Celebrating The Athletic Class of 2023

The nearly 700 attendees at last night's Gary Walters Princeton Varsity Club Awards Banquet in Jadwin Gym walked past this on their way into the building:

In fact, so did the thousands and thousands of others who passed by Jadwin on their way to and from the tents and parties that Reunions offers. 

It's a testament to what the Class of 2023 accomplished during its time at Princeton, though it's only a partial testament. The actual numbers are fairly staggering.

A year ago, Princeton won 16 league championships. This year, Princeton won 16 league championships. 

Princeton's Class of 2023 produced 45 team national tournament appearances, 63 All-Americans, 55 individual conference championships and 57 team league championships. There were 11 national championships between teams and individuals.

That's pretty crazy.

Even crazier it this note: Every Princeton senior athlete was part of a team that either won a league championship or appeared in the postseason, other than women's rugby, which only became a varsity program this past year.

When Princeton recruit its athletes, the goal is to give them a well-rounded experience. Part of that, though, is definitely a championship experience, and Princeton has been doing just that for decades now.

Many of the members of the Class of 2023, of course, started out as members of the Class of 2022. Like their predecessors a year ago, these athletes were faced with an unprecedented decision — to stay enrolled a miss a year of athletics or withdraw for a year and maintain their undergraduate eligibility.

There was no right or wrong answer. Each of them had to do what they felt they needed to for their own situations. 

The ones who withdrew had to watch a year ago as their original classmates, and in many cases best friends, graduated. It wasn't easy for anyone.

Those days were very much in the rearview mirror last night at Jadwin. Whether they started in the fall of 2018 or 2019, there they were last night, together once again, to start the six-day run of Reunions/Class Day/Graduation. It's as festive as it gets.

As for the banquet, the big winners were women's tennis player Daria Frayman, who took home the von Kienbusch Award as the top senior female athlete, and Sondre Guttormsen, the Roper Trophy winner (Sondre accepted the award via a pre-taped video as he is on the road competing).

Frayman's win made her the fifth women's tennis player to be the von Kienbusch winner, and the other four were all in the 1970s. Their names: Helena Novakova (1972), Margie Gengler (1973), Louise Gengler (1975) and Aimee Knox (1977). 

As for Guttormsen, he emerged from as deep a field of Roper finalists as TigerBlog can remember, and all of them had extraordinary careers here. This choice, similar to the 2017 von Kiensbusch Award, was not an easy one to make (Ashleigh Johnson, the top water polo player in the world, was the winner, but you had multiple Olympians, national champions, and all-time leading scorers who did not win). 

The other four nominees were a national champion wrestler (Pat Glory), a nine-time All-American swimmer (Raunak Khosla), the leader of a basketball team that reached the Sweet 16 (Tosan Ebvuomwan) and a sixth-round NFL draft choice who was also a track and field All-American (Andrei Iosivas).

The banquet featured a great video that took four athletes — field hockey player Claire Donovan, football player Uche Ndukwe, fencer May Tieu and men's hockey player Liam Gorman — and showed them pictures throughout their connection to Princeton. They then spoke about what they saw, and did so in a way that was grippingly emotional.

TB's favorite part of all of these banquets is the senior slide show at the end.

Not every senior wins an award. Not every senior gets to be All-Ivy League, or even a starter. Maybe they all hope that will be the case when they start out here, but that's not everyone's destiny. 

They all have different stories to tell. Maybe they were a starter but got beaten out by someone younger. Maybe they were hurt and never made it back. Maybe they worked as hard as they could every day but just couldn't crack the lineup.

Ford Family Director of Athletics John Mack called it a "shared experience, and a unique experience," and that's a great way to put it. 

Whatever their story, they all take something from this experience that will stay with them forever. And they all stuck it out, made it all the way to the end, because it was that important to them.

And for that, they all get their moment in the sun, or at least on the big video screens, as their name and picture appear, two at a time, until every senior has been recognized. They smile. Their friends applaud. 

It's a little thing, but it's also a big thing. It's little, in that it only takes a few seconds. It's big, in that it is a validation of all of the years of hard work, doubt, growth, physical challenges and everything else that goes with being a Princeton athlete. 

Every single one of them earned that moment.