First Pitch, Last Championships

So it's another day, another major honor for senior softball player Serena Starks.

She's having quite a week.

To her Spirit of Princeton Award and her Ivy League Player of the Week Award you can now add Ivy League Player of the Year, which was announced yesterday. Actually, you can make that unanimous Ivy Player of the Year.

Starks leads the Ivy League with a .411 batting average, which is 40 points higher than anyone else. If you go further down the list, there are only four Ivy players within 70 points of her. That's a dominant season.

Starks, who also led the league in hits and runs scored, sits 14 hits away from the Princeton single-season record of 79, set by Stacy Thurber in 1994. 

With 65 hits, Starks is tied with Jen Babik (in 1994) for eighth in a season at Princeton. Every player above her played either in the late 1980s or in the 1990s. It is hardly a coincidence that Princeton's two Women's College World Series teams were in 1995 and 1996.

The list of players on the single-season hits list above Starks reads like a Who's Who of great Princeton softball players, with Thurber, Tara Christie (76 in 1996), Michelle Morale and Amanda Pfeiffer (both 74 in 1995) and then Babik (69 in 1995) and Linda Smolka (69 in 1988).

Starks has at least two games left to move up the charts, as the Ivy League softball tournament begins today in Princeton. It's a double-elimination format, and it starts today with matchups at noon between Princeton and Columbia at noon and then Harvard and Yale at 2:30.

There will be three games tomorrow, starting at 10 am, when the winners of today's games play in the winners bracket final in Game 3. The two losing teams from today play at 12:30 in Game 4, with the loser of Game 4 eliminated. The Game 4 winner then plays the Game 3 loser in Game 5, with the loser of that one also eliminated.

Game 6 will match the Game 3 winner and Game 5 winner at noon Saturday. If the Game 3 winner takes that game, then that team is the tournament champion with the automatic NCAA tournament bid. If the Game 5 winner wins Game 6, then that forces Game 7, which becomes winner take all.

If that sounds confusing, TigerBlog apologizes.

As TB said, and as is the case with all Ivy tournaments, the prize is the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. The Ivy League champion is decided by the regular season, and Princeton and Harvard are the co-champs no matter what happens this weekend. Princeton is the host and top seed because of its two wins over Harvard during the season.

The baseball tournament, in which Princeton has clinched a spot, is next weekend, with a similar format, only spread over four days, not three. The site will be determined by the outcomes of this weekend's games, but it will be either Harvard or Penn.  

The NCAA softball selections will be announced Sunday night.

By the way, if TigerBlog is reading the composite schedule correctly, the softball games will be the final home events of the year. 

The Ivy League awards championships in 33 sports, and 29 of those have already been awarded. 

The final four will be earned this weekend, including on the baseball side, where Harvard hosts Yale and Penn hosts Columbia. Penn and Harvard are tied at 13-5, and Harvard holds the tiebreaker for top seed and host. Columbia need one win or one Yale loss to snag the fourth tournament spot.

The final three will come from the Ivy League women's rowing championships and Eastern Sprints for men's lightweights and heavyweights are held.

Princeton is currently the No. 1 ranked team in the country in both women's open and men's lightweight. The women's lightweight team is also No. 1, and the two-time defending national champion Tigers have already salted away Eastern Sprints in that division.

All of the racing this weekend will be on Lake Quigsigamond, in Worcester, Mass. Heats begin at 8:45 and run through midday, and then finals will begin at 1 and run until 6.

Both the Princeton women's open first varsity 8 and the men's lightweight first varsity 8 are unbeaten on the season. The men's heavyweight team is ranked sixth nationally.

The full schedules and results as they happen will be available at row2k.com.