Thursday, November 3, 2022

A Celebration Of Princeton Rowing

The first weekend of November has some "circle this on your calendar" events at Princeton.

As TigerBlog mentioned last week, it's crossover season, with more and more winter teams who are starting their seasons while fall teams are winding down or looking ahead to postseason. This weekend offers a great deal to choose from on both counts.

And yet, with all of that, TigerBlog starts today with a team (or more accurately teams) who won't be competing for a championship until May.

Despite that, this is a huge weekend for Princeton rowing. The Princeton Chase will be held Sunday, after a huge celebration Saturday night as each of the four rowing programs celebrates a major anniversary.

Rowing at Princeton dates back 150 years, to 1872, when it became Princeton's third varsity sport after baseball and football. Since then, the program has added men's lightweight rowing in 1920, women's open rowing in 1970 and women's lightweight rowing in 1998. 

 In that picture, you can see an A. Marquand ’74. That would be the same Marquand as the Marquand Art Library and Marquand Park. This is from his Wikipedia page:

After obtaining his Ph.D., he returned to Princeton in 1881 to teach Latin and logic.[1]

During the 1881–1882 academic year, Marquand built a mechanical logical machine that is still extant; he was inspired by related efforts of William S. Jevons in the UK. In 1887, following a suggestion of Peirce's, he outlined a machine to do logic using electric circuits. This necessitated his development of Marquand diagrams.[2]

McCosh, the President of Princeton, deemed Marquand's relatively mathematical approach to teaching logic "unorthodox and uncalvinistic",[3]an approach he had learned at Peirce's feet. Hence in 1883, Marquand was offered a position teaching art history, a position he held until his death and at which he excelled. He was elected chairman of the Department of Art and Archaeology in 1905. He also served as the first director of the Princeton University Art Museum.

 

There is no practical way to look this up, but TB would guess that Princeton has had more rowers than it has athletes in any other sport, with maybe the exception of football. Rowing at Princeton has been a constant success story from pretty much Day 1, with basically everything Princeton Athletics has ever wanted to be for its athletes and teams. 

Princeton has had more Olympic medals in rowing than in any other sport. The teams have won multiple national championships each, including most recently the last two in women's lightweight rowing.

The program has had great coaches and athletes who have gone on to successes in all walks of life. It's also a deep and loyal alumni organization made up of people from multiple generations who have all benefited so much from their experience with Princeton Rowing.

The celebration this weekend will include 1,000 such people. Think about that. There will be 1,000 people back on campus under the umbrella of Princeton Rowing. That's something that has touched so many in such a positive way.

While the rowing celebration goes on, there are also other events that are huge. Perhaps the biggest is the women's volleyball match Saturday against Yale in a matchup of teams that are currently 10-0 and 9-1 in the league (Yale defeated Princeton in New Haven earlier this season for the Tigers' only league loss). Princeton has to get past 7-3 Brown tomorrow night to set up the match against the Bulldogs Saturday.

This year is also the first of the Ivy League women's volleyball tournament, which will bring the top four teams in the league together to play for the automatic NCAA tournament bid. Princeton and Yale have clinched their spots, and the winner of the regular season race will be the Ivy League champion.

There's also the first two home men's hockey games (Cornell and Colgate), a soccer doubleheader and of course the football game against Dartmouth. You can see the entire schedule for the weekend HERE.

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