Remembering Al Piranian

TigerBlog will use any excuse he can to use the photo of Gevvie Stone from the 2016 Olympic Games.

It was taken moments after she was given her silver medal in rowing singles. It's up there with any picture ever taken of any Princeton athlete ever.

It's great, right? 

TigerBlog used it as part of his year-long series of rowing features as all four programs celebrate major anniversaries. TB posted two more yesterday (you can read them HERE).

One was entitled "Silver Oars," which tells the stories of Stone, Andreanne Morin and Lauren Wilkinson. All three won NCAA championships at Princeton (Stone and Morin in 2006 and Wilkinson in 2011), and then all three went on to win silver medals in the Olympic Games. Morin and Wilkinson were teammates in the Canadian 8 boat that won silver in 2012, finishing behind a U.S. crew that included another Princeton rower, Caroline Lind.

Not all stories that are told are happy ones, of course. 

The other feature that TB posted yesterday was on Al Piranian, Class of 1969. Piranian was a lightweight rower who never made it to the first varsity boat, but he was as devoted a member of the Princeton rowing program as there has ever been. 

He spent decades as the treasurer of the Princeton University Rowing Association. In addition to that, he also stepped up to coach the first women's rowing team back in the 1971-72 season, which ended with the Eastern Sprints championship.

It was not an easy thing to do back then, coach the women. For starter, there was great resistance in the boathouse to having women row on the part of the man who was the men's heavyweight coach, Pete Sparhawk. For another, there was no money to pay a women's coach.

At the time, Piranian was a recently married graduate student in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Peter Raymond had coached the women in the fall of 1971 while he trained for the Olympics (he'd win silver in 1972), but he needed a replacement when that training got to be too much. Raymond asked Piranian if he'd step in, and Piranian said he would.

Oh, and did TB mention that Sparhawk decreed that the women could only row at 6 am? That means Piranian had to get up ridiculously early every day to coach them.

The story TB wrote about Piranian includes a great deal about his time with the women's team and how much the women loved their coach – and loved to push his buttons. Sadly, it also includes the fact that Piranian was killed recently in a small plane crash at the age of 74. 

By all indications, Piranian was a very solid man, a modest man, a great family man, an extraordinarily loyal Princetonian. There is nobody who would have a bad word to say about him.

TB would go a bit further. He'd say that the success of the first women's rowing team, and the way in which that team showed how women could compete in athletics, made a huge mark on the University and on co-education in general. That team owed a great deal to Al Piranian, and, by extension, so too did women's athletics as a whole.

Why did he do it? Who knows? TB would guess it was because that's just who he was. He loved Princeton Rowing, and so he answered "yes" when he was asked to do something to help.

TB never got a chance to meet Al Piranian. He's heard a lot about him, both during the time he was writing the women's history book and the last few days, when he talked to some of the people who knew him the best. He had to have been a really special person.

There is home women's lighweight rowing this weekend. There's also home women's water polo, softball, women's tennis and women's and men's track and field. 

That's a lot of women athletes who will be competing at home this weekend for Princeton. Not too many, if any, know the name Al Piranian. In his own small way, for whatever reasons he had, he made an important contribution to helping get it all off the ground, to start something that has led to what it is today.

He's gone now, way too early. Maybe take a second this weekend to think about him. 

HERE is the complete schedule for this weekend.