An 8-0 Win For 100

Well, if you're going to play three Ivy League women's soccer games in nine days, you might as well start out with pretty much the most perfect script you could have imagined.

Such was the case for Princeton Saturday. 

The Tigers, like all eight Ivy women's soccer teams, began a portion of the schedule that figures to do a great deal to start to sort out the championship contenders and the teams that will make runs for the four league tournament spots. Each team was to play Saturday and then turn it around quickly for games Wednesday and Sunday. 

It's a challenge, to be sure. There's travel. There's game-planning for three different opponents. There are serious swings in the standings that by definition will have to happen.

Prior to this stretch, each team had played one league game. By this coming Sunday night, half the league schedule will have been played. 

Princeton began that gauntlet by hosting Brown Saturday. There were subplots beyond the obvious, including the fact that Princeton head coach Sean Driscoll had 99 wins at Princeton before the game.

Oh, and there was also this little fact: Brown had not lost an Ivy League game since 2018, which was 29 games ago for the Bears. 

So what happened? 

Well, TigerBlog checked the score for the first time at the half and saw it was 1-0 Tigers. Then he didn't go back to the score until he saw this graphic postgame:

FINAL | Princeton 8, Brown 0

That. That was a lot of goals.

Tigers drop the four-time defending Ivy champs 8-0!

We're 2-0 in the @IvyLeague! pic.twitter.com/WJrL7NdO2z

— Princeton WSoccer (@PrincetonWSoc) October 5, 2024

TB had to do a double-take. Was it really 8-0? 

It was. 

So that was, all at once, all of the following:

* Driscoll's 100th win
* the end of the Brown unbeaten streak
* Princeton's first over Brown since 2017
* the most goals scored in an Ivy game by Princeton since an 8-1 win over Penn in 1985
* the largest margin of victory in an Ivy game for Princeton since a 10-0 win over Columbia in 1985
* the largest margin of victory in any game since a 9-0 win over Lehigh in 1999

Those are crazy numbers.

How'd it go from 1-0 to 8-0 in 45 minutes? It was a somewhat normal first half, with only a goal from Lili Bryant 30 minutes in. Okay, there are 1-0 soccer games at the half all the time. 

It took less than a minute of the second half to get it to 2-0, as Heather MacNab cashed in on a penalty kick. Then it was Pietra Tordin's turn to get involved — times three. 

Tordin, who won bronze with the U.S. at the Women's U20 World Cup in Colombia recently, scored the next three, in a span of 15 minutes. Suddenly it was 5-0. 

Princeton wasn't finished, though. Isabella Garces made it 6-0 with 13 minutes left, and then the last two came from Grace Rossner and Ally Murphy a little more than a minute apart. 

The win improved Princeton to 7-3 overall and 2-0 in the league. Next up is Penn Wednesday night at 6 at home, followed by a trip to Yale Sunday. 

As for Driscoll, getting to 100 wins as a Princeton soccer coach is impressive stuff, and it puts him in with elite company in Tiger history. In fact, men's soccer at Princeton dates to 1906, and the women have had a varsity team since 1980.

In all that time, how many coaches have reached 100 wins? 

For the women, only Julie Shackford had done so before Driscoll. Shackford, now the head coach at William & Mary, won 203 with the Tigers.

For the men, Jimmy Reed won 136 games in 29 seasons from 1938-66. The all-time leader in wins at Princeton by a soccer coach is the current men's coach, Jim Barlow, who won his 215th Saturday night at Brown 2-1 to go to 2-0 in the league.

Like pretty much every good coach, Driscoll won't take credit for his achievement. He'll share it all with his assistants and players and all the others who have helped his program move to this point.

Also, if TB knows anything about good coaches, he also won't have time for milestones. Not during a season. Not during a week like this in a season. 

There are still two more games to go. Princeton is now one of two teams in the league to be 2-0-0, along with Columbia. 

The Lions are still down the road for the Tigers though. First, though, it's Penn Wednesday and Yale Sunday. 

What happened Saturday will be a memory come kickoff time.