Wednesday, May 10, 2023

It's Time To Celebrate

TigerBlog is celebrating.

Why? Because he just made the last payment on his car. It was a 60-month loan, and now it's all paid off. TigerBlog even has a $20 bonus, because he made the last two payments at once. 

See? Isn't this awesome.

Account is closed. Those are three fun words.

TigerBlog has had a car for more than 40 years now. During that time, he's had a car payment approximately 85 or so percent of the time. Not having one rocks. 

Also, he'll be running his current car for as long as it'll hold up. He hopes that will be a very long time.

While TB is in such a good mood, what else is there to celebrate? 

* Princeton Athletics produced three of the seven winners of the Spirit of Princeton Award, which is one of the highest honors for an undergrad. Those three are Aaron Leung from men's heavyweight rowing, Alexander Mrkalj of men's volleyball and Serena Starks (softball).

What did they do to earn the award? What didn't they do? Again TB is left to marvel at Princeton athletes and wonder "where do they come from?"

If you want to know what they did, you can read all about them HERE. TB recommends you do. You'll be marveling as well. 

If you're wondering about their majors, three of the seven are SPIA majors, with two engineers and one each in economics and computer science. 

The seven winners, by the way, were chosen from among 200 nominees. That makes it all the more amazing. 

* Starks, meanwhile, had to pull off a fairly unique double this week when it came to being honored. She was one of the Spirit of Princeton winners, and she was also the Ivy League Player of the Week. She took home that recognition for the second time in four weeks.

Think about that. Spirit of Princeton Award. Ivy Player of the Week Award. All in the same week. Yeah, that's impressive. 

Starks is hitting .411 on the season as she looks to join Marissa Reynolds, who hit .436 in 2017, as the only Princeton softball players of the last 20 years to finish the season at .400 or better.  

TB will borrow these two sentences from the release on goprincetontigers.com: 

Starks leads the Ivy in batting average, runs scored (36), hits (65) and total bases (77) and will help lead the Tigers into the Ivy League Tournament, which begins Thursday at Princeton Softball Stadium at Strubing Field. The top-seeded Tigers will open against fourth-seeded Columbia tomorrow at noon, and tickets are available HERE.

The second game tomorrow, at around 2:30, will match Harvard and Yale. TigerBlog is trying to think of another Harvard-Yale game held on Princeton's campus, and he can't think of one. There hasn't been one in an Ivy League men's or women's lacrosse tournament, or in the basketball tournaments this year. He has to be overlooking something simple he's guessing. 

The softball tournament is double elimination, and it continues Friday and Saturday. The winner gets the Ivy League's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.

* The Ivy League champion men's golf team will play in the NCAA Regional next week at the University of Oklahoma. The Tigers, you recall, won the league tournament by 18 strokes over Columbia two weekends ago.

To qualify for the national championships, Princeton will need to finish in the top five among 14 teams in Oklahoma.

* Princeton finished second at the Ivy League Heptagonal track and field championships at Penn this past weekend on both the men's and women's side. Princeton had 20 athletes earn All-Ivy League honors, 12 on the women's side and eight on the men's.

Not shockingly, Princeton had first-team All-Ivy pole vaulters on both teams. Sondre Guttormsen continues to add records and championships to his already-stacked resume, and freshman Tessa Mudd continues to build one of her own, as she added the outdoor Heps to her indoor title. 

The NCAA regionals begin two weeks from today in Jacksonville.  

* The women's water polo team is winging its way west today as it readies for the quarterfinal round of the NCAA tournament. The Tigers will play Friday night at 9 Eastern against Cal in Stockton. 

Princeton is making its fourth NCAA appearance and first since 2015.


No comments: