You Have To Be Happy For ...

You have to be happy for ... 

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Jenn Cook.

The head women's lacrosse coach at Princeton has her team back in the NCAA tournament after a one-year absence. The Tigers take on Drexel at Boston College tomorrow at 4, with the winner to play the second-seeded host team Sunday at noon.

It's not easy to be the one who takes over for the legend. Sports history is filled with those who tried and didn't succeed. Cook took over for a Hall-of-Fame coach, Chris Sailer, who coached the Tigers for nearly 40 years. 

Putting your own stamp on a program is difficult, but this is clearly Cook's team. She and her staff — Associate Head Coach Kerrin Maurer and assistants Molly Dougherty and Kayla Wood — have navigated through all kinds of hurdles this season, not the least of which was the weather that seemed to pour down rain on the team every chance it could.

The Tigers went 6-1 in the Ivy League, winning their final six league games after dropping an 11-9 game to Yale back on March 2. That Yale game, the league opener for both, turned out to be the Ivy League championship game, since the Bulldogs went unbeaten.

Still, Cook had her team in the Top 20 all season and with an RPI that had Princeton comfortably in the NCAA tournament on Selection Sunday. Now comes the reward — a game against a Drexel team that also received an at-large bid. The Dragons, 13-6 overall, lost to Stony Brook 9-6 in the CAA final this past Saturday.

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The women's water polo team, especially the 13 players who are from California.

Princeton will be in Berkeley for the NCAA tournament beginning tomorrow at 7 Eastern (4 Pacific). The Tigers are the No. 7 seed, and they will open against Hawaii, the No. 2 seed, whom the Tigers played in their season opener back in January, when Hawaii won 10-6.

Princeton has 13 players from the state of California, and they will get to end their season playing essentially at home. The team has four seniors, of whom three are Californians — CiCi Stewart, Meera Burghardt and Bella Moscoe. The fourth is Kaila Carroll, from Connecticut. 

It has to be pretty special for a senior to finish her career in the NCAA tournament in her home state. 

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Lisa Van Ackeren.

The Princeton softball coach was named Ivy League Coach of the Year. If you're keeping score, that's her fifth time as the award-winner in the eight years it has been given. 

That's impressive. 

Princeton had three first-team All-Ivy selections: Sonia Zhang, Julia Dumais and Lauren Sablone (whose three-run home run with two out and two strikes in the bottom of the seventh last weekend against Cornell gave the Tigers their share of the league title and the host role for the tournament).

Speaking of that tournament, it began yesterday with a stunning end to Game 1, as Harvard got a two-out, two-run home run in the seventh to force extra innings and then put up eight runs in the ninth to win 12-4. Princeton's game against Dartmouth started about an hour late, and the Tigers rolled 4-0. 

Today's schedule has Princeton-Harvard at 10, followed by an elimination game between Yale and Dartmouth.

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Jon Basti.

The head coach of the Sacred Heart men's lacrosse team and his Pioneers played in the NCAA tournament's play-in game yesterday at Albany. It was the first appearance in the NCAA tournament for the program.

Basti, who regularly worked Princeton's camps when Bill Tierney was the head coach and who was TigerBlog Jr.'s coach at SHU, has always run a program that was to be admired in many ways. His players all graduate. They stay out of trouble. They win the league's GPA awards. They are always active in the local community.

This year, they've added another dimension to that culture, romping through the MAAC at a perfect 9-0 and then winning the league tournament last weekend. 

If you happened to be watching after the Pios won the title game and saw Basti's interview, you now know everything you need to know about him. His emotions were genuine and worn on his sleeve, as always, and he spoke directly from the heart about what this meant and about how many people he had to thank. It was heart-warming. 

Nice guys, it seems, can finish first. 

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Mike Ford.

The former Princeton player who won Ivy Pitcher of the Year and Player of the Year signed a Major League contract with the Cincinnati Reds. Ford's salary, prorated for the rest of the season, would be $1.1 million.

Ford has hit 36 MLB home runs in 627 career at-bats, including a career-best 16 home runs last year with Seattle. 

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And finally, there's Nicole D'Andrea DeNiro, one of the unsung heroes of Princeton Athletics with her work in the equipment room. Nicole recently got married, and then got married again this past weekend (the ceremony was in April, the party was this weekend). 

Again, couldn't happen to a nicer person.

A Triple Crown, Again

TigerBlog starts today with a reminder that the Ivy League softball tournament schedule has been changed, and changed again, due to 1) final exam conflicts and 2) possible rain.

Here is the actual schedule for the event, which is being hosted by Princeton:

Wednesday, May 8
Game 1 2:30pm #2 Yale vs. #3 Harvard
Game 2 5:00pm #1 Princeton vs. #4 Dartmouth

Thursday, May 9
Game 3 TBD Winner of Game 1 vs. Winner of Game 2
Game 4 TBD Loser of Game 1 vs. Loser of Game 2

Friday, May 10
Game 5 TBD Winner of Game 4 vs. Loser of Game 3

Saturday, May 11
Game 6 12:00pm Winner of Game 3 vs. Winner of Game 5
Game 7 (if necessary) 35 minutes following conclusion of game 6

Make-up Date: Sunday, May 12

So that's the softball story. The baseball story is still a week away, as Harvard and Yale play three regular season games this weekend. Columbia will be the host no matter what. Princeton will be the No. 2 seed unless Yale sweeps Harvard, in which case the Tigers will be the No. 3 seed. 

In the meantime, while you wait you can read THIS STORY about Jake Koonin and his father Jason Koonin, who are the first father-son to play for Scott Bradley at Princeton. 

And all of that brings TigerBlog to this past weekend at Weaver Track and Field Stadium, the site of the Ivy League Heptagonal championships. 

TigerBlog was on the bus back from the Ivy men's lacrosse tournament when he received a text message from his colleague Chas Dorman, who said that the women's Heps was incredibly close. When TB asked about the men, Chas replied "not as close."

He was right on both counts.

The Ivy women's title went to Penn, who won the championship on the final event to edge out Princeton 184.5-184. That's one-half a point. 

It was the second time that that a women's outdoor Heps was decided by a one-point, the other back in 1997, when Princeton again was edged, this time by Cornell. As amazing as it may seem, those two aren't the closest finishes: Princeton and Brown tied in 1996.

Princeton's Alexandra Kelly was named the Most Outstanding Field Performer of the Meet after winning the long jump and finishing second in the triple jump.

As for the men, Chas was right — it wasn't close. Princeton put up 204.5 points. The runner-up, Harvard, had 126.

The result was the completion of a Triple Crown for the Tigers, who have, again, won the men's cross country, indoor track and field and now outdoor track and field championships in the same academic year. How many times has Princeton do so? 

This year makes 11. 

How many times has every other league team do it? Well, perhaps this answers that question: Jason Vigilante is the second head coach to lead his team to the Triple Crown. The first was Fred Samara, who did it 10 times.

In other words, nobody else other than Princeton has ever accomplished it in men's track and field.

Jackson Clarke was the Most Outstanding Track Athlete in the meet after winning the 100 and 200 and  being part of the second-place 4x100 relay. Oh, and he's a freshman.

Of course, TB's favorite event in track and field is the 3,000 meter steeplechase, and Princeton had another Jackson — Shorten — win this one. Shorten, a sophomore, shaved six seconds of his Heps time of last year, when he first fourth. 

Another freshman, Xavier Donaldson, took the 400. Junior Sam Rodman won the 800.

This win, like all wins in such meets, is not done by winning races. It's by stacking finishers near the top in as many races as possible, and that's what Princeton did so well, as it always does. 

The shot put was the perfect example. Princeton didn't win, but it went 2-3-4, with Tyler Konopka, Joe Licata and Casey Helm.

There will be plenty of chances for individual accomplishments at the NCAA Regionals, which come up in Lexington, Kentucky, May 22-25. 

For now it's a chance to celebrate the 11th Triple Crown for the men's track and field team — and "team" is the perfect word to use, even in an individual sport.

"Buy Me Some Peanuts And Cracker Jack"

So from what famous song does this lyric come?:

On a Saturday her young beau
Called to see if she'd like to go
To see a show, but Miss Kate said "No,
I'll tell you what you can do:"

Give up? 

The next line is "Take Me Out To The Ballgame." Perhaps you've heard it? 

The song was written in 1908 by two composers — Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer — who had never, in fact, seen a baseball game prior to writing it. The inspiration apparently came from a sign advertising a game at the Polo Grounds that Norworth saw while riding on the New York City subway.

