Belong The Spoils

TigerBlog isn't sure which piece of news yesterday was less surprising, the announcement of the Ivy League men's soccer Offensive Player of the Year or Coach of the Year.

The Offensive Player of the Year was Princeton's Kevin O'Toole, who led the Ivy League in goals, assists and points. The Coach of the Year was Princeton's Jim Barlow.

This is more than a case of "to the victor belongs the spoils," which, TB learned yesterday, is first credited to William L. Marcy, a politician in 1832 (as opposed to the actor William H. Macy). Princeton, in Ivy League men's soccer, is clearly the victor though, having marched through the league at a perfect 7-0-0.

Hey, by the way, here's a cool stat for you: 

Princeton has eight teams who competed in the fall. Two of those teams are the cross country teams, which don't have league won-loss records per se. For the other six – football, field hockey, men's soccer, women's soccer, men's water polo, women's volleyball - their combined league records are 42-9. That's a winning percentage of 82.3 percent. That seems pretty good.

Also, as TB mentioned the other day, all eight teams either finished either first or second in the league or, in the case of the football team who plays at Penn in the season finale Saturday, will finish either first or second.

The men's soccer team's run through the league has earned the Tigers an NCAA tournament game today at 5 at St. John's, a team who beat Princeton 1-0 back at the end of September. That was a different Princeton team, one that was struggling to get over .500.

Now Princeton is 12-5, having won eight straight, the second-longest current streak in the country, behind only Missouri State's 15 straight. When the All-Ivy team was announced yesterday, the Tigers had eight players on it but only two first-team selections, O'Toole and Lucas Gen. That speaks to what a team effort Princeton put together this year. 

TB wrote about him last week, after the Tigers had locked up the league title with a week to go. You can read that story HERE. 

To sum it up, O'Toole's mother Nancy was a college teammate of former Princeton women's coach Julie Shackford, and she often brought O'Toole and his siblings Jillian and Patrick to Princeton to visit when they were younger. Jillian has gone on to play at William & Mary, where Shackford now coaches and where Shackford's daughter Kayleigh also plays. The O'Toole's spent two years (when Kevin was in first and second grades) living in Poland, which is where he had his introduction to the sport of soccer. 

Oh, and Nancy and TB went to high school together. 

As for Kevin O'Toole, he's also a super young man and, as the headline suggests, the perfect teammate. Talk to anybody about him, and they all call him humble. 

O'Toole's awards added to what was already an big-time resume and put him either at the top or at the very least near the top all-time in program history. He is Princeton's first two-time Ivy Player of the Year, and he is also now a three-time first-team All-Ivy League selection.

Who else is up there? Barlow. If you didn't know, Barlow was the 1987 Ivy League Rookie of Year and a second-team All-Ivy selection as a freshman. He was then a first-team pick each of his last three years and the 1990 Ivy League Player of the Year. The Coach of the Year award this year was his second, after he previously won in 2018 (the award only dates to 2014). 

That makes Barlow an Ivy Rookie of the Year, Player of the Year and Coach of the Year. Nobody else at Princeton can match that, in any sport. 

Also, the 1-0 win over Yale Saturday was the 200th of Barlow's career at Princeton. His record now sits at 200-166-63, and that includes a 32-14-6 record with two Ivy titles in his last three years.

Context can be an important thing too. Is the 200-win threshold big in Ivy men's soccer? Barlow is only the third in league history to get there.

He'll downplay it, of course, because like his star player, he's an extraordinarily humble person. At the same time, he's also an extraordinarily great soccer coach.