The Chris Sailer Show

The lead story on goprincetontigers.com over the weekend was the one about men's golf alum Evan Harmeling and his first professional victory.

Harmeling won the Savannah Golf Championship in a playoff after tying at 21-under. The win came on the Korn Ferry Tour, which is sort of the Triple-A of professional golf.

Golf in Savannah this time of year? It doesn't get too much better than that if you're a golfer.

The win has Harmeling in the serious running to earn a PGA Tour card. 

The best part about the story about Harmeling's win was this:

Harmeling qualified for the Korn Ferry Tour at the end of 2019 thanks to a high finish on the PGA Latin America Tour. The Princeton politics alum has been exceptionally generous along the way, including donating to his caddie a car he won by making a hole-in-one during a Latin American Tour event and by donating his check from the Massachusetts Open in 2013 to the One Boston Fund following the Boston Marathon bombings.

That says a lot about him.

Harmeling finished sixth at the Ivy League championships in 2012 as a senior after finishing 18th the year before. He's certainly come a long way to get to be the champion of a professional event. 

The Harmeling who won the tournament in Georgia also doesn't look anything like the Harmeling who competed at Princeton. You can see that by clicking HERE and HERE.

Congratulations to Evan Harmeling. TB is hoping to see him on the PGA Tour next year.

Another story on GPT, one that was added yesterday, is the podcast with Chris Sailer that TigerBlog did. 

The two had not done a podcast since March 19, right when the entire COVID-19 situation started to break. TB went back and listened to that one to try to see what stood out the most.

Mostly, it was a reminder of how quickly everything progressed back then. The women's lacrosse team had played at Stony Brook on Sunday, March 8, and then by Wednesday everything had been shut down.

As TB pointed out to Sailer on that March podcast, when they left Stony Brook that Sunday, there wasn't a sense in the world that the season was over.

That podcast brought back the emotions of that week. 

The Ivy League, as you recall, was the first to postpone its basketball tournaments. It was also the first to cancel spring sports - and so for a few hours at least, the Ivy League athletes were the only ones who had to be dealing with it. 

At one point in the March podcast, TB asked Sailer this question: What do you say to your players? 

The same question applies now, nearly seven months later. 

Think about that. It's only been seven months. It seems like a few lifetimes ago.

TB and Sailer spent a lot of time on the podcast in March talking about uncertainty, about the future, about eligibility, about what things were going to look like. Some things have been cleared up, such as what online learning would be like.

And yet others still need to be resolved.

One thing that stands out to TB is that back in March, everyone everywhere thought things would be back to normal by the fall. And yet here we are.

For the podcast yesterday, TB revisited some of the same questions. Again, the common theme was uncertainty.

The women's lacrosse team was to have had 32 players on the roster for the 2021 season. Of that group, 19 have withdrawn for the year, which leaves 13 enrolled players. What will that mean for a potential season? Sailer talked about that.

In general the conversation was about what goes into coaching during a pandemic. Sailer, a member of the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame and a three-time NCAA champion coach at Princeton, has nothing in her background that prepared her for this.

Nobody does.  

These are uncharted waters, obviously. And again, there are more questions than answers right now, including whether or not there will be a 2021 season in the first place.

If the end of the 2020 season seems like a lifetime ago, as TB said it was just seven months. In other seven months, it'll be May. For Princeton women's lacrosse, that's a time that usually means Ivy titles and NCAA tournament runs.

What will things look like then?

TB has no idea. He wishes he did.

You can listen to the podcast HERE.