in the very serious discussions this year. She is closing in on Princeton's career record for points, and she already has the record for blocked shots.
In addition, she is fourth in career rebounds at Princeton with 854, which leaves her six away from tying Niveen Rasheed for third. TB would not have guessed Rasheed was third in rebounds, since you don't think of her as a rebounder.
With 13 Ivy League games to go, Alarie would need to average 11.2 rebounds per game to get to 1,000. Ellen DeVoe is second, with 942, and Margaret Meier is the only woman ever to reach 1,000 rebounds at Princeton, with 1,099.
Another Princeton record that Alarie has is most times being named Ivy Player of the Week. She won the award the last time Princeton played, after her 25-point, 11-rebound performance against Penn before exam break.
That was the 18th time in her career that she was named the league's Player of the Week. Only Harvard's Allison Feaster, with 21, has more.
What's most amazing about that is that the people who pick such things like to spread them around if they can. It takes a lot to say "okay, let's give it to the same person again."
And yet she's earned it, time and again.
Princeton is 1-0 in the league and 13-1 overall. Alarie has missed four games this year due to injury, but she seemed to be in top form against the Quakers.
There are still nine more days until Princeton plays again. The Tigers will jump into the thick of the Ivy League race next weekend, with their trip to Dartmouth and Harvard.
Princeton will have played only the Penn game in a 33-day stretch and only two games in a 41-day stretch when that trip happens.
After that, it'll be 13 games in 37 days, to the end of the regular season.
Multiply similar numbers around other sports, and things are about to get really busy around here. That won't leave much time for trying to explain to Warren that sports began long before he started watching.
Who is a better player? Larry Bird or Kevin Durant?
There you have it. Those are the kinds of conversations that happen.
TB's colleague Warren Croxton says he'd take Durant. In fact, he said Durant is one of the 10 best basketball players of all time.
TB then rattled off a list of 10 players he thought were better than Durant: Jordan. Bird. Magic. Kareem. Lebron. Russell. Chamberlain. Robertson. West. Erving.
He actually texted the list to Warren, who looked at it and then said "if Durant and Bird played one-on-one, Bird would never score."
Ah, to be young. Warren is 32 years old, so he can be forgiven. And hey, at least he knew what team Jerry West played for (it's the Lakers).
TigerBlog started to try to explain David Thompson to Warren, but what was the point?
TB was very fortunate to have been able to see ever player on his list play, even if he was a kid for some of them. Certainly with the emphasis on the three-point shot these days, the NBA is a completely different world than it was back then, when the thought was that you couldn't win a championship without a dominant low-post center.
Still, the NBA that TB watched in the 1970s was a great one. It's not Warren's fault he wasn't born yet.
Anyway, that was the conversation yesterday afternoon.
Speaking of basketball, Bella Alarie was honored Monday night at the Philadelphia Sportswriters' Association as its amateur athlete of the year.
Congratulations to our very own @bella_alarie on being named the Philadelphia Sports Writers Association Amateur Athlete of the Year‼️
We are so proud of the player but even more so the person you are, B! 🐯🧡 pic.twitter.com/82vy9vAl1w— Princeton WBB (@PrincetonWBB) January 21, 2020
The PSWA website has a partial list of past winners, and there is nobody on that list who is from Princeton. On the other hand, the website also says that the awards go back to 1905, so somebody from Princeton must have won before.
Pete Carril? Dick Kazmaier? Bill Bradley?
For that matter, how about Hobey Baker if it goes all the way back that far?
Regardless of if she was the first Princetonian, Alarie is a most deserving winner.
She is the two-time Ivy League Player of the Year, and she'll certainly be in the very serious discussions this year. She is closing in on Princeton's career record for points, and she already has the record for blocked shots.
In addition, she is fourth in career rebounds at Princeton with 854, which leaves her six away from tying Niveen Rasheed for third. TB would not have guessed Rasheed was third in rebounds, since you don't think of her as a rebounder.
With 13 Ivy League games to go, Alarie would need to average 11.2 rebounds per game to get to 1,000. Ellen DeVoe is second, with 942, and Margaret Meier is the only woman ever to reach 1,000 rebounds at Princeton, with 1,099.
Another Princeton record that Alarie has is most times being named Ivy Player of the Week. She won the award the last time Princeton played, after her 25-point, 11-rebound performance against Penn before exam break.
That was the 18th time in her career that she was named the league's Player of the Week. Only Harvard's Allison Feaster, with 21, has more.
What's most amazing about that is that the people who pick such things like to spread them around if they can. It takes a lot to say "okay, let's give it to the same person again."
And yet she's earned it, time and again.
Princeton is 1-0 in the league and 13-1 overall. Alarie has missed four games this year due to injury, but she seemed to be in top form against the Quakers.
There are still nine more days until Princeton plays again. The Tigers will jump into the thick of the Ivy League race next weekend, with their trip to Dartmouth and Harvard.
Princeton will have played only the Penn game in a 33-day stretch and only two games in a 41-day stretch when that trip happens.
After that, it'll be 13 games in 37 days, to the end of the regular season.
Multiply similar numbers around other sports, and things are about to get really busy around here. That won't leave much time for trying to explain to Warren that sports began long before he started watching.
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Football Tuesday
TigerBlog saw Princeton head coach Bob Surace the other day and congratulated him on having the 2017 World Series title awarded to his beloved New York Yankees.
He laughed and said 2018 too. In the wake of the whole sign-stealing mess, there is one pretty funny part for those who don't like the Yankees - they very likely would have won at least the 2017 Series had the Astros not been blatantly cheating.
Of course, as TB said the other day, why is sign-stealing illegal in baseball? Shouldn't it be on the team giving the signs to protect themselves, rather than the other way around?
The Yankees are very much like the baseball version of the Dallas Cowboys. They are the two most polarizing teams in professional sports, as in you either love them or hate them. TB doesn't remember too many times he's heard someone say "yeah, the Yankees? Theyr'e fine. Don't like them or dislike them."
