The All-Americans

TigerBlog was giving thought to the number of meetings he's attended in all his years at Princeton. It's probably more than he could ever begin to count.

Or maybe he can. Hmm. Weekly. Monthly. Conference calls. Multiple decades.

Nope. He has no idea how many he's been a part of though the years. It has to be somewhere around, well, a lot. More than 1,000, he'd guess. Probably closer to 1,500.

It was one of the very first ones where Hank Towns, the beloved former equipment manager, mentioned that teams were practicing way too late, which led to a question of where the athletes were eating if practices were going past the time when the dining halls would close.

"I'm not worried about their dinners," Hank said. "I'm worried about my dinner. They can eat at McDonald's."

Classic stuff.

Meetings are much different in the surreal times in which the world now exists, but they still go on. TB has been on several meetings in the last week, with more to come today and tomorrow, but they've been done remotely through an app called Zoom.

Have you used it?

A link is created (once the app is downloaded), and you can click on the link and be connected with all of the people you otherwise would have met with in person. The only issues is that every person on the meeting is on the screen in their own little box.

It gives the impression that everyone is staring closely at you at all times, in ways that are different from regular meetings, when everyone is around a table. Maybe it's in TB's head, but it takes a little getting used to, that's for sure.

There was an Office of Athletic Communications meeting yesterday to talk about a variety of subjects, including content for goprincetontigers.com and social media. If you looked on the webpage yesterday, you saw a series of stories that had "All-American" in there somewhere. Four straight stories, to be exact.

In short order, Princeton had:

* women's hockey player Sarah Fillier named second-team All-American. Fillier is now the first two-time All-American in program history, and she has achieved this after only her sophomore year. You can read about it HERE.

* two of the stories were about the men's and women's squash All-Americans. There were a total of four Princeton athletes honored, three women and two men. The women, as you might know, reached the national championship match against Harvard. The stories are HERE and HERE.

* finally Bella Alarie keeps adding honors to her already hugely long resume. Alarie became the first Ivy League women's basketball player ever to be a two-time All-American. HERE.

Also, this All-American talk got TB to wondering if there will be spring All-Americans named. On the one hand, it would be nice to have continuity in the records through the years, even if the season's were very much abbreviated. On the other, the seasons were very much abbreviated.

Just something to think about.

Oh, and one more thing for today, something that has nothing to do with Princeton Athletics. 

TigerBlog has always liked his cousin Steve very much, ever since he was a little kid.

Steve is married to Linda, who was MotherBlog's first cousin. Linda's mother and MB's mother were sisters who, if stood one on top of the other, would barely have been taller than Chris Young, but hey, at least they were taller than their brother Maurice.

Linda and Steve have been married for 56 years now, and have raised two daughters, TB's cousins Nicole and Jill (who happens to be a Cornell graduate, but it's okay, TB still loves her).

Steve spent his professional career in the New York City probation department, working with some of the toughest people there - and also helping untold numbers of them to turn their lives around. Standing around 6-6 with a deep voice, a slow manner of speaking and a dry sense of humor, he is very much what used to be known as the strong silent type, the kind of character Gary Cooper might have played in a movie long ago.

This past Sunday Steve turned 80 years old. He doesn't look it, and he certainly doesn't act it. Maybe the first has something to do with the second?

Anyway, TB wanted to sneak in a quick "Happy 80th" to his cousin. You know, because he didn't send a card.