Judging by the feedback, everyone seemed to enjoy the Pete Carril quotes yesterday.
TigerBlog figured he'd give you one more before getting started today.
Princeton was playing in one of those in-season tournaments, the ones that were a lot more common back when Carril was the coach. It was the Saturday when it ended, and Princeton had played in the early game that night.
The team had left the arena and gone back to the hotel. TB was still there for the second game and to get his stuff done.
Before he left, he was given a trophy for the Princeton player who had been named to the all-tournament team. TB then took it back to the hotel and found Carril and the other coaches in the hotel bar.
TB gave one of them the trophy and said that it was for the player who made the all-tournament team. While the other coaches said something along the lines of "that's nice," Carril, without ever looking up, said this:
"So did the guy he was guarding."
Epic.
Actually, if TB wanted, he could come up with 20 more stories just like that one.
The point of all this is that Carril has always been exactly what his reputation is. He's a philosopher of sorts, with a no-BS mentality and a way of cutting right to the chase. It's also why he was so good at developing players.
It's what appealed to all of the recruits who came through his office. You can read about that in the "Journey to Jadwin" stories that are about players who played for Coach.
They all say basically the same thing, and that is how much that honesty and directness touched them. It made them want to be the best possible player they could be, and so they signed up for four years of it.
If you look back at the Carril years, he won 13 Ivy League championships in 29 years as Tiger head coach. He took over for Butch van Breda Kolff for the 1967-68 season, tying Columbia for the title his first year (before losing in the playoff for the NCAA bid) and then winning the outright championship and reaching the NCAA tournament for the first time a year later.
Penn would win every Ivy title from 1970-75, but Carril still won the NIT in 1975 in one of the best moments in program history, back when the NIT was played completely in the Garden and when it was still a pretty big deal.
Princeton went 14-0 in the Ivy League in the 1975-76 season and won again a year later. That 1976 title started a run that saw every Princeton men's basketball class except for one win at least one Ivy League championship between then and when Carril retired in 1996.
In fact it would be more than 10 years after Carril retired that the streak would end.
It reminds TB of the men's lacrosse run. If you played men's lacrosse at Princeton in any class from 1992 through 2004, you won at least one NCAA championship.
The football team currently has such a streak going.
The announcement yesterday of the Princeton football Class of 2024 included a note that every recruit who has played for Bob Surace in his 10 years at Princeton has won at least one Ivy League championship.
That's very impressive.
That streak is guaranteed to continue through at least the Class of
2022. There is, of course, nobody in the football program who wants
that to be enough, and so the goal was to put together another top recruiting class to match the ones that have preceded it.
Putting any faith in recruiting services is always risky. On the other hand, Hero Sports, a website that knows a great deal about FCS football, didn't rank the Ivy League schools in their top recruiting classes list but if it had, it would have, according to its own words, had "Princeton first by a mile."
The Tigers also have 22 of the top 500 individual players, as well as seven of the top 100.
The incoming class announcement featured a video put together by TB's colleague Cody Chrusciel in which Cody sat down with Surace to talk about the new players, position by position. The video includes an introduction from each player, as well as highlights from their high school careers.
You can see it HERE.
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