Monday, April 10, 2023

"You Should Write About Women's Water Polo"

Reminder — TigerBlog is now available at goprincetontigers.com/sports/tigerblog. The daily entries will be posted here for the near future as well as GPT before being completely moved to the main website. All archives will still be available.  

 Okay, so here's a quick story to start your Monday:

As TigerBlog mentioned last fall, his 87-year-old father recently retired after nearly 65 years in the insurance business. As a man with no hobbies at all, FatherBlog is very bored. When TB asked his father what he did all day, he said he likes to stand in the lobby of his building on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River and talk to the people who come in and out.

FB has also attended a local lecture series, where he's listened to speakers discuss topics like Watergate and Vietnam. TB suggested to his father that he volunteer to give one of the talks, and that appears to be what he's done.

His expertise consist of four areas — the insurance business, traveling (he has been pretty much everywhere), food (he's eaten pretty much everything) and baseball. It appears that he may be giving a talk on the last of those. 

FatherBlog went to Game 5 of the 1969 World Series and saw the game where the Miracle Mets finished off the powerful Baltimore Orioles. He took his ticket stub and framed it, and that hung on the wall in TigerBlog's house for years after that.

At some point, FatherBlog gave the framed ticket to TigerBlog. A week ago, FB asked TB if he still had it, because he wanted to use it to as part of his talk. This led TB to try to figure out where it is, because 1) he knows he'd never have thrown it away and 2) he has moved quite a few times since the 1980s and it could be anywhere. 

A few days ago he went through a bunch of old boxes to see if he could find the framed ticket, and he couldn't. Of course, he got distracted when he found several hundred photos of when he was younger, including from a school trip he took in high school to Switzerland, Austria and Germany. Those trips used to coincide with spring break, and as such, TB and his high school friends found themselves in Switzerland on Easter Sunday. 

The tour leader, who was also the German teacher in TB's high school (and a very funny man), took the group, around half of which was Jewish, to a church for an Easter service. Here are TB's two memories: 1) it was all in Latin and 2) it was mesmerizing. 

And that is TB's way of saying he hopes everyone had a great Easter weekend. And it's also his way of segueing into the Princeton women's water polo team, which did have a great Easter weekend.

TigerBlog got a comment last week that suggested it was time to start writing about the women's water polo team, and that is certainly spot on.

Princeton is now 25-2 and ranked seventh in the country. The Tigers swept No. 14 Harvard and No. 20 Brown Saturday in Providence, moving to 7-0 in the College Water Polo Association.

The win over Harvard came by a 10-8 score in overtime. As with any OT game, this one had no shortage of drama, including having the Crimson tie it with 18 seconds to go. Princeton then outscored Harvard 3-1 in the extra period, and Kate Mallery's fifth of the game sealed it after Harvard had cut it to one with 38 seconds to play.

The second game wasn't quite as dramatic, as Kate Yelensky led Princeton with three goals in an 8-5 win. Neither team scored in the fourth quarter.

Lindsey Lucas made 25 saves for Princeton in the two games. 

Princeton's two losses have come against UCLA (ranked third) and Wagner (ranked 16th). The Tigers finish the regular season this weekend in Ann Arbor, with games against Michigan (ranked 13th), Bucknell and St. Francis (Pa.). 

The CWPA tournament, with an automatic NCAA bid on the line, will be held in DeNunzio Pool the final weekend of April. The championship game will be noon on Sunday, April 30.

By then, TB had better have found the framed ticket.

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