Because of that, if you're a Princeton fan and not one of those people who loves the Cowboys, then you've been in a tough spot when it comes to Jason Garrett.
On the one hand, Garrett is one of the absolute most likeable and most highly respected Princeton alums that TigerBlog has ever met. The only other Princetonian that TB would compare him to in that regard is former baseball/basketball player Chris Young.
On the other hand, well, it's always been the Cowboys, and you know what that means.
The news that Garrett was out of Dallas and now joining the Giants as their offensive coordinator was therefore very easy to take. Now rooting for Garrett doesn't have to coincide with rooting for Dallas.
With the Giants, Garrett will be working with first-year head coach Joe Judge, who 1) is 38 years old, 2) is someone who has made an extraordinary first impression, 3) has never been an NFL offensive or defensive coordinator and 4) is a graduate of the same high school - Lansdale Catholic outside of Philly - as current Princeton senior running back Ryan Quigley.
Because of No. 3 on the above list, Judge will benefit immeasurably from having someone who has been a successful NFL head coach on his staff. So will Daniel Jones and Saquon Barkley, the Giants' very promising quarterback and running back around whom the team is trying to rebuild.
And now you can root for the Giants and by extension Princeton.
The Super Bowl for this year is set - it'll be Kansas City against San Francisco in Miami. The Chiefs are making their third Super Bowl appearance and first since 1970; the 49ers are there for the seventh time, with a 5-1 record.
By the way, who thought a team could win a conference championship game and only throw the ball eight times? The 49ers simply pounded Green Bay on the ground, and when you can do that, you become basically unstoppable.
To show you how misleading football stats can be, and how big it is to be able to run the ball like San Francisco did yesterday, consider this: Green Bay outgained San Francisco 358-354. Also, Green Bay's Aaron Rodgers was 31 for 39 for 326 yards and two touchdowns - and his team was never in the game.
Quarterbacks throw for 300 or 400 or even 500 yards and lose all the time Teams do not outgain the other team 285-62 and lose. Ever.
TigerBlog is rooting for Kansas City, because Princeton alum John Lovett is on the team. On the other hand, he'd rather see the Chiefs win next year with, presumably, Lovett on the active roster than this year with him on injured reserve.
Finally, this past weekend saw Princeton senior Kevin Davidson compete in the East-West Shrine Bowl in Florida. Davidson was 6 for 11 for 51 yards in the game, with two passes dropped, but the game itself wasn't as big as the week in practice.
Davidson had a great week in Florida, and he's continue to make a name for himself as an NFL prospect as he looks to follow his two immediate predecessors - Lovett and Chad Kanoff - into the league.
Remember, Davidson was only Princeton's starter for one year (plus one game last year against Brown), so he wasn't totally on the radar of pro scouts when the season started. The push he's made in year has been amazing.
Hopefully he'll be in the NFL next year as well.
Even if it would have to be, gasp, Dallas.
He laughed and said 2018 too. In the wake of the whole sign-stealing mess, there is one pretty funny part for those who don't like the Yankees - they very likely would have won at least the 2017 Series had the Astros not been blatantly cheating.
Of course, as TB said the other day, why is sign-stealing illegal in baseball? Shouldn't it be on the team giving the signs to protect themselves, rather than the other way around?
The Yankees are very much like the baseball version of the Dallas Cowboys. They are the two most polarizing teams in professional sports, as in you either love them or hate them. TB doesn't remember too many times he's heard someone say "yeah, the Yankees? Theyr'e fine. Don't like them or dislike them."
Because of that, if you're a Princeton fan and not one of those people who loves the Cowboys, then you've been in a tough spot when it comes to Jason Garrett.
On the one hand, Garrett is one of the absolute most likeable and most highly respected Princeton alums that TigerBlog has ever met. The only other Princetonian that TB would compare him to in that regard is former baseball/basketball player Chris Young.
On the other hand, well, it's always been the Cowboys, and you know what that means.
The news that Garrett was out of Dallas and now joining the Giants as their offensive coordinator was therefore very easy to take. Now rooting for Garrett doesn't have to coincide with rooting for Dallas.
With the Giants, Garrett will be working with first-year head coach Joe Judge, who 1) is 38 years old, 2) is someone who has made an extraordinary first impression, 3) has never been an NFL offensive or defensive coordinator and 4) is a graduate of the same high school - Lansdale Catholic outside of Philly - as current Princeton senior running back Ryan Quigley.
Because of No. 3 on the above list, Judge will benefit immeasurably from having someone who has been a successful NFL head coach on his staff. So will Daniel Jones and Saquon Barkley, the Giants' very promising quarterback and running back around whom the team is trying to rebuild.
And now you can root for the Giants and by extension Princeton.
The Super Bowl for this year is set - it'll be Kansas City against San Francisco in Miami. The Chiefs are making their third Super Bowl appearance and first since 1970; the 49ers are there for the seventh time, with a 5-1 record.
By the way, who thought a team could win a conference championship game and only throw the ball eight times? The 49ers simply pounded Green Bay on the ground, and when you can do that, you become basically unstoppable.
To show you how misleading football stats can be, and how big it is to be able to run the ball like San Francisco did yesterday, consider this: Green Bay outgained San Francisco 358-354. Also, Green Bay's Aaron Rodgers was 31 for 39 for 326 yards and two touchdowns - and his team was never in the game.
Quarterbacks throw for 300 or 400 or even 500 yards and lose all the time Teams do not outgain the other team 285-62 and lose. Ever.
TigerBlog is rooting for Kansas City, because Princeton alum John Lovett is on the team. On the other hand, he'd rather see the Chiefs win next year with, presumably, Lovett on the active roster than this year with him on injured reserve.
Finally, this past weekend saw Princeton senior Kevin Davidson compete in the East-West Shrine Bowl in Florida. Davidson was 6 for 11 for 51 yards in the game, with two passes dropped, but the game itself wasn't as big as the week in practice.