Why has TigerBlog started there on this Tuesday morning? It's because there are two Princeton teams who can be forgiven for humming the most famous verse in their sport.

The Princeton baseball and softball teams will see their seasons continue beyond the end of the regular season, which came for both this past weekend. TigerBlog will start with the softball team.

Princeton won itself an Ivy League championship Saturday afternoon, and the host role for this week's Ivy League tournament, in about the most dramatic way imaginable. In fact, the ending was more reminiscent of the end of "Casey At The Bat," though with a happier ending.

Much like the Mudville Nine that day, Princeton trailed 4-2 with but one inning more to play. And then, also like Mudville, Princeton found itself with two on and two out. 

Unlike Casey, though, Lauren Sablone did not strike out. And, as such, there was great joy in Princeton.

Sablone, down to her final strike, rocketed the ball over the leftfield fence, making the final score 5-4 Princeton. How long did it take Sablone to circle the bases? 

TigerBlog timed it. He came up with 12.3 seconds. Even if it's give or take a tenth of a second here or there, Sablone clearly wanted to get back to where the celebration was starting.

Walk Off Championship Moment.
Your Ivy Player of the Week 🤫https://t.co/VUYA0yA1Cw pic.twitter.com/gSo8cvr8Gp

— Princeton Softball (@PUSoftball) May 6, 2024

 Had she gone the way of Casey, Princeton would not have won a share of the Ivy title, and the Ivy tournament would not be in Princeton. In fact, it would have been at Yale.

Princeton will begin the ILT on its home field tomorrow (that's a change in date due to the weather forecast) at 5 against Dartmouth, while Harvard and Yale will play in the opening game of the double-elimination event at 2:30. Princeton earned a share of the Ivy championship, making it the 22nd overall and third straight for the program.

The baseball team, on the other hand, was playing this past weekend to get into the Ivy tournament. Columbia had already clinched the league championship and host role, but the Tigers went into the weekend in second place. 

At the same time, Princeton, even with just three games left, had not yet clinched its ILT spot. And doing so wouldn't be easy, not with the three at Columbia.

Princeton had a single game Friday and then two Saturday. The drama never made it to the weekend.

First, Dartmouth knocked off Penn, which meant that Princeton now needed only one win in the three games or one more Penn loss to get its spot. 

And whom should the Tigers rely on for the clincher, Dartmouth ... or Jacob Faulkner? The answer was clear.

Princeton's Will Sword started the first game at Columbia and went into the third inning without allowing a run. With the Tigers up 1-0, Scott Bradley went to Faulkner, who has been amazing all season. Scratch that. He's been the keystone of the entire team all season.

And now, with the season on the line, he came through once again. Faulkner would go the rest of the way and not allow a run until the ninth, by which time the Tigers were up 4-0. Even though the ninth was the only inning in which Columbia would score, it was also in many ways Faulkner's most impressive inning.

Faulkner allowed a lead-off walk and then, after getting a ground out, saw the shutout vanish with a two-run home run. Suddenly things were dicey. 

How would he respond? He got another out and allowed two singles. On the ropes, but not out, he finally ended things with a fly ball.

Faulkner is now 7-1 with four saves as he has anchored, and held together, an injury-riddled pitching staff. 

Columbia swept the doubleheader Saturday, and Penn swept Dartmouth as well, which shows you how important that win Friday was. The Tigers will now wait an extra week for the start of the baseball tournament, which will take the team back to Columbia next week. 

The Battle Of Cayuga Blu

The Battle of Cayuga Blu went to the team on the second floor. 

From check-in on Thursday until check-out yesterday, the Princeton and Penn men's lacrosse teams shared the same hotel, the Cayuga Blu, located across the parking lot from the Ithaca Mall. Both teams were at Cornell for the Ivy League tournament, and it turned out that the hotel — which came to be nicknamed "Big Blu" — was the only landing spot either could find.

The hotel has two floors. Penn was on the first floor. Princeton was on the second. Almost nobody else was in the hotel, except for a vinyl record fair held Saturday.

Both teams took their meals on the first floor, separated by about 20 yards of hallway. At first, it was mildly amusing, since Princeton played Yale and Penn played Cornell in Friday's semifinals. 

Then, when both teams won those games, they were now going to face each other in yesterday's final. That meant a lot of close proximity for two teams about to play against each other in the biggest game of the year, and it was certainly an interesting dynamic. 

Princeton was going through its pregame scouting meeting Saturday night, and Penn's players were walking right by in the hallway. That's not something that happens a lot.

Now, TigerBlog offers a few words about the Cayuga Blu Hotel. It's an older hotel without a ton of amenities, and there was a boiler issue yesterday that left both teams without hot water. At the same time, it makes up for any negatives it might have with the welcoming warmth of the staff, especially Kimberly, who owns it with her husband. 

TB asked Kimberly if she'd be able to come to the game yesterday, and she said she'd watch it but couldn't leave the hotel. When TB asked her which teams she was rooting for, she said "you of course." Then he asked her if she said the same thing to Penn, and she said yes and laughed.  

In fact, she had hung on the marquee by the road "Good Luck Ivy League," a diplomatic gesture of neutrality. 

In the end, the Cayuga Blu became a rallying cry for Princeton, a literal one, for that matter, as the Tigers broke their huddle by yelling "Cayuga Blu" in unison. There was also a bit of grit to the place, the good kind, the kind that can give you an edge if you embrace it, and the Tigers clearly did. 

Yesterday morning, there was the unlikely sight of four buses lined up in the same hotel parking lot, getting ready to carry the two rivals over to Schoellkopf Field. TigerBlog can't remember ever seeing something like that before.

And so, at 1 yesterday afternoon, the two teams who had shared a hotel for three nights now shared the same field. At stake was the Ivy League's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament, and the team on the second floor defeated the team on the first floor 18-11. 

Like Princeton's 14-10 win over Yale in the semifinals, this one was close at halftime and then not as close after that. The Tigers led 8-7 at the break after Penn had scored three goals in the final two minutes of the second quarter, and it was 10-4 Tigers after that.

Between the two games, Princeton outscored its opponents 13-12 in the first half and 19-9 in the second.

The Most Outstanding Player of the tournament was sophomore face-off man Andrew McMeekin, whose two game totals were almost shocking: 38 for 60, with 28 groundballs and three caused turnovers, as well as a massive goal against Yale Friday night. 

The final was also a showcase for Coulter Mackesy, Princeton's junior attackman. It wasn't so much a showcase of his skill, though he did put up three goals and four assists while being guarded by a can't miss first-team All-American defenseman.

No, it was more his toughness. He absorbed hit after hit, check after check, all with his 5-10, 170-pound frame, and yet his tenacity and relentlessness never wavered. Whenever Princeton needed a big play, Mackesy was there to make it. 

Then again, so was everyone else on the team. It's hard to single anyone out, because this was a total team effort, just like it has been the last three weeks. 

If you recall, Princeton lost to Brown back on April 13 to dig itself a deep hole as far as even making the Ivy tournament in the first place. With their backs to the walls, the Tigers had to regroup, and do so quickly. First, there were the two regular season finales, which became a 15-10 win over Penn and a 15-8 win over Yale to get into the Ivy tournament.

Then it was the tournament itself, where Princeton repeated its two wins, just in reverse order. It was the second straight year that Princeton has won the Ivy tournament, and the Tigers are now headed back to the NCAA tournament for the third straight year, including reaching the 2022 Final Four.

Princeton's buses rolled back into town just in time for the Selection Show. In fact, the Tigers had to sprint out to the football stadium to see who their opponent would be (Maryland), where (at Maryland) and when (Saturday, 7:30). As the team headed across the track, it encountered the women's team, who had just seen that it would be playing Drexel at Boston College in its own tournament.

And now it's time for the Tigers to get back to work. There will be no staying at the Cayuga Blu this time, but make no mistake, the Tigers will be taking some that Cayuga Blu experience with them to College Park.

Thoughts Before A Big Weekend

Thoughts before the start of a big weekend ... 

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There will be at least two Ivy League championships, and possibly three, won at Princeton this weekend. 

The two that are for sure are at the Ivy League Heptagonal track and field championships, which starts tomorrow at noon and runs through Sunday at Weaver Track and Field Stadium. Coverage on ESPN+ begins both days at noon.

If you've never been to Heps, it's quite a show. There are all kinds of different events all day, and the colors of all eight schools are all on abundant display. 

The Princeton men and women both finished second a year ago in the outdoor Heps. The men have already won the Heps cross country and indoor track and field titles, which means another Triple Crown is a possibility. Princeton's men have already won 10 of those. 

