Scanlan And Lawrence

TigerBlog Jr.'s first day of high school his freshman year was technically considered a "snow day." 

It actually was a hurricane that caused a postponement, but starting off your high school career with something to be considered a snow day has to be a rarity. TigerBlog told his son it was a sign of good luck.

Perhaps the same thing applies to the start of the "spring" semester at Princeton, which began yesterday with during a genuine major snowstorm in Princeton the last few days. Perhaps it's good luck. 

TB certainly hopes so for all Princeton students. Good luck to every one of you this semester.

TigerBlog prefers when the temperature reaches into the 90s to winter. Even a fan of summer like that, though, can appreciate the beauty of nature that is a major snowstorm.

In fact, TB loves to watch the snow fall, the heavy kind that blankets the ground and leaves nothing around other than sheets and sheets of endless pulchritude in every direction. It's amazingly peaceful to see it, especially when it finally stops and the sun reappears, glistening in all directions.

It's everything else about the snow that's a pain in the butt.

It's the shoveling, though even that can be fun. Mostly, there are two things that TB can't stand about snowstorms: 1) eventually it turns brown and muddy and slushy and gets all over everything and 2) it keeps the ground covered as a reminder that spring is not necessarily right around the corner quite yet.

One of TB's favorite days is when the snow finally disappears, without a trace to be found anywhere. That's when you know the warmer weather is on the way.

TB has spent his entire life in this general area, living essentially in a 50-mile radium (even less if you don't count the first two years of his life in Queens) of Jadwin Gym. As such, he long ago became used to the weather here in the winter.

It's cold. It snows every now and then. It gets warmer.

It's hardly a world of brutal winters. As TB said last week, former NHL player John Scott said that 12 inches of snow in Traverse City, Mich., was hardly a big deal.

TB remembers a few massive blizzards, including from when he was a kid, through his days at Princeton. There haven't been that many of them.

He does not understand how people can live their whole lives in places that get brutal amounts of snow and ridiculously long winters.

As you are probably aware, TB is writing a book on the first 50 years of women's athletics at Princeton.

The most recent piece he completed was about former Princeton fencers Susie Scanlan and Maya Lawrence. The two were never Princeton teammates, with graduating years separated by more than a decade, but they were teammates on the 2012 U.S. Olympic team, winning a bronze medal together in women's team epee.

Scanlan grew up in Minnesota. This was her quote about winters in Princeton versus winters in St. Paul:

"My first winter here," she says, "it got to March and April and I said 'that's it?'"

That's good stuff.

TB had never spoken to Lawrence or Scanlan before he interviewed them for the book. As it turned out, their stories are wildly compelling, and TB loved telling it. In fact, it became one of his favorite chapters of the entire project.

That's been one of his favorite things about this book. Actually, his favorite. It's been the ability to take people whose accomplishments he'd long been familiar with and get a chance to hear the human stories behind those accomplishments. It's been a lot of fun. 

In the case of Scanlan and Lawrence, both of them had to overcome major injuries and setbacks. The world of international fencing is a fairly unique entity, and they both told about the physical and emotional toll it took on them to get to where they did.

Scanlan is part of an extremely small class of Princeton athletes. She came back to compete as a Tiger undergraduate after winning an Olympic medal. Not a lot of Princeton athletes can make that claim.

She can make another claim - she won an NCAA championship (the 2013 national team championship) after she won an Olympic medal.

Forget Princeton. How many athletes anywhere can say that?