Davidson had a great week in Florida, and he's continue to make a name for himself as an NFL prospect as he looks to follow his two immediate predecessors - Lovett and Chad Kanoff - into the league.
Remember, Davidson was only Princeton's starter for one year (plus one game last year against Brown), so he wasn't totally on the radar of pro scouts when the season started. The push he's made in year has been amazing.
Hopefully he'll be in the NFL next year as well.
Even if it would have to be, gasp, Dallas.
Monday, January 20, 2020
Remembering John Doar
Today is the national holiday of Martin Luther King Day.
TB has written about this holiday before, including this:
When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
The United States has 10 officially recognized federal holidays.
They are:
New Year's Day
The Birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.
Washington's Birthday
Memorial Day
Independence Day
Labor Day
Columbus Day
Veterans' Day
Thanksgiving
Christmas
According to the official government website, the official name of "Presidents Day" is really "Washington's Birthday," and it offers this explanation:
This holiday is designated as "Washington's Birthday" in section 6103(a) of title 5 of the United States Code, which is the law that specifies holidays for Federal employees. Though other institutions such as state and local governments and private businesses may use other names, it is our policy to always refer to holidays by the names designated in the law.
In other words, only one federal holiday is named after a person who was born in the United States of America.
That's a fairly large group of people, a group that has accomplished some of the singularly greatest moments in the history of mankind, in every single area of human existence (science, religion, government, athletics, women's equality, economics, discovery and on and on and on).
Only one, Martin Luther King Jr., has ever been honored by a federal holiday in his name.
Dr. King was the driving force in the civil rights movement, and his non-violent approach helped achieve monumental successes in a struggle that had begun with an entire race of people literally in chains.
The holiday falls this year on the Monday after the weekend without any Princeton Athletic events because of first semester exams. There will be events this coming weekend, and then it's the wild month of February, which will see winter Ivy League championships and spring openers in another crossover season.
This weekend, though, was quiet, in contrast to what comes next.
TigerBlog did see the story last week on the main University website and on social media about John Doar and his role in the civil rights movement. Anything with the name "John Doar" in it gets his attention.
John Doar, a member of the Class of 1944, was a native Minnesotan who went on to play basketball at Princeton and then attend law school at the University of California. After that, he practiced law in the family firm in Wisconsin, and there was absolutely nothing that suggested he was about to become a towering figure in the South.
This is from a story TB wrote about Doar almost 20 years ago:
"I looked around late in 1959 and became conscious from newspaper articles and magazines that nothing had happened with segregation since I left Princeton," he says. "A friend of mine called me and asked if I'd like to go to work for the Justice Department, in the Civil Rights Division. It didn't take me long to say I'd do it. I moved my family to Washington on July 4, 1960."
He'd had conversations with Princetonians from the South about segregation at Tiger Inn, and then all those years later decided to do something about it.
And do something he did.
TigerBlog would end up spending considerable time talking to Doar long after Doar retired. TB also nominated him for the NCAA Inspiration Award, which Doar ended up winning - and then ended up sending TB a handwritten thank-you note that he still has.
You can read TB's feature on him HERE.
You can read the story from princeton.edu HERE. A book about Doar's role in the civil rights movement is in the works from Princeton professor Kevin Kruse. If you read the two stories, you'll get a better sense of who Doar was and what his role was in the South in the 1960s.
If you've never heard of him, he's definitely worth reading up about.
Especially today.
TB has written about this holiday before, including this:
When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
The United States has 10 officially recognized federal holidays.
They are:
New Year's Day
The Birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.
Washington's Birthday
Memorial Day
Independence Day
Labor Day
Columbus Day
Veterans' Day
Thanksgiving
Christmas
According to the official government website, the official name of "Presidents Day" is really "Washington's Birthday," and it offers this explanation:
This holiday is designated as "Washington's Birthday" in section 6103(a) of title 5 of the United States Code, which is the law that specifies holidays for Federal employees. Though other institutions such as state and local governments and private businesses may use other names, it is our policy to always refer to holidays by the names designated in the law.
In other words, only one federal holiday is named after a person who was born in the United States of America.
That's a fairly large group of people, a group that has accomplished some of the singularly greatest moments in the history of mankind, in every single area of human existence (science, religion, government, athletics, women's equality, economics, discovery and on and on and on).
Only one, Martin Luther King Jr., has ever been honored by a federal holiday in his name.
Dr. King was the driving force in the civil rights movement, and his non-violent approach helped achieve monumental successes in a struggle that had begun with an entire race of people literally in chains.
The holiday falls this year on the Monday after the weekend without any Princeton Athletic events because of first semester exams. There will be events this coming weekend, and then it's the wild month of February, which will see winter Ivy League championships and spring openers in another crossover season.
This weekend, though, was quiet, in contrast to what comes next.
TigerBlog did see the story last week on the main University website and on social media about John Doar and his role in the civil rights movement. Anything with the name "John Doar" in it gets his attention.
John Doar, a member of the Class of 1944, was a native Minnesotan who went on to play basketball at Princeton and then attend law school at the University of California. After that, he practiced law in the family firm in Wisconsin, and there was absolutely nothing that suggested he was about to become a towering figure in the South.
This is from a story TB wrote about Doar almost 20 years ago:
"I looked around late in 1959 and became conscious from newspaper articles and magazines that nothing had happened with segregation since I left Princeton," he says. "A friend of mine called me and asked if I'd like to go to work for the Justice Department, in the Civil Rights Division. It didn't take me long to say I'd do it. I moved my family to Washington on July 4, 1960."
He'd had conversations with Princetonians from the South about segregation at Tiger Inn, and then all those years later decided to do something about it.
And do something he did.
TigerBlog would end up spending considerable time talking to Doar long after Doar retired. TB also nominated him for the NCAA Inspiration Award, which Doar ended up winning - and then ended up sending TB a handwritten thank-you note that he still has.
You can read TB's feature on him HERE.