The complete schedule of events can be found HERE. 

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The third Ivy title that could be won on campus this weekend is in softball, where Princeton will host Cornell for three games beginning with one today at 3:30 and then continuing with a doubleheader tomorrow beginning at 12:30.

Right now Princeton is 12-6 in the Ivy League, while Harvard and Yale have both finished their regular seasons at 14-7. To give you a better sense of what's at stake, there's this from the goprincetontigers.com preview story:

If Princeton wins two games to finish 14-7 in the league, it would host the Ivy League tournament because it would have the best record against the other tied teams, whether that's Harvard and Yale or Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth. Princeton swept both Yale and Dartmouth and took one from Harvard, while Yale swept Harvard, Harvard took two from Dartmouth, and Dartmouth took two from Yale. 

If Princeton wins one or fewer games this weekend, Yale would host the Ivy tournament as it would have the best record among the possibly tied teams, whether that's only Harvard or both Harvard and Dartmouth. Princeton needs one win or one loss each from Columbia and Brown to clinch a bid in the league tournament.

The Ivy League tournament begins Thursday, either in Princeton or at Yale.

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TigerBlog was about to put his stuff on the bus yesterday morning when he realized something wasn't quite right. What could it be? 

As it turned out, it was the women's tennis bus. When you have a bunch of buses stacked up at this time of year, it's a great sign.

The women's tennis team, ranked 39th nationally, was on its way to Charlottesville for the NCAA tournament, where it will take on No. 26 Washington tomorrow at 10 am. The winner of that match will then take on the winner of fifth-ranked Virginia and Long Island U. 

Whoever wins that much Sunday will advance to the Super Regionals next weekend. 

As TB realized he was headed to the wrong bus, he saw women's tennis coach Jamea Jackson. Had he know then that Jackson was about to be named the Ivy League Coach of the Year after guiding the Tigers to a fifth straight Ivy title.  

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The women's tennis team is not the only Princeton team in Charlottesville for the NCAAs this weekend. The men's team will be there as well. 

The Tigers, ranked 33rd, take on No. 41 Virginia Commonwealth today at 1, followed by No. 3 Virginia and NJIT at 4. The winners meet tomorrow at 4 in the second round.

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The correct bus for TigerBlog was the one in front of the women's tennis bus. That would be one for the men's lacrosse team, which was heading in the opposite direction for women's tennis. 

The men's lacrosse destination was Ithaca, where Cornell will be hosting the Ivy League tournament tonight and Sunday afternoon. 

It begins at 6 tonight, when second-seeded Princeton takes on third-seeded Yale in a rematch of a game from six days ago, when Princeton won 15-8 in New Haven. Top-seeded Cornell will take on Penn at 8:30 or so; the winners play Sunday at 1. All three games can be seen on ESPNU and ESPN+.

Princeton is staying in the same hotel as the Penn team. You know who else is staying in this hotel? Nobody.

You have Princeton on the second floor. You have Penn on the first floor. Just before dinner last night, Princeton head coach Matt Madalon and Penn head coach Mike Murphy were having a casual conversation in the hallway. 

Should both teams win tonight, it would be an interesting dynamic to be sharing a hotel as they would be preparing to play in the ILT final. For now, it's been a whole bunch of "hey, how you doing?" with nods back and forth as the teams walk by each other. 

The person who so far has had the toughest balancing act is the woman at the front desk, an amiable woman named Kimberly who has to convince each team that it is actually her favorite. Kimberly owns the hotel along with her husband, and it has been in her husband's family since the 1970s. If you think you work hard, you should see how much Kimberly does at her hotel.

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The women's lacrosse team had to negotiate the explosion on I-95 in Connecticut, which will keep the highway closed for the next few days, on its way to its own Ivy League tournament, this one at Yale. 

Princeton, like the men seeded second, open the tournament against third-seeded Penn at 4 today, followed by the game between top-seeded Yale and fourth-seeded Harvard at 7. The final is Sunday at 1, with all three games on ESPN+.

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Another team that is hopping on a bus this weekend is the baseball team, who plays three at Columbia, also beginning this afternoon (2) and continuing with a doubleheader tomorrow (first pitch at 11:30). Columbia has already clinched the Ivy League title and the host role in the league tournament. 

Princeton is currently in second place and would clinch an Ivy tournament spot with two wins, or if any number of other scenarios play out beyond that. Complicating matters is that Harvard and Yale play next weekend, not this weekend, so the final outcome might not be known after the weekend.

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The complete weekend schedule can be found HERE.

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Lastly, TigerBlog would like to congratulate his longtime dear friend Sue Byrne of Harvard Athletics, who retired yesterday after a long career in sports marketing with the Boston Bruins first and then with the Crimson.

Remembering Dick Malacrea And Bob Casciola

TigerBlog starts today with the sad news of the recent passing of two legends in Princeton Athletics history.

Former head football coach Bob Casciola (1973-77) and longtime head athletic trainer Dick Malacrea both passed away within the last two weeks. Together they lived 181 years (Dick was 92; Bob, 89), though it was still sad to see the news.

This is from the obituary for Malacrea. TB isn't sure who wrote it; he does know it is spot on.

Dick was the consummate professional, equally dedicated to excellence in the care of each individual as well as advancing the state-of-art for the athletic training profession. 

Malacrea came along at a time when athletic training was in the midst of a major advancement, and he was at the forefront. He attended West Chester University for his undergraduate and graduate work, and he went into athletic training after a tryout with the Phillies and a stint in the United States Army.

As for Bob Casciola, these are the kinds of things you want in your own obituary:

Some of his many honors include All-Ivy League team selection, a Heisman Scholarship award from the Downtown Athletic Club, named "Person of the Year" by the New Jersey Tournament of Champions, the 2004 Distinguished American Award by NFF, and Delaware Valley Chapter. The Delaware Valley Chapter named their Distinguished American Award after him.

Casciola was a three-year starter as a two-way lineman for the Princeton football team, in 1955-57, when he played for the great Charles Caldwell in his first two years and the great Dick Colman in his senior year. How many players have ever had the chance to play for two Hall of Fame coaches?

Casciola wore No. 70 for the Tigers and weighed what at the time was a lot: all of 210 pounds. In fact, here are the weights of the starters on the line from 1956: 210, 220, 180, 195, 190. Imagine that today? 

Princeton went 7-2 in each of his three seasons on the varsity. The 1957 team went 6-1 and won the first Ivy League championship in program history, and Casciola was named first-team All-Ivy, one year after being a second-team selection on the first-ever All-Ivy team.

One week after falling to Yale, Princeton came back to beat unbeaten Dartmouth 34-14 at Palmer Stadium to gain its piece of the title. This was how the Daily Princetonian story began:

It was a Princeton team that all season long had been expected to run roughshod through the Ivy Group, but because of numerous unfortunate happenings had never been quite able to realize its fulr potential.' However, there was no denying the Orange and Black on Saturday as they completely bottled up their unbeaten opposition from Hanover to take the much-deserved championship. With captain Jack Sapoch and senior tackle Bob Casciola softening up the Indians with their vicious blocks and crushing tackles, sophomore tailback Danny Sachs supplied the KO blows by tallying three touchdowns and passing for a fourth in, the 34-14 rout. 

Casciola's post-Princeton career was spent largely in the sport at which he excelled beyond his coaching career, especially with his time with the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame and as a television commentator.

You can read more about Dick Malacrea HERE and Bob Casciola HERE.

TigerBlog knew both men. They both had a very imposing presence.

If you were ever in Dick Malacrea's training room, you definitely knew who was in charge. If you ever got a call from Bob Casciola about a project that was important to him, you knew that he was going to pursue it with all the passion in his body.

There aren't too many people here now who knew them first hand, or for that matter have even heard of them.

They were loyal, big-hearted men who valued so much the student-athletes who competed here and what the athletic department and Princeton represented. 

TigerBlog sends his best to both of their families. 

A Women's Water Polo NCAA Return

The NCAA women's water polo selections were announced Monday night. 

There are nine teams in the field, seven of whom advance directly to the main draw and two of whom will compete in a play-in game. Want to guess in what state six of those nine teams reside? 

Shockingly, the answer is "California." The other three states? 

One of them is New York, home to Wagner, who will play one of the California schools — Biola — in the play-in game. Biola is located in Los Angeles and is primarily a Division II school, one whose nickname is the Eagles.

New Jersey is obviously one of the others. Princeton earned the tournament's No. 7 seed after rolling through the College Water Polo Association, going unbeaten in the regular season and then winning the league tournament this past weekend.

