NCAA Pole Vault Night

There are somewhere around 1,000 Princeton varsity athletes each year, give or take a few.

Of this academic year's group, all but four have started down their summer plans, whether that be travel, internship, research or, in the case of the graduates, moving on with their post-Princeton lives.

If you take a stroll around Instagram, you'll see how many of those seniors are currently in Europe with their now-former teammates, by the way. Or how many current or recently graduate athletes have seen Taylor Swift.

By the way, TigerBlog cannot name too many Taylor Swift songs, which he takes as a generational thing. He does know that the singer performed at Lincoln Financial Field right before the stadium hosted the NCAA men's lacrosse championships and that the press box was sold as a suite. The only problem was that the windows had to be removed so that those in the suite could hear, and they were then replaced with brand-new windows for the lacrosse.

How much do huge brand-new windows cost? Also, the people who sat in the press box left a huge mess, though it was 100 percent immaculate by Saturday's start of the lacrosse (though not by Friday, when TB went down to sync his computer and the scoreboard).

As he just said, there are four Princeton athletes who are still competing. By this time tomorrow, there will only be two left.

The NCAA Track and Field Championships begin today in Austin, Texas, and two of Princeton's four competitors will be competing. Those two would be the Guttormsen brothers, Sondre and Simen, who are certainly among the biggest names in the entire event, let alone their event, the pole vault.

Simen has two fourth-place finishes, both last year (indoors and outdoors), and he is competing this time around after missing the indoor championships due to injury. Sondre, of course, is chasing his fourth NCAA pole vault championship, after having won indoors and outdoors a year ago and indoors this year.

As a bit of a subplot, the two will be graduate transfers this coming academic year at Texas, which is this week's host for the NCAAs.

Sondre is the second Ivy League pole vaulter to win the NCAA outdoor championship in the event. Who was the other? That was Yale's Truman Gardner. Is his name not familiar? That's because he won (or tied, actually) for the first NCAA pole vault championship, back in 1921. His winning height? That would be 12-0.

Gardner, as an aside, was a United States Amateur golf champion in addition to his pole vaulting.

Sondre's winning indoor vault this past March was 19-8 1/4 feet, which tied the all-time NCAA record. He also had only other vaulter within a foot of him, and that was Zach Bradford of Kansas, who was four inches away.

Bradford, now of Texas Tech, won the West Regional two weeks ago, sort of. He finished in a nine-way tie for first at 17-8 1/4, which means absolutely nothing, since it was all about qualifying and the competition ends when there are only 12 athletes remaining in the two regions. That was the same qualifying height for Simen in the East, while Sondre actually qualified at 17-4 1/4.

The winning vault tonight will be much higher.

Bradford, by the way, has won five straight Big 12 titles between the two schools. Most of the top 10 finishers from a year ago are back into the finals this year.

The men's pole vault begins at 7:30 Eastern tonight and can be seen on ESPNU. If you're looking for the Guttormsens, you won't see them quite that early. The bar starts at five meters, which is 16-4. Given that each vaulter wants to limit the number of jumps as much as possible, it'll be a while before either Guttormsen makes his first attempt.

Once the pole vault is over, which will be around 11 or 11:30 Eastern time, the two remaining Princeton athlete will be Kate Joyce in the women's javelin tomorrow at 5:30 Eastern and then Nicholas Bendsten in the men's 5,000 meters Friday at 10:55 Eastern.

In the meantime, there's the pole vault. It may keep you up late, but it'll be well worth watching. There is history on the line.