You can read the story from princeton.edu HERE. A book about Doar's role in the civil rights movement is in the works from Princeton professor Kevin Kruse. If you read the two stories, you'll get a better sense of who Doar was and what his role was in the South in the 1960s.
If you've never heard of him, he's definitely worth reading up about.
Especially today.
Friday, January 17, 2020
Another Gameday For Davidson
This story about the Houston Astros and the sign-stealing is pretty amazing.
It has come out that Astros were stealing signs during their 2017 World Series championship season. That's pretty extraordinary.
This is probably going to end up being one of the biggest cheating scandals in sports history. There are already new reports coming out about the extent to which the team went to steal signs and to relay them, including the possibility that players wore buzzers under their uniforms.
Of course, the question of whether or not sign-stealing should be illegal is another issue. Teams try to do it all the time in other sports, right, especially football.
Shouldn't the onus be on teams to figure out how not to get their signs stolen? Ah, that's a different subject - the reality is that in baseball, stealing signs is illegal.
And the punishments have already been harsh.
The Astros saw their GM and manager suspended for a year and then subsequently fired. Alex Cora, a bench coach at the time with the Astros, was fired as manager of the Red Sox - this after he led them to the 2018 World Series title.
Carlos Beltran is out without ever managing a game for the New York Mets. He was implicated as a player with Houston.
What about if other players are caught, current players? Will they face one-year suspensions?
And, taken to the extreme, could the Astros be stripped of their championship?
It's a fascinating story.
And then there's Odell Beckham Jr., who apparently has some issues with his need for attention. First he handed out either real or fake money to LSU players after the national championship game Monday night. Then he slapped a police officer's butt and subsequently was charge with simple battery.
The worst part is the way he's taken away from the players on the LSU team, a group that has just completed one of the best seasons any college football team has ever had. And there's Beckham, trying to make himself part of it.
The question is, who would want him on their team? What has he ever done other than make a few really spectacular catches with the Giants?
He certainly wasn't much of a factor this year for the Browns. In fact, he had exactly three more TD receptions than Princeton alum Stephen Carlson did for the team.
Speaking of Princeton football and the NFL, it's been a great week for Kevin Davidson as he prepares for tomorrow's East-West Shrine Bowl. That game, which is being played in St. Petersburg, Fla., kicks off at 3 and can be seen on the NFL Network.
There were 70 players from last year's game on NFL rosters this year. It's obviously a big step in the direction of getting into the league.
Davidson's path to this stage hasn't exactly been typical. In fact, you can read a lot more about his story.
Davidson was the backup quarterback for his first three years, though he wasn't backing up just any quarterbacks. There were two NFL quarterbacks, well, NFL players, in front of him, first Chad Kanoff and John Lovett together, then just Kanoff and then just Lovett.
He did have one big moment in the 10-0 season in 2018, when he threw for 299 yards and four touchdowns in a win over Brown. He then started all 10 games this year, and despite being only a one-year starter, he finished his career seventh all-time at Princeton in touchdown passes and 12th in passing yards.
That's not easy to do in basically one season.
Oh, and he's also the Ivy League record holder for touchdown passes in a game with seven, which he did against Bucknell this season.
Davidson is 6-4 and 225 pounds, and he certainly looks the part of an NFL quarterback. He also has an NFL level arm, that's for sure. And that was obvious from the first pass he threw in that Brown game a year ago, a 39-yard pass to Carlson that was perfectly placed.
There were NFL scouts at Princeton games all season, and Davidson impressed them from start to finish.
The game itself is probably the least important part of the week at a senior all-star game. The practices, run while NFL coaches watch, are way more important, and by all accounts Davidson has had a superior week there.
This game, it appears, will not be his last one.
It has come out that Astros were stealing signs during their 2017 World Series championship season. That's pretty extraordinary.
This is probably going to end up being one of the biggest cheating scandals in sports history. There are already new reports coming out about the extent to which the team went to steal signs and to relay them, including the possibility that players wore buzzers under their uniforms.
Of course, the question of whether or not sign-stealing should be illegal is another issue. Teams try to do it all the time in other sports, right, especially football.
Shouldn't the onus be on teams to figure out how not to get their signs stolen? Ah, that's a different subject - the reality is that in baseball, stealing signs is illegal.
And the punishments have already been harsh.
The Astros saw their GM and manager suspended for a year and then subsequently fired. Alex Cora, a bench coach at the time with the Astros, was fired as manager of the Red Sox - this after he led them to the 2018 World Series title.
Carlos Beltran is out without ever managing a game for the New York Mets. He was implicated as a player with Houston.
What about if other players are caught, current players? Will they face one-year suspensions?
And, taken to the extreme, could the Astros be stripped of their championship?
It's a fascinating story.
And then there's Odell Beckham Jr., who apparently has some issues with his need for attention. First he handed out either real or fake money to LSU players after the national championship game Monday night. Then he slapped a police officer's butt and subsequently was charge with simple battery.
The worst part is the way he's taken away from the players on the LSU team, a group that has just completed one of the best seasons any college football team has ever had. And there's Beckham, trying to make himself part of it.
The question is, who would want him on their team? What has he ever done other than make a few really spectacular catches with the Giants?
He certainly wasn't much of a factor this year for the Browns. In fact, he had exactly three more TD receptions than Princeton alum Stephen Carlson did for the team.
Speaking of Princeton football and the NFL, it's been a great week for Kevin Davidson as he prepares for tomorrow's East-West Shrine Bowl. That game, which is being played in St. Petersburg, Fla., kicks off at 3 and can be seen on the NFL Network.
There were 70 players from last year's game on NFL rosters this year. It's obviously a big step in the direction of getting into the league.
Davidson's path to this stage hasn't exactly been typical. In fact, you can read a lot more about his story.
2020 East-West Shrine Bowl: Kevin Davidson ready for his shot - https://t.co/EnQmGT1RFY— NFL Draft Bible (@NFLDraftBible) January 15, 2020
Davidson was the backup quarterback for his first three years, though he wasn't backing up just any quarterbacks. There were two NFL quarterbacks, well, NFL players, in front of him, first Chad Kanoff and John Lovett together, then just Kanoff and then just Lovett.