More specifically, Princeton was 12-0 in the league during the regular season. The tournament? That was anything but easy.

The Tigers defeated Brown 9-7 in the semifinals in a game that was tied 7-7 late in the third quarter. Kayla Yelensky scored four times for Princeton in that game.

That advanced Princeton into the final against Michigan, where again the Tigers would find themselves tied late. This time, Princeton had to come from behind after digging a 4-1 hole, and it was still 4-3 Wolverines at the break.

Princeton went up 9-7 in the fourth quarter, only to see Michigan come back and even things at 9-9 with 1:45 left. Ava Houlahan then scored the game-winner 24 seconds later.

The moral? Winning in the postseason is never, ever easy.

Princeton 10, Michigan 9 | 1:00 4th

WHAT A GOAL FOR AVA!

💻 - https://t.co/wAf6JNTd6y pic.twitter.com/N1YmnfFssu

— Princeton Water Polo (@Pwaterpolo) April 28, 2024

Princeton's win advanced the Tigers into the NCAA field as the No. 7 seed. The first round opponent will be the only other team not from California, and that would be second-seeded Hawaii one week from Friday at 7 Eastern time.

How many players from Hawaii are on the Hawaii team? There aren't any. 

The head coach is named Maureen Cole. You owe it to yourself to check out the picture on her bio on the Hawaii webpage.

Cole's job is to convince top players to come to Oahu. How hard can that be? She has six from California, but she also has seven other countries on the team: Australia, New Zealand, Spain, the Netherlands, Canada, South Africa and Brazil. 

Princeton, who brings a record of 23-6 into the NCAA tournament, has 13 players from California, as well as three from Connecticut and one from Australia.

Princeton reached the NCAA semifinals a year ago, with a win over Cal in the quarterfinals. This trip will be the fifth in program history, with the others in 2012, 2013 and 2015.

Basically, Princeton has become a national water polo powerhouse, between the men's team and the women's team. You may recall that the men's team went 28-6 last fall, reaching the NCAA semifinals as well after taking down UC-Irvine in the quarterfinals. 

This is all a credit to several people, most notably current head coaches Derek Ellingson and Dusty Litvak and former head coach Luis Nicolao, now at Navy. What has been built in DeNunzio Pool is very, very special.

The women's tournament will be held at Cal, who is the third seed and who opens with Fresno State. The winner of that game will take on the winner of Princeton-Hawaii in the semifinals May 11, also at 7 Eastern.

The other side of the draw has No. 1 seed UCLA against the winner of the play-in game and the 4-5 game between Stanford and Southern Cal.

Hey, it just dawned on TigerBlog that today is May 1. How about that? Where does the time go? 

The Princeton women's water polo team began its season back on Jan. 26. Who was Princeton's first opponent? 

Hint - it's also the next one. The Tigers opened their season in Hawaii's pool, with a 10-6 loss. 

Now the hope is that the season doesn't end against the same opponent.

Ivy Tournament Bound

The Princeton men's lacrosse bus was on Interstate 95 in Connecticut, around Exit 29, as the clock reached 3:30 Saturday afternoon.

Music was playing. Players were talking and laughing. There was food. It was something of a party.

And why wouldn't it be? Princeton had just finished off its second-straight huge win, this time 15-8 at Yale after a 15-10 win at home over Penn, and suddenly Princeton was in the Ivy League tournament as the No. 2 seed. 

You know what there wasn't? Anyone who was watching the start of the Harvard-Brown game, which faced off in Cambridge at that moment. 

Ah, how different it all could have been. How different it was the last time the bus had rolled past that spot after a game.

That was two weeks earlier, when Princeton rode home in silence after a 13-12 loss at Brown. Had Princeton won that game, it would have clinched its Ivy tournament spot right there.

Instead, Brown had its first Ivy win, which became two Ivy wins seven days later against Dartmouth, in a game that ended before Princeton-Penn began. Suddenly, Princeton's Ivy tournament spot was precarious.

Heck, there were even conversations about what would happen with a three-way tie at 2-4 between Princeton, Harvard and Brown, if it came to that. 

It didn't.

First there was the win against Penn, one that was a Vitamin B12 shot of confidence for the Tigers. That set up the game at Yale, which was a noon start, where a win would mean an ILT spot. A loss, though, would have meant Princeton needed a Harvard win over Brown, in a 3:30 start, to get in.

Add in that Princeton had not won in New Haven since 2012, and that it was Yale's Senior Day, and this was going to be anything but a layup. 

And so most of the story can be told by simply knowing that as 3:30 came and went, nobody on the bus was hanging on what was happening in Cambridge. 

Princeton's win over Yale earned the Tigers a rematch with the Bulldogs in the Ivy tournament semifinals Friday at Cornell at 6. The top-seeded Big Red will take on Penn in the second semifinal, with the winners to meet for the league's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament Sunday at 1.

The difference between Princeton at Brown and Princeton since is remarkable. What seemed so daunting after that game became reality, and it was based on something of a reinvention of a team in a very short time. 

For the second straight week, it was no longer about strategy, matchups or anything like that. It was about effort, and, again, it was there from start to finish. 

Princeton fell behind Brown 6-0 in the 13-12 loss. Princeton has not trailed at any point the last two weekends. 

What's even more impressive is that both Penn and Yale were playing for a share of the league title. Had either of them won against the Tigers, they would have had an Ivy title. It's not like they had nothing to play for.

The game that ended up mattering for Princeton Saturday was the Cornell-Dartmouth game, which started at 4. Because of traffic, the bus had only made it to Exit 11 by then. 

Had Dartmouth won, Princeton would have gotten a share of the league championship. Instead, it was all Cornell, who won 15-10.

Still, given where Princeton was not that long ago, this will do. 

If you recall last year, Princeton took down Yale and Penn to win the Ivy tournament. This time, it was the same two opponents just to get in again. 

When Princeton got back to Caldwell Field House after the trip back from Brown, the team gathered in its lockerroom to hear from the coaches. The message was simple: You're only guaranteed two more games together; if you want to keep playing beyond that, you have to be better.

Since then, Princeton has been. 

Now the Tigers get to keep playing as the calendar turns to May. That's the first goal every year. 

The next one is to keep going as long as possible. Two years ago, that meant all the way to Memorial Day. 

May lacrosse. There's nothing like it in the sport. Princeton has earned its place in the fun.

When the players got on the bus, a few of them did say that they were psyched not have to care about the outcome of the Harvard-Brown game. The coaches said the same, a bit more emphatically. 

The bus was on Route 1 when the Harvard-Brown game ended. TigerBlog was watching on his phone. 

When it ended, there was no reaction from anyone on the bus. Nobody even realized it had ended. 

The sound of the music and laughter was all that there was.

There's A New Home Run Champion

The Princeton baseball team played its first game in 1864.

It was actually the first intercollegiate athletic event in Princeton history, that baseball game against Williams. TigerBlog has always loved the fact that the final score of the first baseball game Princeton ever played was 27-16, while the score of the first football game — five years later — was 6-4.

TB isn't sure how great the record-keeping was in the 19th century, but he does know that it's been pretty good in the last 100 years or so. And so, when the record book has said for the past 25 years that the record for home runs in a career was held by Matt Evans (also a three-time first-team All-Ivy League punter), with 26, TB thinks that's pretty accurate.

Ah, but as was said on TV in 1974, there's a new home run champion, and his name is Kyle Vinci. 

The Princeton senior hit his 27th career home run during a doubleheader sweep of Dartmouth Saturday in Hanover, with scores of 14-5 and 11-3. He added his 28th yesterday, on an inside-the-park variety, as Princeton won again, this time 5-3.

Here is the record-setter:

Princeton 12, Dartmouth 3 | Bot 8

THE RECORD BREAKER! @kylesvinci is the new Princeton program record holder for career home runs after this titanic shot!

💻 - https://t.co/5auFCyUb0Q (G1) pic.twitter.com/luEn2mJP7v

— Princeton Baseball (@PUTigerBaseball) April 27, 2024

The record is great. It's certainly impressive, and who doesn't want to say "I'm the home run king."

Oh, by the way, Vinci played on the same high school team at Delbarton at current New York Yankees shortstop Anthony Volpe. If you want to learn more about Vinci, you can read THIS, which TB wrote about him a year ago, before the Ivy tournament.

More important than the record — and on the subject of the Ivy League tournament, this Princeton team has put together a season based on grit as much as anything else, given the amount of injuries it has suffered, especially on the mound. 

Nobody typifies that more than Jacob Faulkner, who picked up two more saves this weekend, closing out Game 2 Saturday with a three-inning performance and then Game 3 yesterday with one inning. 

