Going Back To 2015

TigerBlog learned something yesterday about Blake Dietrick that he didn't previously know.

Dietrick, of course, is one of the greatest women's basketball players Princeton has ever known. She was the 2015 Ivy League Player of the Year, after leading the Tigers to a 31-1 record in a season that featured a 30-0 regular season and the first NCAA win in program history.

TB already knew all that.

What he didn't realize was that Dietrick's high school team, Wellesley High School in Massachusetts, went 84-9 during her time on the basketball team there. If you add together Princeton's rather gaudy 98-22 record in her four years here, you get a total between high school and college of 182-33.

That's a lot of winning, and not a lot of losing mixed in. that's 215 games and 182 wins. That's a winning percentage of .847. That means winning 85 percent of your high school and Division I college basketball games.

How many people can make that claim?

The fact about her team's record has been sitting on her goprincetontigers.com bio page for years now, but TB either never noticed it or never thought to add it to her success at Princeton. When he finally did, he has to admit - he was very impressed.

Dietrick was a great athlete at Wellesley, where she is the school's all-time leading basketball scorer while also being a three-time All-American lacrosse player, not to mention finishing 10th in the state in cross country as a freshman.

She went from Princeton to a professional career that has seen her play in Europe and in the WNBA. She currently is playing professionally in 3x3 basketball, and this past weekend she played for Team USA in an event in Romania.

Dietrick was one of four players on the team that went 2-2 in the tournament, falling to eventual champion Germany 15-14 in the semifinals. Dietrick's teammates in the event were N'Dea Jones from Texas A&M, Jordan Reynolds from Tennessee and Breanna Richardson from Mississippi State.

If you talk to Dietrick for a few minutes, you'll be struck by how unassuming and laid-back she seems to be, especially if you've seen how tenaciously she plays. That fire, plus her obvious athleticism, combined to turn her into a player who has been able to make an impact on the professional and now international levels.

Look at the picture of her on the women's basketball page of goprincetontigers.com right now. Does that player look unassuming? Nope.

Her 2015 Princeton team was an extraordinary one, obviously. Here's a trivia question for you: that team had two players who started all 32 games. One was Dietrick. Who was the other? 

Your hint is that it wasn't Annie Tarakchian or Michelle Miller, who both started 31 of 32 (neither would start on Senior Night).

The 2014-15 season saw Princeton win two of its first three games by the same 59-43 score, against Pitt and Drexel. Only twice in that regular season did a team stay with 10 of Princeton, American in a 63-56 game in November and Yale 56-50 in the first meeting between the two. In fact, Princeton defeated the Bulldogs by 18 two weeks later in the rematch, making Yale the only one of the other seven Ivy schools whom Princeton did not defeat by at least 20 in at least one of the two meetings that season.

Princeton also reached the 100-point mark for a game for the first time in program history in a 104-33 win over Portland State. The Tigers would eclipse that in a 107-44 win over Wagner in three seasons later.

It still bothers TigerBlog, and most Princeton fans, that the Tigers had to play at Maryland in the second round of the NCAA tournament. Princeton was a No. 8 seed despite its perfect record, and TB was hoping for a four or five, which would have meant avoiding one of the top seeds (in this case Maryland) on their home court in Round 2, which is what came to be.

Princeton did defeat Wisconsin-Green Bay 80-70 in the first round of the tournament (Miller had 20 and Tarakchian had 19). The season ended with an 85-70 loss to the Terps in a game that had been four points at the break. Dietrick had a huge night, finishing with 26 points on 10 of 18 shooting.

It's always fun to look back on season's like that. It clearly was one of the greatest seasons any Princeton team in any sport has ever had.

And the trivia question? Dietrick, Miller and Tarakchian were usually joined in the starting lineup by two others, Alex Wheatley, who missed a few games that year due to injury, and the other who started all 32 games - Amanda Berntsen.