He did have one big moment in the 10-0 season in 2018, when he threw for 299 yards and four touchdowns in a win over Brown. He then started all 10 games this year, and despite being only a one-year starter, he finished his career seventh all-time at Princeton in touchdown passes and 12th in passing yards.
That's not easy to do in basically one season.
Oh, and he's also the Ivy League record holder for touchdown passes in a game with seven, which he did against Bucknell this season.
Davidson is 6-4 and 225 pounds, and he certainly looks the part of an NFL quarterback. He also has an NFL level arm, that's for sure. And that was obvious from the first pass he threw in that Brown game a year ago, a 39-yard pass to Carlson that was perfectly placed.
There were NFL scouts at Princeton games all season, and Davidson impressed them from start to finish.
The game itself is probably the least important part of the week at a senior all-star game. The practices, run while NFL coaches watch, are way more important, and by all accounts Davidson has had a superior week there.
This game, it appears, will not be his last one.
Thursday, January 16, 2020
Less Than A Month
Here's a true statement to start your Thursday: There's less than a month until opening day for Princeton lacrosse.
The one-month mark was yesterday, actually. The 15th of the month.
Princeton opens its men's and women's lacrosse seasons on February 15th, with the men at home against Monmouth and the women at Temple.
They will have wildly different starts to their season in terms of playing on Sherrerd Field at Class of 1952 Stadium. The men follow the opener at home against Monmouth with a game that Tuesday against Colgate, also at home, which means the men will play more home games in four days than the women will in the first 40 days.
The Princeton men play five of their first six games at home and eight of their 13 total at home. The women play six of their first seven games on the road and then six of the last eight at home.
Both teams will feature history-making offensive players.
Kyla Sears is the only player in Princeton women's lacrosse history with two seasons of at least 80 points. Keep in mind that she's entering her junior season.
Sears has 178 career points; should she match that in the next two years, that would give her 356, bettering the current career record of 285, set by Olivia Hompe, who graduated in 2017.
Joining Sears is senior Tess D'Orsi, who is already 10th all-time in career scoring at Princeton with 187 points. D'Orsi scored 64 goals last year, which is tied for the second-best single-season total in program history - with Sears. Only Hompe with 75 in 2017 has scored more.
The big storyline for the women is the fact the Tigers return a 95-point scorer (Sears) and an 80-point scorer (D'Orsi) and then no player who had more than 10 a year ago (sophomore Maria Pansini).
As for the men, they return Michal Sowers, who will rebreak the school career record every time he gets a point, since he is already the record-holder with 255. He enters his senior season with 105 goals and 150 assists, and his 6.07 points per game are fifth in Division I history and the most in the last 38 years.
Think about that. No player who has played in the last 38 years has as many points per game as Sowers does. That includes the Gait brothers, all of the Thompsons, the great Pat Spencer - everyone.
You can also think about this: Sowers ranks fourth in Division I history with 3.67 assists per game. Should he play in all 13 regular-season games this year and NOT record a single assists, his per game total would drop to 2.73 - which would leave him in 22nd place all-time.
Sowers does not currently hold the career records for goals in a career (Jesse Hubbard with 163) or assists (Kevin Lowe with 174). His career numbers suggest that he has a better shot at the assists than goals; his last game of last year suggests he could get both (seven goals, one assist against Cornell).
As for the single-season record, yes, he holds that. And second. And third. In his first three seasons. He is the only player in program history with at least 80 points in a season, and he's done that three times, including a 90-point junior year that saw him become a Tewaaraton Award finalist.
In its preseason Player of the Year watchlist earlier this week, Inside Lacrosse had him ranked second, behind Penn State's Grant Ament. TigerBlog and Grant go back to when Grant was in fifth grade, and TB has always liked Grant a lot. He would take Sowers over him in an instant.
There is much more to both of the two teams other than their top scorers obviously. For now, one day less than one month away, they're a good starting point.
If you think winter has barely started, consider that Colgate and Jacksonville men scrimmaged earlier this week. The first actual live Division I men's games are Feb. 1, when there will be 12 games.
You can buy tickets to the men's home games HERE. There is no admission charge for regular season women's games.
The one-month mark was yesterday, actually. The 15th of the month.
Princeton opens its men's and women's lacrosse seasons on February 15th, with the men at home against Monmouth and the women at Temple.
They will have wildly different starts to their season in terms of playing on Sherrerd Field at Class of 1952 Stadium. The men follow the opener at home against Monmouth with a game that Tuesday against Colgate, also at home, which means the men will play more home games in four days than the women will in the first 40 days.
The Princeton men play five of their first six games at home and eight of their 13 total at home. The women play six of their first seven games on the road and then six of the last eight at home.
Both teams will feature history-making offensive players.
Kyla Sears is the only player in Princeton women's lacrosse history with two seasons of at least 80 points. Keep in mind that she's entering her junior season.
Sears has 178 career points; should she match that in the next two years, that would give her 356, bettering the current career record of 285, set by Olivia Hompe, who graduated in 2017.
Joining Sears is senior Tess D'Orsi, who is already 10th all-time in career scoring at Princeton with 187 points. D'Orsi scored 64 goals last year, which is tied for the second-best single-season total in program history - with Sears. Only Hompe with 75 in 2017 has scored more.
The big storyline for the women is the fact the Tigers return a 95-point scorer (Sears) and an 80-point scorer (D'Orsi) and then no player who had more than 10 a year ago (sophomore Maria Pansini).
As for the men, they return Michal Sowers, who will rebreak the school career record every time he gets a point, since he is already the record-holder with 255. He enters his senior season with 105 goals and 150 assists, and his 6.07 points per game are fifth in Division I history and the most in the last 38 years.
Think about that. No player who has played in the last 38 years has as many points per game as Sowers does. That includes the Gait brothers, all of the Thompsons, the great Pat Spencer - everyone.
