Missing Heps

Well, this weekend would have been the Cornell home weekend for football, men's and women's soccer and field hockey.

TigerBlog isn't sure what the women's volleyball schedule would have been, but it's possible the Tigers would have hosted the Big Red there as well. 

What else would have been coming up on the athletic schedule? The Ivy League Heptagonal cross country championships, which would have been tomorrow.

TB assumes they would have been at Van Cortlandt Park in New York City. Either that or in Princeton.

Because Princeton football played at Cornell on a Friday evening a year ago, TB was unable to attend the Heps cross country meet. The cross country races would have been at 11 and noon at Van Cortlandt, and it would have been cutting it too close to get to Ithaca on time. 

TB considered it, but then the kickoff moved from 7 pm to 6 pm, which made it impossible. As a result, TB had to miss the meet, for the first time in a long time.

There are few sporting events TB enjoys more than the Ivy League Heptagonal cross country meet. It seems a little more special when it's at Van Cortlandt Park, at least once you've found one of the rare parking spaces in the area.

It's a huge party, with eight women's teams and eight men's teams, not to mention eight tents. And a huge number of fans.

The races go off within an hour of each other. There is so much pageantry to the start and so much misery at the finish, as racer after racer gives every ounce of energy he or she has. 

Maybe misery isn't quite the right word, but TB can't really think of a better one.

Each year as TB watches, he stands by the start, sees the runners go off, talks to the million people he knows there from all the different schools as the runners make their way around the course, sees them briefly if the course has them come by the start again and then eagerly awaits the finish. 

As the runners start to head to the chute, he tries to calculate the team scores in his head, but that's not an easy task at all. He's never successfully done it.

It's a fascinating dynamic, as the runners try to improve their positions at the finish and in doing so provide crucial team points, even to teams other than their own. The runner from Team A who just edged out the runner from Team B? That pushed Team C above Team B in the standings.

Maybe it's that the races do not take very long. Maybe it's that it's an entire Ivy League championship season condensed into one day.

Whatever it is, the meet is always exciting and always dramatic, and, from TB's perspective as a non-runner, always fun. It's a big athletic party. 

The weather for Heps always seems to cooperate. Well, almost always. 

TB checked the weather for this weekend to see what it might have been like, and tomorrow's forecast suggests rain and temps in the mid-40s. That would have been less than ideal for spectating, but he would have gone anyway.

And no matter what, it's hard to imagine that the weather for Heps will ever be tougher than it was nine years ago today at the West Windsor Fields course at Princeton.

If you remember that day in 2011, it was snowing. Big-time snowing. There was a rare October snowstorm in Central New Jersey, one that left around four inches of snow on the ground.

It made the football game that afternoon into a snow bowl in a game that Cornell won 24-7, despite two big performances by Princeton freshmen, as Chuck Dibilio ran for 158 yards to break his own freshman single-game record and Quinn Epperly ran for 96 yards of his own.

Their paths would be much different after that freshman year, as Epperly would win the Bushnell Cup and lead Princeton to an Ivy League title in 2013 while Dibilio would suffer a stroke and never play football again. Dibilio's recovery from the stroke was chronicled beautifully by TB's colleague John Bullis in a documentary entitled "When The Game Ends," which you can see HERE.

As for the cross country races that day, they were contested in the ridiculous conditions that the snowstorm created. The Princeton men won the team race, while the women came in third.

It was the kind of day that stands out among all of the gamedays TB has experienced at Princeton. It's hard to believe it was nine years ago already.

As for the 2020 Heps that wasn't, TB can't wait for his next chance to go and watch one.