Friday Night At Columbia

TigerBlog starts today with something you have to read, whether you are a lacrosse fan or not.

This is the story that Trevor Tierney, the first-team All-American goalie on Princeton's 2001 NCAA championship team, wrote about his father Bill, whose Hall of Fame coaching career is now in its final weeks.

Trevor is a unique person in Princeton men's lacrosse history. You don't have to talk to him long to realize he's a goalie, because he definitely has the personality for it. 

He's one of the most cerebral Princeton athletes TigerBlog has ever met. He has incredible depth in his thinking. Had he been born 400 years earlier, he would have become one of the greatest philosophers ever. 

He's smart. He is very, very soft-spoken. And he can write. He's like Sean Gregory, the former men's basketball player who now writes for Time Magazine. When they write, you can really feel the emotion of what they're saying.

That would be true no matter what Trevor wrote. The fact that he's writing about his father at this point of his father's career makes it 10 times, 100 times, more emotional.

You can read the whole piece HERE.

Here's how it starts:

My father has an inauspicious jewelry box in his study at home. Dust gathers on the glass cover. Ten championship rings sit unworn, scattered unceremoniously inside.

They became relics — memories of special teams, people and experiences that went by too fast with the passage of time.

As someone who was raised by, played for and coached alongside Coach Bill Tierney, the following is how I remember his incredible coaching career as it comes to a close.

A tribute to my father, coach and childhood hero.

How good is that? 

Tierney's Denver team appears to be in great shape to play in the NCAA tournament this year, with or without the Big East's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. 

For the Princeton men, it will need the automatic NCAA bid from the Ivy League tournament if they are going to have a chance for a repeat visit to Championship Weekend.

If you recall last year, Princeton did not qualify for the Ivy tournament but instead got an at-large NCAA bid. The Tigers then defeated Boston University and Yale to reach the Final Four, where it lost to eventual champion Maryland.

As a result, the current Princeton team has 15 players who have seen the field in an NCAA semifinal game, including seven who started, but it has no player who has ever been in a Ivy League tournament game. That anomaly changes tonight.

Princeton, the third seed, takes on second-seeded Penn tonight in the second Ivy semifinal game at Columbia's Lawrence A. Wien Stadium. The first game matches top seed Cornell against fourth seed Yale at 6, meaning the Princeton game should start around 8:30. Both of those games can be seen on ESPNU.

The winners meet Sunday for the automatic bid. That game will be at noon, on ESPN2.

Keep in mind, you can watch the Princeton women at 4 on Penn Park, where the Tigers will play Yale in the first semifinal, followed by Penn-Harvard. That championship game is also Sunday at noon. 

Can you get to the game at Penn at 4 and then the men's game at Columbia at 8:30? If you do, let TigerBlog know.

Princeton began its Ivy season with a 9-8 loss to Penn at Franklin Field back on March 18. From there, Princeton won its next four league games, defeating Yale, Brown, Dartmouth and Harvard by an average of 8.5 goals. That set up last weekend's game at Cornell for the league championship, which the Big Red won 14-13, also in overtime.

Princeton, in fact, is 0-3 in OT games this year, having lost to Rutgers the week before Penn. That's a first in program history.

Princeton head coach Matt Madalon always talks about having two paths into the NCAA tournament. There's the at-large route, which eluded Princeton with the three OT losses. Had they all been wins, then Princeton would be an NCAA lock. It shows you how slim the margin of error can be.

Then there's the automatic bid. That's what Princeton is playing for this weekend. 

Whatever got Princeton here doesn't matter. This the start of something new, a full season in one weekend.