Opening Kickoff

Welcome to the start of the 2024-25 Princeton Athletics year.

Game 1 is actually tomorrow, when the women's soccer team hosts Miami (Fla.) on Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium. Opening kickoff — for the game and the new year — is at 7.

Between now and the NCAA track and field championships in June 2025, Princeton's 38 varsity teams and 1,000 athletes will compete in somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 events. Championships will be won (presumably hopefully). Great moments will happen. Tough defeats will have to be endured. 

There figure to be records set. There also figure to be injuries. Familiar names will do what they've always done. New names will become familiar names.

He's told you this every year, but he always thinks back to when he was still at the newspaper and Trenton State College (now The College of New Jersey) had its kickoff luncheon. The college president at the time was named Harold Eickoff, and he started every one of those luncheons with this: "I predict this is the year that all Trenton State teams will go undefeated."

He obviously wasn't serious. He was more talking about the optimism that this time of year brings, that anything is possible.

There's an excitement that surrounds the start of a new year. It's always the same feeling, at least for TigerBlog.

It's the feeling that lets him know that yes, he chose the right career path all those years ago. What else could he have done with his life? 

If TB didn't have that feeling, then he'd know that it was time to do something different. He always figured he'd work in sports until he found a "real" job, and yet he'd always get to this time of year and thinks "one more year" until he realized that he was a lifer.

And so another year begins. Miami has already played twice, falling 1-0 to North Florida and tying Florida Atlantic 1-1 last weekend. 

There aren't many sports in the Ivy League where the national impact is as great as in women's soccer. There are 336 Division I women's soccer teams (TB is pretty sure that's the number), and a year ago four of the 64 teams in the NCAA tournament were from the Ivy League.

Princeton was one of those four teams. The Tigers won their first round game 1-0 over Michigan before falling to Texas Tech, the No. 2 seed in the region, on PKs after a 0-0 tie.

The 2024 preseason poll has the four NCAA teams from a year ago as the top four: 1. Harvard, 2. Brown, 3. Princeton, 4. Columbia. Harvard, Brown and Princeton all received first-place votes.

If you're looking down the road, Princeton has Brown and Harvard at home and Columbia on the road, the first two in October and the last one in November. For now, in late August, it's the opener. 

Princeton will have something of a new look this year, and even more of a new look in the early season than it figured — though for a very good reason. The Tigers will be without Pietra Tordin, who had 12 of the team's 33 goals last year, and defender Zoe Markesini as both are at the FIFA U-20 Women's World Cup in Colombia.

Tordin, who plays for the United States, and Markesini, a Canadian, will begin play next Saturday. Depending on how far they advance, they could be gone until the final, which will be Sept. 22.

If you want more information on the game against Miami and the team outlook, you can click HERE.

In the meantime, you can keep in mind that there are few better places to watch a game than Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium. You know that as the first game of the year, the crowd figures to be energetic and large. You know that there is no admission charge.

Princeton will also be home the next two Thursdays as well, both at 7, first against Seton Hall and then Penn State. 

And by the time Penn State gets here, the schedule for the other fall teams starts to come into play. And then it's really off and running.

Yeah. TB is in the right business.