Jackie And Heidi

If you listened to the "First 50" podcast on goprincetontigers.com yesterday, then you already know the answer to this trivia question:

There are only three women's basketball players in Princeton history who have averaged at least 14.5 points and 7.5 rebounds for their career. Can you name them? 

TigerBlog will spot you two of them.

One is Bella Alarie, and if you're any kind of Princeton fan, then you didn't need TB to give you that one. Another one is Niveen Rasheed.

Now Alarie and Rasheed have five Ivy League Player of the Year awards and seven first-team All-Ivy League selections between them. They were also both All-Americans at Princeton.

In fact, those two have combined for five of the seven Ivy League Player of the Year awards in program history. Bonus trivia question: who won the other two?

Alarie is Princeton's career leader in points with 1,703. Rasheed is fifth with 1,617. 

Were it not for injuries (and in Alarie's case, COVID), both would easily have surpassed 1,800 points. They would have both made a real run at 1,900. Getting to 2,000 would have been tough, but hey, if anyone could have done it, Rasheed and Alarie could have.

And, of course, when you think of Rasheed, you don't necessarily think about rebounding. You think about scoring obviously, and you think about getting out on the break, being a hounding defender and playing with the kind of ferocity that maybe no other Princeton women's basketball player has ever matched.

Then again, ferocity often leads to being the first one to the ball, and therefore to rebounds, so maybe it's not surprising.

So who was the third? 

That would be Jackie Jackson, of the Class of 1978. 

Jackson was one of the two guests on the podcast, along with her former teammate Heidi Nolte, who was one year behind Jackson at Princeton. You can listen to it HERE.

By the way, the picture of Nolte was taken at St. Andrew's in Scotland.

Jackson and Nolte talk about their days at Princeton and then how it impacted them in their careers and lives moving forward. They also talk about the connection between their generation and the current generation of women's basketball players.

And they talk about leadership in general. Both of them went on to careers where those lessons were extremely valuable.

As part of his current project of writing the history of women's athletics at Princeton, TigerBlog has been attempting to find the first black female letterwinner and first black female captain. 

Jackson, it turns out, was the first black woman to be a captain of a team at Princeton. It's something she mentions on the podcast that she wasn't aware of until TB let her know about it.

In addition, she is possibly the first black female letterwinner, having lettered in basketball first in 1975. TB isn't 100 percent sure of that yet, and in fact he welcomes anyone's input who would know definitively. 

One of TB's favorite parts of the women's basketball team's current run of success is the way that the modern day coaches and players have made a concerted effort to engage or reengage the pioneers of the program. A by-product of that is that some of the older players have been able to reconnect.

Jackson, for one, has within the last five years become close again with Margaret Meier, who shared the team captaincy with her in 1978. As a matter of fact, they also shared the von Kiensbusch Award as the to senior female athletes.

When TB talks to the 1970s basketball players, or any athletes for that matter, they all laughingly say something along the lines of: "We would have loved to have had some of the stuff that the kids today have, though we're thrilled that they have it."

Of course, they have that because there were the pioneering women in the first place. 

Two of them were featured on the "First 50" podcast this week. Their impact on Princeton women's basketball has been enormous. 

And hey, anytime you're mentioned in the same sentence as Niveen Rasheed and Bella Alarie, then it's clear that you were a great player.