Will Sword pitched eight strong innings yesterday to get the win in the first game of the weekend, allowing three runs on six hits. The Game 2 win went to Elliot Eaton, who went six innings and allowed one run on five hits, striking out six, before turning it over to Faulkner. It was the first win of the year for Eaton. 

Then, yesterday, Sean Episcope pitched four shutout innings before Andrew D'Alessio went four more, improving to 3-0, before Faulkner got his fourth save.

Suddenly the Tigers find themselves at 11-7 in the Ivy League, in second place with one weekend of games to play. Princeton, who plays at Rutgers Wednesday at 6 in its final non-league game, finishes the regular season with three at Columbia.

The goal is for there to be additional games at Columbia after that. 

The Lions have already wrapped up the Ivy League championship and the host role in the league tournament, which will be May 17-20. Who will join the Lions for that event? 

Princeton is in second place, followed by Cornell at 10-8 and Penn and Yale at 9-9. Harvard is 8-10, and then it goes back to Dartmouth at 6-12 and Brown at 4-14. 

The season doesn't actually end this weekend, since Harvard and Yale don't play until May 11-12 in New Haven, for reasons of which TB has no idea. This weekend has Dartmouth at Penn and Cornell at Brown, in addition to Princeton-Columbia.

The Tigers hold the tiebreaker head-to-head with Penn, having taken two of three. Princeton does not have the tiebreaker against Harvard or Yale, having lost two of three to each.

A year ago, Princeton made it to the final of the first Ivy tournament. What will it take to get back? 

If Princeton wins twice against Columbia, then it will clinch an Ivy spot no matter what else happens. Princeton could also get in with either one win or no wins, depending on what else happens. It's also possible that it will go past this coming weekend, all the way to Harvard-Yale in another week.

Off To New Haven

Congratulations to Princeton's new head coach of men's hockey, Ben Syer.

This is from the release on goprincetontigers.com:

A 25-year veteran behind the bench of Division I college hockey programs, Syer takes the reins of the program after recently concluding his 13th season overall at Cornell and his 12th as Associate Head Coach of the Big Red. His previous 12 seasons as a college coach came while serving as Associate Head Coach and Recruiting Coordinator at Quinnipiac from 1999-2011.

In 2018, Syer was the recipient of the Terry Flanagan Award which is presented annually by the American Hockey Coaches Association (AHCA) to an assistant coach in recognition of his superior body of work over a career.

“I am thrilled to welcome Ben and his family to Princeton and the men’s hockey program,” said Mack. “He has a proven track record of recruiting and developing student-athletes and positioning them for success on the ice and in the classroom. He has been part of championship teams throughout his entire coaching career, navigating one of the toughest conferences in college hockey year-in, year-out. Throughout this process, it was evident that Ben possesses the qualities we are looking for in a head men’s ice hockey coach at Princeton. He is a passionate recruiter, an innovative tactician and a commanding leader inside the locker room. Under his guidance, I am confident that Princeton’s best days on the ice are ahead of us.”

You can read the entire story HERE.

Syer's announcement came yesterday afternoon. He is a native of Kitchener, Ontario, which is a little more than two hours away from Peterborough, also in Ontario. That would be the hometown of Zach Currier.

Okay, give TB some credit. He'd already written the Currier part before the announcement came. 

Anytime TigerBlog can mention Zach Currier's 2017 season with the Princeton men's lacrosse team, he will do so. 

In case you forgot, this was Currier's line: 24 goals, 34 assists, 130 ground balls, 114x220 facing off (.564 percentage) and a team-best 21 caused turnovers. For putting together the best all-around season for a college midfielder in maybe forever, Currier was NOT selected a USILA first-team All-American, a slight that was laughable then and becomes even more ridiculous as time passes.

It still bothers TB. If you go to the record section for men's lacrosse, TB doesn't even acknowledge it. 

Currier's exploits from that season make their way into TB's pregame story for tomorrow's game at Yale in two different spots.

First, the 21 caused turnovers, which alone is an insane number for someone who, you know, didn't really play defense. Only seven Princeton players have ever reached at least 20 caused turnovers in a season since the stat was first officially kept in 2009, and Currier is the only one to do so with a shortstick. 

The reason it came up this week is that Michael Bath, a current starting defenseman, became the seventh player on the least a week ago, when Princeton defeated Penn 15-10. 

Next, there were the 24 goals. Going back 35 years — or as long as individual face-offs appear in Princeton's stats — only five Princeton players have taken at least 50 percent of the team's face-offs and scored at least seven goals, including Andrew McMeekin, who has done so this year. Currier took 46 percent of the team's face-offs that year, when he had the 24 goals.

Princeton is at Yale tomorrow in a noon start in New Haven. A Princeton win in the game clinches a spot in the Ivy League tournament and almost certainly the No. 2 seed for the Tigers. 

If Yale wins the game, then Princeton would still make the Ivy tournament should Harvard beat Brown in a game that begins at 3:30 tomorrow. The only way Princeton does not reach the ILT is with a loss and a Brown win, in which case the Bears would take the final spot. 

In Providence two weeks ago, Princeton dropped a tough 13-12 game to Brown. How would the Tigers respond against a Penn team playing for a share of the league title? 

Very well.

Princeton played its most complete game of the year, with emotion and intensity from start to finish. The result was a 15-10 win that sets up this weekend's final three Ivy games. In addition to the two TB already mentioned, Cornell is at Dartmouth, where a Big Red win means next weekend's tournament would be in Ithaca.

Yale has the nation's top scoring offense (16.54 per game). Princeton, with the No. 1 scoring defense in the Ivy League, has held eight of its 12 opponents below 12 goals, which is the lowest output for Yale this season.

Complete Games

Where to start today? 

How about with this: There have been four complete games in the Major Leagues so far in the 2024 season.

There were 38 complete games all of last season, when there were also 11 teams that had ZERO complete games. How is that possible? Analytics. And a change of mindset.

If you're in TigerBlog's age range, you remember when a complete game was almost the norm. A year ago, the Major League lead in complete games was three (Sandy Alcantara, Jordan Lyles). Back in 1975 — a year TB has picked at random — the Major League leader was Catfish Hunter, who threw 30 complete games. There were 39 pitchers who had at least 10 complete games that season.

Want to know how many there were in the 1975 season as a whole? Go ahead. Guess.

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While the subject is baseball, the Princeton baseball team has seven regular season games to play, all on the road, all after yesterday's home finale against Wagner. There is a midweek game next week at Rutgers, and that is sandwiched around a trip to Dartmouth this weekend for three and then a trip to Columbia next weekend for three more.

To keep playing beyond that, Princeton needs to be in the top four of the Ivy standings, which would mean a return to the league tournament. Right now Princeton is 8-7 and in third place, trailing 12-3 Columbia and 10-5 Cornell.

Behind the Tigers sit Yale, Penn and Harvard, all one game back at 7-8. Princeton has the tiebreaker over Penn of the group tied for fourth, achieving that with a 3-2 win in the series opener and then a 3-1 win in the third game last weekend. 

Who was the winning pitcher in those two games? In Game 1 it was Jacob Faulkner. In Game 3, it was Jacob Faulkner. The junior from Venice, Fla., has carried the Tigers this season, and he upped his record to 6-1, with a 3.11 ERA and 37 strikeouts with nine walks in 46 innings.

Are those good numbers?

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In other sports played on diamonds, the Princeton softball team finds itself in first place in the Ivy League at 11-4, ahead of 12-6 Harvard and Yale. While the baseball team is away the next two weekends, the softball team is home for three this weekend against Brown (Saturday at 12:30/2:30 and Sunday at 2:30) and then finish the regular season with three at home against Cornell next weekend.

The Tigers have not yet clinched a spot in the Ivy League tournament, with a three-game lead over 8-7 Dartmouth and Columbia, who are tied for fourth. 

Princeton had a huge sweep of Yale last weekend. Unlike baseball, the Ivy softball race has two teams who have played 18 of their 21 games, while the rest have played 15.

Princeton split its first eight Ivy games. Since then, the Tigers have won seven straight.

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The answer is that in 1975, there were 1,052 complete games. There were also 3,866 games in all that year, which means that one of every 3.67 games was a complete game.

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The Penn Relays return to Franklin Field this weekend for the 128th edition of what Penn's website refers to as "the world's oldest and largest annual track & field carnival."

TigerBlog has been to the Penn Relays, and it is indeed a carnival. If you're going to watch track and field at the Olympics this summer, its worth your time to head to Penn for this weekend's show. 