You can also think about this: Sowers ranks fourth in Division I history with 3.67 assists per game. Should he play in all 13 regular-season games this year and NOT record a single assists, his per game total would drop to 2.73 - which would leave him in 22nd place all-time.
Sowers does not currently hold the career records for goals in a career (Jesse Hubbard with 163) or assists (Kevin Lowe with 174). His career numbers suggest that he has a better shot at the assists than goals; his last game of last year suggests he could get both (seven goals, one assist against Cornell).
As for the single-season record, yes, he holds that. And second. And third. In his first three seasons. He is the only player in program history with at least 80 points in a season, and he's done that three times, including a 90-point junior year that saw him become a Tewaaraton Award finalist.
In its preseason Player of the Year watchlist earlier this week, Inside Lacrosse had him ranked second, behind Penn State's Grant Ament. TigerBlog and Grant go back to when Grant was in fifth grade, and TB has always liked Grant a lot. He would take Sowers over him in an instant.
There is much more to both of the two teams other than their top scorers obviously. For now, one day less than one month away, they're a good starting point.
If you think winter has barely started, consider that Colgate and Jacksonville men scrimmaged earlier this week. The first actual live Division I men's games are Feb. 1, when there will be 12 games.
You can buy tickets to the men's home games HERE. There is no admission charge for regular season women's games.
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
Guest TigerBlog: It's Humbling To Be A Junior College Coach
TigerBlog has a standing offer to anyone who would like to write a guest entry, and he's always happy when someone takes him up and writes a meaningful, thoughtful piece on something that is of importance.
Today the floor belongs to former Princeton men's basketball great Howard Levy, a 1985 graduate who was an All-Ivy center and who is still the program's career record holder for field goal percentage. Howard is now the head coach of at Mercer County College, as well as one of the most loyal and well-liked Princetonians you will ever meet.
Today the floor belongs to former Princeton men's basketball great Howard Levy, a 1985 graduate who was an All-Ivy center and who is still the program's career record holder for field goal percentage. Howard is now the head coach of at Mercer County College, as well as one of the most loyal and well-liked Princetonians you will ever meet.
It’s humbling to be a junior
college coach.
The best laid plans and
coaching strategies mostly don’t work and then it’s all about adjustments. This
season, I thought I had it figured out with some great ideas on what to do and
more importantly, how to teach it quickly.
Well, a few months into the season, I realized that the ideas were more
suited to last year’s team, a mostly mature, veteran, very good team that moved
the ball as well as any team I have ever coached, rivaling the 1998 Princeton
team in that regard. So it’s time to
adjust, and my coaching upbringing has been to blame myself, that there is no
problem that better coaching can’t solve.
I had been feeling sorry for myself as my Mercer Vikings team headed
into the holiday break with a 4-8 record, with one game to go against Frederick
(MD) Community College on our annual trip to the Washington, DC, area.
We have visited Washington every
year that I have been the head coach at Mercer, so this is our 12th
trip. I had the idea to give our team an
annual cultural experience to go along with a game, and John Simone, our long
serving Athletic Director, agreed. I
spent seven years in DC from 1987-1994, three as a law student/assistant coach
at George Washington University, and the remainder working as a lawyer, so I
have a lot of good friends and contacts there, both in and out of basketball.
In my first year, then-Georgetown head coach John Thompson III allowed us to practice at McDonough Arena, and the trip
has taken shape from there. After that
first practice, John spoke to my team, and after a few minutes, he grew very
comfortable and started talking as if he was speaking to his own team.
From there, we’ve either played a
game at the Verizon Center (or whatever it is called these days)—usually at 8
or 9am before a Georgetown game—or we have held a practice at the Wizards’
practice facility. Our guys have gotten
to see and meet Georgetown and NBA players and coaches, and I’ve gotten to
deepen my friendships with Wizards execs, including current GM Tommy Sheppard
and former President and GM Ernie Grunfeld.
I have always
followed Ernie - one of the few Jewish NBA players of my generation, and his career closely, and our paths have crossed several times over
the years, the first time being at Brendan Byrne Arena in 1985 during my all-too-brief tenure with the New Jersey Nets. I lasted through the exhibition season, and my first game was against
the Knicks (it was Patrick Ewing’s first game too).
Before the game, players from both teams were shooting around and
talking. I felt a little awkward as I had
no one to talk to; Ernie saw this, came down and introduced himself. We shot
around a bit and started a relationship that has continued over the years.
Of course it has been great to
see John and his dad. John would
normally speak to our team after our game and his words and manner served to
reinforce the fact that our Mercer teams are part of a bigger basketball family. I know the players were surprised and happy
to realize that prominent people in our sport follow them.
John’s dad is one of my all-time
favorites, and I treasure the time we have spent together talking about life
and basketball. Besides his wealth of
knowledge and experience, his personality and way of carrying himself remind me
so much of my (also 6’10”) father, Syd, who passed away too young a dozen years
ago. My last encounter with Coach
Thompson was two or three years ago during John’s last season at Georgetown, when he
saw me leading my team out of the locker room, and bellowed, “Hey MF-er,
they haven’t fired your ass yet?”
Our results on this trip have
been mixed—we’ve lost more than we have won but have won our share. Our usual opponent—Frederick—is a perennially
good team, and we have played some really exciting hard-fought games. I’ll get to this year’s game in a little bit.
In addition to the basketball, we
do some sightseeing in DC. We’ve
visited monuments, usually the Lincoln and Martin Luther King Memorials. We have visited the Holocaust Museum; that
visit was preceded by a session at the Mercer County Holocaust/Genocide
Resource Center.
We’ve been to the
Washington Nationals Baseball Academy, which provides baseball and academic instruction
to underprivileged youths in DC. Two
years ago, we visited the Supreme Court and every other year we try to visit
the U.S. Capitol.
