Get The Picture

Okay, so the women's history book is just about at the finish line.

It's been such a long and involved project, albeit one that TigerBlog has loved doing. Through it all, he has kept telling himself that he can't wait until the book is here and he can finally actually see it, and that time is coming closer.

The final product is going to be well worth your time as a Princeton athletic fan. There are 55 chapters that are separated into nine sections with a total of right around 130,000 words, as well as photos throughout. 

The book tells stories from every decade in the first 50 years of women's athletics at Princeton, and, as TB mentioned before, it begins with this: 

This book begins with an apology to all of the amazing women who competed at Princeton in the first 50 years whose stories are not covered in these pages. There are so many compelling stories to tell about women’s athletic history at Princeton that all of the stories collected here could be deleted and replaced by an entirely different book of the same length – and still have more stories to tell.

As TB said, there is way more than one book's worth of great stories about the women athletes in Princeton history.

For TigerBlog, the writing part was the easy part. The subjects were all so fascinating, and so he had so much to work with in the first place.

The editing and layout? That's been a whole other story. TB has been fortunate to work with two people who very much know what they're doing in those areas: editor Kathy Taylor and designer Mike Trunzo. 

Kathy herself is a member of the Class of 1974, so she knew first-hand some of the early pioneers about whom TB wrote. As for Mike, he knew nothing about Princeton women's athletics when he started working on the project and now is something of an encyclopedia himself.

The toughest part has been tracking down all of the photos. For starters, there are thousands and thousands of pictures here, either in storage on Jadwin E-level or already scanned on servers. Unfortunately, the majority of them are either not ID'd or have file names like "IMG.3124" or something like that. 

TB has tried to get a balance of action shots and current pictures of the athletes through the years, as well as some pictures of athletes whom he unfortunately was not able to write about. 

One of the best things about this project, probably the best actually, is that TB has had a chance to meet some of the women whose athletic achievements he knew about but had never spoken to and to meet some of the women who have done incredible things post-Princeton who he had not yet been aware of prior to starting the book.

He's also had a chance to randomly meet some people who have helped him during the process. That brings him to the story of the random field hockey picture.

Here it is:

Now that's a pretty good picture, right? The problem is that it was labeled "field hockey 80s?"

So how does one go about finding who that is in the photo? 

Well, it certainly looks like 1980s field hockey. It's being played on grass, and it certainly looks like Gulick Field, the very old home of the Tigers, which sat next to Lourie-Love Field, the home of Princeton soccer before Roberts Stadium. 

TB saw Princeton field hockey play at Gulick, before Class of 1952 Stadium was built in the mid-1990s. The only thing he's wondering about from the picture is that Gulick was above Lourie-Love with a small hill in between, and he thinks the fans were on the other side of the field from the soccer field. But hey, assume that's Gulick Field for now.

Who is the player? TB can see the coach in the background, and he thinks that's Betty Logan (whose tragic story is covered in the book). If so, that puts this game solidly in the late ’70s/early-to-mid ’80s.

To find out who it was, TB reached out to four women who played field hockey at Princeton during those years. They in turn included a few other teammates on the email thread. 

Eventually one of them suggested it might be "Mirna." TB went to the records section and found that Mirna Goldberger of the Class of 1988 was a four-time field hockey letterwinner.

He then emailed Mirna, and she in fact confirmed that she was the one in the photo. Mirna thought the game was played her sophomore year in 1985, but TB believes it was actually a year later, at home in 1986. For starters, the 1985 game was played on a rainy day at Brown, whose field hockey field was on the roof of another building.

The 1986 game was a 4-2 Princeton win. When TB looked back in the Daily Princetonian archives from that game, he found this:

"We were very aggressive in this game, pushing up and using the big hit rather than little plays in which it's easy to lose the ball," junior midfielder Mirna Goldberger noted.

And this:

"We were looking for the intercept in the midfield," added Goldberger, who along with sophomore Demer Holleran played a very strong game in the midfield.  

Demer, by the way, is featured in the book in the three-sport athlete section. Her name should be familiar as a three-time national squash champion who also played lacrosse.

As for Mirna, she was more than just someone who found herself in the right place at the right time for one photo. She was actually the 1984 Ivy League Rookie of the Year and then a three-time All-Ivy League selection, including first-team honors in 1985 and 1986. 

She came to the United States in high school, after growing up in Argentina, where field hockey is the biggest sport for girls and women. Betty Logan recruited her from Dwight Englewood in North Jersey. 

She majored in architecture, which isn't easy to do at all, and after graduation she worked in art and architecture conservation. After getting married and moving to Boston to start a family, she has been a high school and middle school Spanish teacher and field hockey coach.

That's her abbreviated story. It's just another one TB would have loved to have included in the book.