Wednesday, January 19, 2022

New Parents, A New Record And A Big Win

As TigerBlog said yesterday, there are a few things he'd like to mention this week.

He starts with congratulations to Kat Sharkey and Tom Schreiber on the birth of their first child, Lillian Grace.

Off the top of his head, TB can only think of one other time where a von Kienbusch Award winner (Sharkey) married a Roper Trophy winner (Schreiber), and that is when Katie Reinprect married Taylor Fedun. Is he missing anyone?

TigerBlog is rooting for Lillian Grace to grow up and score 108 goals in some sport at Princeton. Why 108? That's because Schreiber scored 106 for the men's lacrosse team, and Sharkey scored 107 for the field hockey team.

In fairness to Schreiber, he also added 94 assists, and his resume includes professional and world championships, professional MVP awards and the game-winning goal with one second left in the most recent World Championship, in 2018 in Israel.

For her part, Sharkey was an NCAA champion and an Olympian. Between the two of them, they earned the maximum eight first-team All-League selections. They also were both three-time first-team All-Americans.

How many kids can say that about their parents? That's a lot of athleticism being passed on to the next generation. 

It's also a lot of another quality that you can't get enough of: Sharkey and Schreiber are two of the nicest people you can ever hope to meet. Again, congratulations to the two of them. 

What else? TB goes from husband and wife to brothers.

This past Friday night in Las Vegas, Princeton's and Sondre and Simen Guttormsen competed at the World Pole Vault Summit, and they both had big-time performances.

Sondre set the Ivy League record by clearing 5.71 meters. Simon had been the previous record-holder, having cleared 5.51 meters earlier this season. Simon bettered that mark too, going 5.61 in Las Vegas.

Just to give you a little perspective on those numbers, the NCAA champion outdoors last spring was Branson Ellis of Stephen F. Austin, who went 5.70. That means that Sondre - who competed at the Olympic Games in Tokyo for their native Norway last summer - would have won the NCAA championship with his performance last week. Simon would have been third, behind Sondre and Ellis and ahead of Kentucky's Keaton Daniel, who vaulted 5.55 meters. 

If you're wondering, 5.71 meters is 18 feet, 7.3 inches. The Guttormsen brothers are two athletes to definitely keep your eye on, in much the same way that Donn Cabral was when he ran the steeplechase at Princeton. 

In other Princeton news, there was the wrestling team's 20-18 win over Arizona State Sunday afternoon. That was sixth-ranked Arizona State, by the way.

The win was the third time in three seasons that Princeton has defeated at Top 10 team. The Tigers are also the defending Ivy League wrestling champion, having ended Cornell's nearly two-decade run atop the league standings in the 2020 season (earning Princeton's 500th Ivy title in the process).

TB knows he's said this before, but the job that Chris Ayres and his staff (Sean Gray, Joe Dubuque, Nate Jackson) have done is as great as anything any other coaches have ever done at Princeton. Starting with a team that couldn't field a full lineup, they have built the Tigers into a factor on the national level.

It's extraordinary.

The Tigers open their Ivy League season Saturday against Columbia. The biggest date on the calendar is Feb. 5, when Cornell comes to Jadwin, but that is hardly the only big match left. In fact, that match is followed by a Feb. 11 trip to Lehigh and then a home date with Penn the following day. It doesn't get any easier after that, as it's Princeton-Rutgers on Feb. 16 in Piscataway.

The EIWA championships are the first weekend in March at Cornell.

And those are some of the things that TB wanted to talk about this week. A birth. A record. A huge win.

It's always good when there's good news.

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