15 Miles With Jim Barlow

TigerBlog was not where he wanted to be Sunday morning at 10.

Where he wanted to be was on I-95 on his way to Philadelphia, Lincoln Financial Field, to be exact.

That's where he would have been had this been a normal spring. It would have been Day 2 of the NCAA men's lacrosse Championship Weekend, and TB would have been heading to the Linc for one of his favorite days.

The Sunday of the weekend is always the day for the Division II and Division III championship games. They're a little more laid back than Saturday, which is the Division I semifinals, and certainly Monday, the day of the Division I final and the end of the grind.

The D-II and D-III games offer a chance to see teams that certainly could compete on the Division I level. No, they wouldn't make it to the final weekend, but they would certainly be able to hold their own against most teams.

The day of those two finals starts out with press conferences for the Division I finalists, and the athletic communications groups for both will be up in the press box, getting ready for Monday's game. There is a certain calmness for those games, except of course for the participants.

And there won't be as many people there to cover those two games Sunday, but those who do are the lacrosse diehards who appreciate the spectacle of the moment.

TB certainly does. One thing about the teams from the lower levels is that they usually outclass most of the teams they play, and they also play a lot of games. The result is a stat sheet with players who routinely put up numbers that aren't often seen in Division I.

TB has been the official scorer for every NCAA men's lacrosse Championship Weekend game from 2005 through this weekend. With five games per weekend and 19 years of doing it, that's a total of 95 games. This weekend would have put him at 100 as official scorer on the men's side (he's also done three women's Championship Weekend games as well).

Going back before his role as official scorer, TB had attended every Final Four from 1992 through 2004 except for the three years that the Princeton men were not in it - 1995, 1999 and 2003.

So yes, where TB wanted to be Sunday morning at 10 was on 95, heading to Philly. He'd be aiming to get to the Linc around 10:30, before the 15-minute or so walk from where the workers park into the stadium. Face-off for the first game of Sunday's doubleheader is always 1, but he likes to get there about two hours early to take in the atmosphere and get settled.

So where was he Sunday at 10?

He was arriving in the Jadwin Gym parking lot.

It's a place he's been a lot in his life and not a lot in the last few months, so much so that it feels a bit eerie to be there nowadays. It's been completely empty the few times TB has been there of late, as opposed to its usual fairly packed status.

What was TB doing there? He was meeting up with Jim Barlow, the men's soccer coach. It was on a Zoom call a week or so ago that Barlow mentioned he'd been doing a lot of bicycle riding, so TB suggest they head out one day together.

That day was Sunday.

The two did the 15-mile ride around Princeton that TB learned from John McPhee. It's a great ride - not too many hills, roads that are mostly empty so two people can talk and ride easily. And that's what the two of them did.

TB goes back further with Jim Barlow than anyone else in the athletic department at Princeton. TB was covering high school sports in the 1980s, when Barlow was a star soccer player at Hightstown High School, before he went on to win Rookie of the Year and Player of the Year honors in the Ivy League before graduating from Princeton in 1991.

In fact, this makes TB wonder something. How many people have ever won Ivy League Rookie of the Year, Player of the Year and Coach of the Year honors? Hmmm. TB will look that one up.

His first thought was Sabrina King, the women's volleyball coach, but she's only won the last two. She was not Rookie of the Year.

Barlow has always been a TB favorite. They've had a long-standing "lacrosse vs. soccer" banter that has always been fun, and they've shared a lot of experiences together through all these years.

Barlow replaced Bob Bradley, who went on to, among other things, coach the U.S. men's national team and become the first American to be a head coach in the English Premiere League. TB has always said that Bradley is the deepest thinker he's ever been around, not only as a coach but anyone at all. Barlow isn't far behind.

TB can't think of anyone he knows who doesn't like Barlow. He has a reputation of being the most honest person in the world, one who checks the NCAA rule book for any possibly unintentional minor infraction. He's ultra-competitive and laid back at the same time, in a way that reminds TB a bit of Bill Tierney.

His Princeton resume includes five Ivy titles and five NCAA appearances, the most recent of each having come two years ago. He is very much the embodiment of coach-as-teacher, and he's churned out two decades worth of alums who learned a great deal in his classroom.

As they rode on Sunday they talked about anything and everything - the current pandemic, people they both know, what the future might hold, times they'd been together in the past. There was a lot of good conversation mixed with a lot of laughing, and that's pretty much always what you get with Jim Barlow.

It wasn't where TB wanted to be at that time. Still, it was really nice just the same.