The event starts today, and you can find all information HERE.

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The College Water Polo Association has its tournament this weekend at Harvard. The winner of the six-team field will get an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. 

Princeton is the top seed after running through the league regular-season unbeaten. The second seed is Michigan, and those two have first-round byes. 

The quarterfinals tomorrow will have third-seeded Harvard take on sixth-seeded St. Francis, and fourth-seeded Brown will play fifth-seeded Bucknell. Princeton's semifinal game will be Saturday at noon, and the final will be Sunday at noon.

Princeton is 21-6 overall, with 13 wins against ranked teams. The Tigers have the CWPA Player of the Year in goalie Lindsey Lucas, and Derek Ellingson was named the league's Coach of the Year for the third time.

Lucas is Princeton's third CWPA Player of the Year, following Ashleigh Johnson and Jovana Sekulic, both of whom are in the running for spots on the U.S. Olympic team for this summer.

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The complete schedule for this weekend's events can be found HERE.

Senior Day With Kit And Sandi

Want to see a picture of 3,229 points scored in basketball at Princeton? 

Here you go ... can you name them? 

That's Kit Mueller (1,546 points) and Sandi Bittler Leland (1,683 points). Kit graduated in 1991 after being a two-time Ivy League Player of the Year. Sandi, Class of 1990, was a three-time first-team All-Ivy League selection, as well as a two-time national Academic All-American and an NCAA post-graduate scholarship winner. 

No other Princeton women's basketball player in program history has all three of those items on her resume.

Kit was second to only Bill Bradley in scoring in men's basketball when he graduated. Now, all these years later, only two players have passed him. Can you name them?

Mueller scored most of his points in the paint. He had any number of low-post moves, including one that was not really a move at all but simply a dribble across the lane while the defender waited for something else, only to find the ball already in the basket. He was a great passer as well, and his 381 assists rank third in program history. Who are 1-2? 

As for Sandi, she was the all-time leading scorer in Princeton women's basketball history from graduation through 2020, when Bella Alarie caught her. Today she remains the all-time leader in three-pointers at Princeton in women's basketball, with 246.

The answers to the two above questions, by the way, are: Ian Hummer and Doug Davis are 2-3 in scoring at Princeton, and Billy Ryan and Spencer Weisz are 1-2 in assists. 

The picture of the Kit and Sandi was taken over the weekend in Princeton. Kit was here for the lacrosse doubleheader, since he has a child on each team — Ellie on the women's team and Cooper on the men's. Sandi? She was here just check out the campus after she and her daughter Emma had spent some time in New York City.

It was Senior Day for the men's and women's teams in lacrosse this past Saturday, and there haven't been too many Senior Days that have ever gone better. TigerBlog wrote all about the men's game, 15-10 win over Penn, this past Monday.

The women's game was the first of the day. For a team that had played almost all of its home games this year in torrential rain, the Princeton women got sunshine in every way Saturday. 

The game against Dartmouth was over almost immediately after it started. By the end of the first quarter, Princeton led 9-0. It was 15-3 at the break, before Dartmouth made it closer in the second half, with a final of 17-10.

Even with that, the second half had a great moment too for Princeton. It came with four minutes to go in the third quarter, when Olivia Koch scored the first goal of her career on her Senior Day.

A Senior Day To Remember!

Olivia Koch scores her first collegiate goal to set off a raucous celebration at '52 pic.twitter.com/5NHDLlpNqG

— Princeton Women's Lax (@princetonwlax) April 20, 2024

The win over Dartmouth improved Princeton to 5-1 in the Ivy League, with a game at Harvard this Saturday in the regular season finale. After that, it'll be the Ivy League tournament, which will definitely be held at Yale, who is now 6-0. Princeton could still get a share of the league championship, with a win over Harvard and a Yale loss to 0-6 Columbia. 

The four teams in the Ivy League tournament will be Yale, Princeton, Harvard and Penn. That drama long ago ended. 

What will the seeds be? Yale is the No. 1. Princeton, with a win over Harvard, would be the No. 2. Penn and Harvard are both 4-2 in the league, and Penn holds the tiebreaker with its win over the Crimson earlier this year. Should Harvard beat Princeton and Penn beat Dartmouth, then there would be a three-way tie for second, and TB is pretty sure it would come down to goal differential between Princeton, Penn and Harvard in their head-to-head games, where Princeton is currently plus-five and Penn is currently plus-six. 

That's what the future holds. In the immediate past, there was a practically perfect Senior Day. 

And in the way past, like in the late 1980s, there was Sandi Bittler's playing days at Princeton. TB isn't sure why out of all the athletes he met back then that he and Sandi have stayed friends all these years, but they have. TB has been to the house in Oregon she shares with her husband Michael and their three kids, and he has seen her when she comes this way.

Oh, and, in addition to being 4-2-4-2-4 today, it's also the birthday of none other than Sandi Bittler Leland. Happy birthday, old friend. 

As always, it was great to spend some time together.

More Ivy Champs

When TigerBlog saw the women's tennis team in Providence two weeks ago, the Tigers were 2-1 in the league with four matches to go.

Actually, it wasn't even two weeks ago. It was 10 days ago. 

Since then? Jamea Jackson's team won all four matches in an eight-day stretch, the final one of which was by a 4-3 score Sunday in Princeton over Harvard. When the dust on the Ivy League season cleared, Princeton was, once again, the outright Ivy champion — for the fifth straight time and 18th overall. In addition, the prize was the league's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.

Going back before the trip to Providence, all the way to March 30, Princeton fell to Penn 4-3 in its Ivy opener. Would the team's streak of Ivy titles be in jeopardy? 

Princeton then beat, in order, Columbia and Cornell 4-3 each, Brown 4-2, Yale 4-1 and Dartmouth 4-2 before the Harvard match. None of this was easy; the match Sunday was the most dramatic of all.

A Harvard win would, in all likelihood, have meant an outright championship for the Crimson. Princeton won the doubles point, but Harvard won the first three singles matches, making it 3-1 and obviously meaning that one more singles win would end things right there. 

All three matches still on the court went to a third set. Princeton's Neha Velaga made it 3-2 with a win at No. 1. It was 3-3 when Madeleine Jessup won at No. 4.

So who was it now up to with the Ivy League championship on the line? That would be a freshman, Alice Ferlito, at No. 5, who won her first set 6-1 and lost her second 6-1.

That's a lot of pressure, no? You already know she won, because TB already said Princeton won the match, so instead, before getting into that part of it, there's the question of who Alice Ferlito is. 

She came to Princeton from Barcelona, where she graduated from the Emilio Sanchez Academy. You can read all about how she came to play the sport and be at Princeton in this very nice story HERE. If you don't want to read it all, you can have this quote from her coach at ESA, Alvaro Pino:

“For Alice earning a position on the team, having that responsibility on the team, helps a lot in maturity, and she is a player who likes to make her team proud."

And did she ever make them proud in the third set. With an Ivy title in the balance, Ferlito won that last set 6-4. The result was this picture:

Ah, nothing like good jubo, right? 

For Princeton, that's the ninth Ivy title jubo picture of the year and 10th league title jubo picture overall. Your conference champs to date:

Men's cross country, men's indoor track and field, women's basketball, men's basketball, women's swimming and diving, men's squash, men's fencing, women's fencing, men's water polo and now women's tennis.

There are other teams with a shot at Ivy titles this spring as Princeton chases 10, which is always a good milestone for an academic year. Princeton, by the way, has reached double figures in Ivy titles in an academic year 28 times. Harvard has done it 11. Nobody else has ever done it. 

Princeton did not win the Ivy League championship in men's or women's golf this weekend. The Yale men won, beating Princeton by an excruciating three strokes, while the women's champ was Dartmouth, who won for the first time ever.

Princeton did have the league's medalist as the individual champion on the women's side. That title belonged to Victoria Liu, who won for the second time in her career, making her the fourth Princeton woman to do so. 

The others? Julia Alison (1999, 2001), Avery Kiser (2002, 2003, 2004) and Susannah Aboff (2008, 2009).

Liu entered the final day tied at plus-two with Dartmouth's Sophie Thai and then shot an even-par 72, while Thai finished the day four-over.  Liu, who you may recall played in an LPGA event last summer,  will now advance to the NCAA Regionals.

A Wire-To-Wire Team Effort

There were two mantras for the Princeton men's lacrosse team as it readied for its game Saturday afternoon against Penn.

First: "Not on our field." A Penn win would mean an Ivy League championship for the Quakers, and there was nobody at all on Princeton's team who wanted to see that celebrated all over Sherrerd Field.