Our former Congressman
Rush Holt has hosted us, as has Congresswoman Terry Sewell (Princeton 1986) of
Alabama. Terry took us onto the floor of
the House of Representatives, where I ran into retiring Senator Tom Harkin, and
he was happy to hear that I coached his son-in-law Steve Goodrich (Princeton
1998).
This year we were fortunate
enough to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Prior to leaving, my good friend and former
Princeton football coach Steve DiGregorio (“Digger”)—currently a history
teacher in his hometown of Nutley, NJ—spoke to the team about what to expect at
the museum. Steve and his son Derek
accompanied us on the trip. The museum
is incredible, but I was most impressed with the engagement and seriousness of
our players, most of whom are African-American from low income backgrounds,
with what I perceive as little knowledge of their history. I was happy and grateful to see them taking
their time and asking questions during our 2+ hours there.
Then it was off to practice at the
Wizards new facility in SE Washington. I
will just say that the practice bore little resemblance to the players’
Instagram posts of them “working” at an NBA facility.
My general feeling about this team is that we
have enough talent to be successful but only with a consistent level of work,
attention to detail and mature behavior that has not been present thus
far. Unfortunately lack of effort and
talking and bickering have been the hallmarks of this team, and solving these
human problems has been our central challenge as coaches. We have found this to be more difficult than
teaching offense, defense or any basketball skill.
After a difficult practice, we
headed to our final, and to me, the most important event of the day—DINNER—not
because of the food but because of the company. This annual dinner is organized by me and two close friends: Rich Dipippo, a DC insurance agent who was
the academic advisor and mentor to many GW student athletes during my time
there; and Jimmy Lynn (“The Judge”), who I met as a Princeton freshman in 1981
when he visited his best friend and Princeton football legend Kevin Guthrie.
The Judge is “Mr. DC” and has built a
tremendous career in sports marketing and diversity, first at AOL, and
currently as a founder of Kiswe—the world’s
most advanced cloud-based interactive mobile video streaming platform
and as a professor of Sports Marketing at Georgetown. He has used his success to mentor scores of
kids and young adults in the DC area, from Georgetown student athletes (usually
those from disadvantaged backgrounds and those from outside the U.S.) to
youngsters at the Nationals Baseball Academy where he serves as a board member.
The food is generally a sidelight
to the evening, but this year it is worth mentioning. The Judge was able to set up the dinner at
Momofuko, one of DC’s top restaurants owned by famed restaurateur David
Chang. Even here, I was happy to see our
guys embracing the atmosphere and eagerly trying new and different types of
foods. One of the guys said it was the
first time he had eaten salad.
In addition to Rich and The
Judge, I try to invite friends and former players to share their life
experiences that I hope will be relevant to our players. In a nice coincidence current Princeton
Women’s DOBO Helen Tau has joined us in the past when she had a similar role at
Georgetown. Over the years we have heard
from former Princeton star and babysitter extraordinaire, current American
University assistant coach Scott Greenman, some of my former GW players, and a
former Mercer player who now has an MBA and is working in real estate, Paco
Boussougou.
Paco’s words were
particularly impactful as he played on my first two teams, and we constantly
butted heads. I even temporarily threw
him off the team at one point. In Paco’s
second year, we went into the holiday break with a 2-9 record only to rattle
off 11 straight wins in January and February to win our Region championship
and earned a berth in the NJCAA Tournament.
This year Digger invited and
introduced Billy Jordan, a great running back and Princeton and now a
successful real estate executive. Billy
had to wait his turn to play at Princeton as he backed up Keith Elias for two
years. He shared how the lessons he
learned about being a good teammate and continuing to work while not playing
have helped him in life. These are
difficult lessons to teach in today’s instant gratification world.
The Judge wrapped up the evening
tying together the life lessons, particularly how simply showing up for work
every single day is the foundation for success. All the speakers offered to be in contact with the guys to help them as
they progress through college and life. I know that at least one of the guys has already followed up, which is
encouraging to me.
I am grateful to my friends for
the interest that they have taken in my guys, and I know that the things they have heard will impact them,
though I am not sure they will have the desired effect by TOMORROW in time to
improve our team enough to win.
I am also grateful for this
entire experience as coaching is an often frustrating job, and when done in
obscurity at a place like Mercer, it’s easy to forget what is really
important—the development of these guys. Hearing my friends and seeing the engagement of the guys is a needed
reminder why I do this.
Oh yeah—the game. Well, we had our moments, overcoming a bad
start to take a lead while playing some beautiful basketball against a more
talented opponent and then issues that have plagued us—bickering, lack of
hustle—showed up and we lost by 15.
I
was particularly distressed to see one of our guys who didn’t play as much as
HE expected sulking and not rooting on his teammates. Of all the things that were discussed at the
dinner, that is the one that can be changed immediately—just fake it!
In any event, my assistant coach
(and former Mercer player) Stan Tuchez and I spoke to them about the need to self-evaluate,
absorb the lessons that they have learned and come back in January ready to get
better. At the very least, we gave them
some things to think about, and I hope they will now see their coach a little
differently—possibly as a human being that cares about them.
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
0.6 To Go
When you walk onto a plane, do you turn to the cockpit to see who the pilots are before walking down the aisles to your seats?
TigerBlog does. He also thinks that probably close to 90 percent of the people do this.
Why? He's not sure.
Is it because it's human nature to see the people who are now entrusted with taking over all control of your immediate future? TB doesn't know the first thing about flying a plane. He needs to be able to trust the pilots.
Still, what exactly are you looking for when you see them? Young pilots? Old ones? Is there anything that suggests that these people do or do not know what they're doing?
TB operates on the theory that 1) the airline has hired these people, so they must have a sense of how to fly a plane and 2) they're going with you, so they presumably have as much invested in getting you where you need to go as you do.
Another thing that TB always figures is that if they know how to taxi the plane to the end of the runway before takeoff, then that's a sign that they have a basic working knowledge of how an airplane works and how to communicate with air traffic control.
