Welcome To Crossover Season

Welcome to the start of those two most dreaded words: Crossover Season.

This Homecoming weekend on the Princeton campus, you can see the field hockey team play for an Ivy League championship and automatic bid to the NCAA tournament and the women's ice hockey team play its season opener. 

If you want to travel a bit, you can see the Ivy League Heptagonal Cross Country Championships at Van Cortlandt Park in New York City tomorrow and keep going up I-95 to Harvard for Saturday's men's hockey opener. 

That is the definition of crossover.

It only gets more intense in the next few weeks as more and more winter sports start and fall events get bigger and bigger. If TigerBlog is counting correctly, there are 10 Princeton teams who have regular season events this weekend: men's and women's cross country, men's and women's hockey, field hockey, men's and women's soccer, football, women's volleyball and men's water polo. There's also a wrestling Orange vs. Black scrimmage on Powers Field before the football game, and a men's golf event at Baltusrol, but those are not official intercollegiate events.

In two weeks, that number swells to 13, or probably 14. That's a lot of teams, a lot of athletes, a lot of events and a lot of behind-the-scenes work. 

For this week, it's 10.

It's also the first chance you have to see the women's hockey team in a regular season game, which also means a chance to see Sarah Fillier. Once she steps on the ice for Princeton, she'll join Bill Bradley and Ashleigh Johnson as the only two athletes ever to win an Olympic gold medal and then come back to compete at Princeton.

The Tigers, ranked 10th, host No. 4 Colgate (9-0) and No. 6 Cornell this weekend. The game against Colgate tomorrow night is Black Out Baker night. You can see more information HERE, including this: 

Princeton brings back the scorers of 48 of the team's 58 goals from last season, led by Maggie Connors (13) and Annie Kuehl (10).  Connors has 61 career goals, good for 14th in program history. A 20-goal season would lift her to eighth.

The Heps cross country meet is one of TigerBlog's favorite annual Ivy sporting events. The races take place tomorrow at Van Cortlandt Park in New York City, which is a great spot for watching the runners and enjoying the accompanying atmosphere.

The Princeton men are ranked 19th nationally and second in the Mid-Atlantic Region, behind Villanova. No other Ivy team is ranked in the Top 30, though Harvard was until the most recent poll. 

There is no Ivy League team ranked in the Top 30 among the women, though there are three teams ranked in the top five in both the men's and women's polls: Northern Arizona, Oklahoma State and BYU.

Princeton is ranked fifth in the Mid-Atlantic Region for the women, one spot ahead of Penn. In the Northeast Region, you have four Ivy teams ranked: Harvard (3), Dartmouth (6), Columbia (9) and Cornell (15). 

Another Princeton team that can win an Ivy title this weekend is the field hockey team, something that could actually happen Saturday, one day before the Tigers play their game against Brown (Sunday, noon, Bedford Field). Harvard hosts Cornell Saturday at 11 am; should Cornell win that game, Princeton would be assured of no worse than a share of the league championship and would have the league's automatic NCAA bid. Cornell took down Louisville, the No. 4 team in the country, in its last game.

Regardless of what happens in that game, Princeton gets at least a share of the title and a spot in the tournament with a win against Brown or next week at Columbia. Mathematically, at least, a four-way tie for the championship is possible, but there is no way Princeton missed out on the automatic NCAA bid with a win in either of the last two games.

Oh, and the feature story TB mentioned earlier this week will be up next week, instead of this week.

HERE is the complete schedule for this weekend.

Oh, and of course there is the football game Saturday at 1 against Cornell. TB will have more on that tomorrow, of course, including the fact that it's the 100th anniversary of one of the most historic moments in all of Princeton Athletic history.