The second: "Play hard." Whatever you did, do it full speed. Whatever problem came up, just play through it with everything you had.

Because of the latter, you saw plays like when Chad Palumbo dove fully extended to prevent a ball from reaching the midline. Or like when John Dunphey managed to stop another loose ball just before it got to the sideline and then had the presence of mind to reestablish himself in the field before he touched after his momentum took his out of a bounds. 

Or there was Andrew McMeekin, who ripped two more goals after face-off wins but who also spent the day keeping loose balls alive for teammates like Liam Fairback and Marquez White to snag off the wings on those face-offs. As a result, he won 16 of 27 face-offs while picking up a ground ball on only half of them.

These were just a few examples. Wherever you looked, a Princeton player was going 100 percent, especially shortstick defensive midfielders Fairback, White, Michael Kelly and Cooper Mueller, who between them had six of Princeton's eight caused turnovers.

And so yes, the lingering image from the game will be the stunning end-to-end run and backhanded shot for a score by Princeton goalie Michael Gianforcaro in the fourth quarter. It was a hustle play to be sure, but it was more than anything just an incredible individual effort — not to mention the first goal by a Tiger goalie since Alex Hewit in 2008.

That goal aside, this was not a day for individual efforts. This was a wire-to-wire team win.

Because of the latter mantra, the former also came through. The final was 15-10 Princeton in a game the Tigers never trailed and led for the final 42 minutes, and there would be no Ivy title celebration for the Quakers afterwards.

The game, which packed nearly 3,000 into the Sherrerd Field stands, was a huge one for Princeton, and not just because of the Ivy League race. It came seven days after a crushing loss at Brown, one that revitalized the Bears' season and threatened to derail Princeton's. 

For one week, the tempo, tone and intensity of practice amped up. This wasn't going to be as much about matchups, offensive sets or even the clearing game. Those mattered, but not as much as effort. 

It was the last thing Princeton heard as it left its team room prior to the game. It's something the team gave all game.

Brown had been 1-9 overall and 0-3 in the Ivy League before the game against Princeton. A win by the Tigers would have clinched an Ivy League tournament spot. Instead, Brown went up 6-0 and never trailed, even after it was tied twice.

Princeton suddenly was in all kinds of trouble in the league tournament race, and with two teams who had already clinched their spots and were thinking league title left on the schedule. With the win against Penn achieved, that leaves a game at Yale this coming Saturday at noon.

Harvard was eliminated with its loss to Cornell, who clinched the third of the four ILT spots. Brown stayed alive by beating already eliminated Dartmouth 14-11. 

Entering the final weekend of the regular season, a Princeton win over Yale would give the Tigers the fourth spot in the field and possibly a seed as high as No. 2. If Yale wins, it would clinch at least a share of the championship (so would Cornell, and the host role, with a win over Dartmouth). 

On the other hand, a Princeton loss and a Brown win over Harvard eliminates the Tigers and puts Brown in the ILT. It would be an amazing accomplishment for Brown, one that the Tigers hope not to see.

For Princeton, there was no going back in time to the fourth quarter that got away in Providence. The only way was forward, and Princeton slammed ahead with its best, most complete performance of the season.

Now it needs another one in New Haven, or it will be forced to get some help from Harvard (that game starts at 3:30).

The formula for success isn't tricky. 

Play hard. For 60 minutes. 

This past Saturday on Sherrerd Field, it was a beautiful sight to see. 

Someone In The Crowd

TigerBlog saw "La La Land" for the first time the other night. Is it really possible that Ryan Gosling never played the piano before that movie?

TB always thought Gosling would be the right person to play Hobey Baker if a movie about the great Princeton athlete from the Class of 1914 would ever be made. Either way, "La La Land" is amazing. Watch it if you haven't already. Watch it again if you have.

As for this weekend ...

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The last time the Penn Quakers played a men's lacrosse game on Sherrerd Field, there were 41 goals scored, the last of which came from the Tigers' Chris Brown in overtime, ending a 21-20 epic.

It was the only game Princeton has ever played in its long, long history in which both teams reach at least 20 goals. The Quakers will be back tomorrow (face-off at 5) for the first time since that game, which was pretty much universally considered the best college lacrosse game of 2022. 

Now, since that game, the teams have played twice, both last year. There was the regular-season game at Penn, won by the Quakers 9-8 in overtime, and then an Ivy League tournament semifinal game, won by Princeton, also 9-8. 

That's a total of 34 goals in two games last year after 41 in one game two years ago. The 2022 game was the highest-scoring game in program history; the two games last year are the only two Princeton men's lacrosse games in the last 55 the team has played where neither team has reached double figures.

Talk about different outcomes. 

If TigerBlog had to guess, he'd say the game tomorrow will be somewhere in the middle. It's a huge game for both teams, as Penn would clinch at least a share of the Ivy title with a win and Princeton is still chasing down an Ivy tournament spot.

Princeton has to make sure it's playing the Penn game tomorrow and not last week's Brown game, a frustrating 13-12 loss to the Bears. It's hard to turn the page from such games, but there's no time to dwell on losses, or, for that matter, wins at this time of year. 

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The men's game is the second game of a Sherrerd Field doubleheader, which starts at noon with the women's game against Dartmouth. The current Ivy League standings have Yale at 5-0, Princeton at 4-1 and Harvard and Penn at 3-2, followed by 2-3 Cornell and Brown, 1-4 Dartmouth and 0-5 Columbia.

The league tournament will almost surely be held in New Haven, as Yale needs to win only one of its final two games, either tomorrow against Cornell or next week against Columbia. Princeton has won four straight in the league since an 11-9 loss to Yale in its opener.

Yale and Princeton have clinched their ILT spots. Penn (who plays Brown) and Harvard (who plays Columbia) would also do so with a win tomorrow.

Princeton is at Harvard next week in a game that will have a big impact on seedings. 

Princeton lost 16-12 to Maryland Wednesday night in a game in which the Terps outscored the Tigers 7-0 in the third quarter. Take that away, and well, you can't, but you get the point.

McKenzie Blake, by the way, has 47 goals and 47 draw controls. With three more of each, she would join Elizabeth George as the only players in program history with at least 50 of each in a season. 

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Princeton is at Yale for three softball games this weekend. The Tigers head to New Haven one game back of the Bulldogs in the loss column, as Yale is 12-3 and Princeton is 8-4.

The Ivy League tournament for softball will also be at the home of the top seed. It's too early to think about clinching spots with so many games to play, but first place is on the line in these three.

The baseball team is home for three against Penn this weekend, with two tomorrow starting at 11:30 and then a single game Sunday at noon. 

Talk about a tight race? The top and bottom of the league are separated by six games. Princeton is in a three-way tie for third with Penn and Yale at 6-6, with Columbia at 9-3, Cornell at 8-4, Dartmouth and Harvard at 5-7 and Brown at 3-9.

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As TB wrote yesterday, the Ivy League tennis championships will be decided this weekend. Princeton's women are home against Dartmouth tomorrow and Harvard Sunday in a match that could decide the title.

There will also be Ivy titles won at the league's golf championships this weekend.

The full schedule for the weekend is HERE.

On The Bus

TigerBlog is writing today about the last weekend of the Ivy League tennis season. 

It may take him a little while to get there, though. To wit:

The bus driver for the men's lacrosse team's trip to Brown last weekend was an amiable sort named Andy.

At one point, the name "Kaitlyn" was mentioned, and Andy's ears perked up.

"Chen?" he said. 

That's the one.

"I drove them a few times," he said. "You could tell she's the real deal."

She certainly is. Chen, the three-time Most Outstanding Player at the Ivy League women's basketball tournament, has the stats, wins and accolades to prove it. As Andy can attest, she also carries herself like a champion.

This past week, Chen added two more impressive items to her resume. First, she was named a second-team College Sports Communicator Academic All-American, becoming the fourth Princeton women's basketball player to be honored on the national level (Sandi Bittler twice, Michelle Miller twice and Lauren Edwards once were the others).

Also this week, Chen was, not surprisingly, named a first-team All-Metropolitan Basketball Writers' Association selection. Her teammates Ellie Mitchell (second-team) and Madison St. Rose (honorable mention) were also honored.

Who were the other players on first-team?

You had Abbey Hsu from Columbia, as well as players from St. John's, Stony Brook and ... Sacred Heart. The Sacred Heart contribution would be Ny'Ceara Pryor, who was honored for the second straight year. Pryor has finished her first two seasons at SHU with 1,222 points, 462 rebounds and 297 assists. 

