Wednesday, March 1, 2023

Individual Accomplishments

Congratulations go out to the great Ryan Boyle.

Of course he's great. They only let the greats into the Hall of Fame, and Boyle will now be inducted into another one, this time the Premier Lacrosse League's Pro Lacrosse Hall of Fame. 

He's already a member of the US Lacrosse National Hall of Fame. Now he'll be in the second class of the PLL one. He found this out in a great way, by the way.

When TigerBlog thinks of Boyle, he thinks of the single smartest lacrosse player he's ever seen. If you've ever heard Boyle as an analyst on television, you know what TB means.

As for Boyle as a player, you can't help but go back to two moments in his Princeton career. The first was when he set up B.J. Prager perfectly in overtime in the 2001 championship game, a 10-9 Princeton win over Syracuse. 

The other is the 2004 NCAA quarterfinals against a favored Maryland team. Princeton was down two late when Boyle twice took that season's best defender to the cage, scoring both times, to tie the game. Then he made the same move in overtime before setting up Peter Trombino for the winner.

As TB has written many times before, that sequence ranks No. 1 among individual efforts he's seen at Princeton. None of the accomplishments of this past weekend supplant that, but there were still some great ones, including:

* Raunak Khosla of the men's swimming and diving team scored the maximum 96 points at the recent Ivy League championships. He also won the award as the career point scorer, running his total to 380 points. 

His final Ivy championship race saw him win the 200 butterfly for the fourth time. His 1:41.72 also seat a pool record for Brown's pool.

By the way, this was the third time in his career he won the award as the high scorer of the meet.

* Who is leading Division I women's lacrosse in saves per game? That would be Princeton freshman Amelia Hughes. 

Talk about getting thrown into the deep end. Hughes has started her college career with 30 saves in two games, including 19 this past Saturday in a 17-9 win over Temple.

Her performance against the Owls earned her the IWLCA National Defensive Player of the Week Award. That's not the top defensive rookie; that's the overall winner. Again, that's pretty impressive stuff. There only two other goalies of any class who average more than 13 saves per game, and the next highest freshman is Canisius' Jody Chu, who is 16th with 10.33 per game.

It isn't going to get much easier for the women's lacrosse team, who has two nationally ranked opponents in the next four days, both on the road.

It begins tonight at 6 at Rutgers, who had been ranked as high as sixth this season before a loss to Army. After that, it's a trip to Yale, whom Princeton defeated in a matchup of unbeatens in the last game of the regular season to win the Ivy title last year and then again in the Ivy League tournament final. 

* And then there's Princeton baseball player Scott Bandura and the series he had at Georgia.

Bandura went 6 for 16 with five extra base hits, including three home runs. His slugging percentage was 1.063, which places him 16th in Division I.

That was a performance that, not shockingly, earned Bandura the Ivy League Player of the Week award. 

By the way, in case you didn't know it, Bandura grew up in Philadelphia and was a member of the Taney Little League team that reached the LL World Series. You remember that as the team with Mo'ne Davis as its pitcher; she is now a softball player at Hampton. Bandura and Davis attended the same high school, Springside-Chestnut Hill.
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