TB likes pilots who get on the PA system and have a nice chat with the people in the back. He likes knowing how high they're going to fly, how long it's going to take, that kind of thing. He used to like when pilots would tell you the route, which is something they don't do much of anymore, probably because you can find it out so many other ways, either online or in the little TV in the seat in front of you.
When TB got on the plane in Florida the other day, he did the instinctive look into the cockpit and saw two very, very, very young pilots. And one of them was scarfing down Chinese food while everyone boarded.
Whatever he did, it worked. The flight was uneventful.
TB flew from West Palm Beach to Trenton the other day. There was also supposed to be a flight on the same airline that went from West Palm to Philadelphia, but that one got cancelled and everyone on that flight got put on the one to Trenton.
If you've never driven from Trenton-Mercer Airport to Philadelphia, it takes about 30 minutes. Listening to the Philadelphia people, you'd think that 1) they'd never heard of Trenton and 2) that their flight had gotten rerouted to Utah or something.
As he listened to two such people talk about Trenton as if it were in another country, TB also watched the Princeton-Penn men's basketball game on his phone. Because his flight was delayed slightly, he was able to see the game through to the end, which turned out to be a 63-58 Princeton win that improved the Tigers to 2-0 in the league.
The best game of the weekend for Princeton, or at least the most dramatic ending of a game, was the men's hockey game Saturday night against St. Lawrence. TB also watched this one on ESPN+. Unlike the men's basketball game, he didn't see it to the end, though he thought he had.
He was watching without sound as the teams played through a scoreless first three periods and into the five-minute overtime. And though what he thought was the entire overtime.
When he flipped his computer off, he though the game had ended. Then, about 15 minutes later, he saw the tweet that said that Luke Keenan's goal had given Princeton a win.
What? How had he missed that?
As it turns out, he had looked away for a second and then saw Princeton players on the ice. He figured it had been a 0-0 tie but no - Keenan had tipped in a shot with 0.6 seconds left to win it.
That's 0.6 seconds. After going 64:59.4 scoreless.
Princeton goalie Jeremie Forget was outstanding, as he has been lately, especially in the OT, when he made six saves.
And suddenly Princeton is showing that it could be a team to be reckoned with in the second half of the season. Princeton is only four points away from home ice in the first round of the playoffs, with five more weekends to go. In fact, of those 10 remaining league games, five are against the three teams directly ahead in the chase for home ice - Brown, Yale and Union.
Of course, as with the rest of Princeton's teams, the men's hockey team is on break for first semester exams, and the first of those 10 games is still 17 days away.
Still, it's nice to think ahead to the coming weeks and the stretch run, a time when Ron Fogarty's teams have usually been at their best.
TigerBlog does. He also thinks that probably close to 90 percent of the people do this.
Why? He's not sure.
Is it because it's human nature to see the people who are now entrusted with taking over all control of your immediate future? TB doesn't know the first thing about flying a plane. He needs to be able to trust the pilots.
Still, what exactly are you looking for when you see them? Young pilots? Old ones? Is there anything that suggests that these people do or do not know what they're doing?
TB operates on the theory that 1) the airline has hired these people, so they must have a sense of how to fly a plane and 2) they're going with you, so they presumably have as much invested in getting you where you need to go as you do.
Another thing that TB always figures is that if they know how to taxi the plane to the end of the runway before takeoff, then that's a sign that they have a basic working knowledge of how an airplane works and how to communicate with air traffic control.
TB likes pilots who get on the PA system and have a nice chat with the people in the back. He likes knowing how high they're going to fly, how long it's going to take, that kind of thing. He used to like when pilots would tell you the route, which is something they don't do much of anymore, probably because you can find it out so many other ways, either online or in the little TV in the seat in front of you.
When TB got on the plane in Florida the other day, he did the instinctive look into the cockpit and saw two very, very, very young pilots. And one of them was scarfing down Chinese food while everyone boarded.
Whatever he did, it worked. The flight was uneventful.
TB flew from West Palm Beach to Trenton the other day. There was also supposed to be a flight on the same airline that went from West Palm to Philadelphia, but that one got cancelled and everyone on that flight got put on the one to Trenton.
If you've never driven from Trenton-Mercer Airport to Philadelphia, it takes about 30 minutes. Listening to the Philadelphia people, you'd think that 1) they'd never heard of Trenton and 2) that their flight had gotten rerouted to Utah or something.
As he listened to two such people talk about Trenton as if it were in another country, TB also watched the Princeton-Penn men's basketball game on his phone. Because his flight was delayed slightly, he was able to see the game through to the end, which turned out to be a 63-58 Princeton win that improved the Tigers to 2-0 in the league.
The best game of the weekend for Princeton, or at least the most dramatic ending of a game, was the men's hockey game Saturday night against St. Lawrence. TB also watched this one on ESPN+. Unlike the men's basketball game, he didn't see it to the end, though he thought he had.
He was watching without sound as the teams played through a scoreless first three periods and into the five-minute overtime. And though what he thought was the entire overtime.
When he flipped his computer off, he though the game had ended. Then, about 15 minutes later, he saw the tweet that said that Luke Keenan's goal had given Princeton a win.
What? How had he missed that?
As it turns out, he had looked away for a second and then saw Princeton players on the ice. He figured it had been a 0-0 tie but no - Keenan had tipped in a shot with 0.6 seconds left to win it.
That's 0.6 seconds. After going 64:59.4 scoreless.
Princeton goalie Jeremie Forget was outstanding, as he has been lately, especially in the OT, when he made six saves.
And suddenly Princeton is showing that it could be a team to be reckoned with in the second half of the season. Princeton is only four points away from home ice in the first round of the playoffs, with five more weekends to go. In fact, of those 10 remaining league games, five are against the three teams directly ahead in the chase for home ice - Brown, Yale and Union.
Of course, as with the rest of Princeton's teams, the men's hockey team is on break for first semester exams, and the first of those 10 games is still 17 days away.
Still, it's nice to think ahead to the coming weeks and the stretch run, a time when Ron Fogarty's teams have usually been at their best.
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