Are those good numbers? TB will always take a chance to pump up Sacred Heart, being his son's alma mater and all.

Meanwhile, back on the bus, in addition to driving Princeton women's basketball and men's lacrosse, Andy also mentioned having driven the women's soccer team and the men's hockey team. Bus rides are a huge part of the Princeton athletic experience for the athletes, and each team travels with its own culture, traditions and procedures. 

TB has been on the bus with a few teams, most notably field hockey and men's lacrosse. He can attest to just how different those rides are, and he knows that all teams have their own uniqueness.

This past Saturday, the men's lacrosse bus wasn't the only one to arrive in Providence. The women's tennis team stayed in the same hotel as the Tigers, and the women's lacrosse team stayed across the street.

TigerBlog was in Room 616 at the Providence Courtyard Marriott. From his window, he could see all the buses lined up one behind the other. 

The first person TB saw when he came downstairs after checking in was women's tennis coach Jamea Jackson. If you've never met Jamea, she, like Kaitlyn Chen, is clearly the real deal. 

She's always smiling, and she appreciates any time anyone comes to watch her team compete. She has a way of making you feel like you're part of the women's tennis family, even if you just stopped in for a bit.

Jackson introduced TB to her assistant coaches, Nathan Thompson and Richard Sipala. Again, it was like an extended family reunion.

TB asked them about their bus ride. The men's lacrosse team travels on two buses, one for offense and one for defense. Even with the two buses, some of the players have to double up. 

The women's tennis team? One bus. Eight players. 

Princeton, of course, wasn't the only school who had sent teams on the road this past weekend. Princeton's hotel also included Syracuse track and field and a whole bunch of people in Drexel shirts. 

The women's tennis team had two matches this past weekend, first defeating Brown 4-2 Saturday and then taking down Yale 4-1 Sunday. Right now, Princeton is 4-1 in the Ivy League, with a 4-3 loss to Penn in its opener.

Harvard is 5-0, and Penn is 3-2. Harvard is at Penn Saturday and Princeton Sunday at 1. The Tigers play Dartmouth at 1 Saturday at home as well.

This is the final weekend of the Ivy League tennis season. The men's side is crowded at the top, with Princeton, Harvard and Columbia all at 4-1 heading into this final weekend.

Columbia is at Yale and Brown. Princeton is at Dartmouth and Harvard. 

There's a lot on the line this weekend in Ivy tennis. For the Princeton men, it means getting on the bus before getting on the courts. 

Hopefully the ride home after will be a celebratory one.

100 Percent Chance Of Women's Lacrosse

There's a 100 percent chance of a home game for the Princeton women's lacrosse team tonight. 

There's a 53 percent chance of showers at 7 pm, which is when tonight's game begins. That would make it among the best weather forecasts for the Tigers to play at home this season. 

Hey, it's only supposed to be light rain, even a gentle, soft spring rain. That'll be quite different than the pouring, biblical rains with temps in the 40s that Princeton has endured most of its home season.

A little rain isn't going to deter these Tigers. 

Princeton's opponent tonight is Maryland, whose current RPI is No. 5. This will be Princeton's seventh game against a team currently in the top 20 of the RPI, including five of the current top 10.

That's a team that has been tested. 

Princeton is 8-4 overall, with an RPI of 13 of its own. The Tigers have already clinched a spot in the Ivy League tournament and seem to be in good shape for a return to the NCAA tournament. 

This is a team in every sense as well. Grace Tauckus is fifth in Division I in free position goals per game, making her the only Princeton player to rank in the top 20 nationally in any statistical category.

The top 100, though, is dotted with Princeton players. McKenzie Blake ranks 77th in Division I in points per game. Haven Dora ranks 31st in assists per game. Amelia Hughes in 29th in saves per game. The list goes on like that.

As a team, Princeton ranks 14th nationally in scoring offense and 16th in shooting percentage. Perhaps the best number is 12.33, which is the number of times per game Princeton turns the ball over, a figure that ranks ninth in Division I.

Blake leads Princeton with 43 goals on the year. There are six other players in double figures in goals, and two — Tauckus and Jami MacDonald — who have better than 20 (Dora is one away from joining that group). There are four players in double figures in goals and assists (Tauckus, MacDonald, Dora and Kari Buonanno).

By the way, Blake has 43 goals and 43 draw controls. Should she get seven  more of each, she'd join Elizabeth George as the only player in program history to have a season of at least 50 of each.

When you have a team that has the kind of scoring balance that Princeton does, it makes you harder to defend. It's not like you can simply lock off Blake and take your chances. 

Dora, for her part, has had a huge breakout sophomore year. After six points a year ago as a freshman with three goals and three assists, Dora now has 43 points on 19 goals and 23 assists through 12 games this year. 

While Princeton ranks 14th in scoring offense, Maryland brings the nation's No. 11 scoring defense to the game, as the Terps allow 8.6 goals per game. Emily Sterling, the Maryland goalie and the two-time Big Ten Goalie of the Year, is No. 3 in the country with a .527 save percentage.

The Terps are 11-4 overall but 2-3 in their last five, beginning with a 13-9 loss to Penn on March 27. Princeton beat Penn 14-9 in the Quakers' next game after their Maryland game. Princeton comes into the game tonight after putting up 23 goals Saturday against Brown.

By the way, the forecast for the game at Brown was for sunshine, though a bit windy. And what happened during the women's game? It rained, of course, even though there was a zero percent chance of rain according to the weather.

After tonight, Princeton has two regular season games to go, this Saturday at home against Dartmouth (noon start, Princeton-Penn men follow at 5) and then April 27 at Harvard. Princeton is 4-1 in the league, behind Yale, who is 5-0, including defeating Princeton 11-9 on March 2 in the Ivy opener for both.

Yale, who along with Princeton is the only other team to have clinched its ILT spot, has games remaining against Cornell and Columbia; one win in those two means that the tournament will be at Yale. Harvard and Penn are a game back of Princeton at 3-2 in the league.

The Cure For A Bad Mood

TigerBlog walked outside yesterday morning, and the spring weather was already perfect. 

Then he stopped off in a store, where he was the second one on line at the checkout. The cashier said to the man in front of him "have a nice day," to which the man responded "you have a better one."

How nice was that? That comment lifted TB's morning spirits even higher. 

And then? He was driving into Princeton when he came to the point where 206 heads to the left at Nassau Street. The lane to go straight onto Nassau Street was blocked by a broken down van with a tow truck already there, so everyone in that lane had to move over into the other one. 

It was all going smoothly until TB pulled over and heard honking. When he looked in his rearview mirror, he saw a driver who was gesturing wildly at him. 

It didn't cause TB any road rage. More like "road confusion." Where did she want him to go? Wasn't it obvious what was going on? 

Anyway, that did take his spirits down a few levels. Leave it to Joe Dubuque to bring them back up.

The head coach of wrestling at Princeton came into TB's office to introduce his new head assistant coach, Cody Brewer. As Dubuque introduced Brewer, he asked TB when the next entry with him in it would be, suggesting that nothing drives blog traffic quite like a mention of Dubuque.

TB assured him that it would be today, and so here he is. 

Dubuque is a definite, 100 percent can't miss cure for someone's flipping you off on Nassau Street. That's for sure. 

As for Brewer, TigerBlog didn't know anything about him, other than he certainly looks the part of a wrestling coach, and, presumably, a pretty good wrestler before that. As it turns out, he is all of that.

Brewer coached at Virginia Tech and Northwestern before this, and as an undergrad he was the 2015 NCAA champion at 133 pounds. He came into the event as the 13 seed and then won five straight matches, including taking down the top seed 15-3 in the semifinals and the third seed 11-8 in the final. 

The third seed, by the way, was named Cory Clark and he was from Iowa. Two years later, in 2017, Clark won an NCAA title of his own.

TB hopes he enjoyed his few years as making a claim to being the best "Clark" from Iowa until Caitlin came along. Are the two Clarks related? TB can't find anything to suggest they are, but they did grow up 14 miles apart from each other. 

With TB's mood now much back on the positive side, he saw an envelope on his desk, one of those inter-University envelopes that he used to get all the time and now gets once a year or so. These are the envelopes that are sealed with the red piece of string that winds around the two red circles, and the front has different spaces to cross out the last person who had it and add the next address. 

This envelope came to Jadwin Gym from Firestone Library. Before that, it was at the East Asian Library, 693 Alexander, 226 Alexander and originally at Firestone Library. Presumably, TigerBlog will cross out his name and send it off to someone else, even though he hasn't had to send something through the University mail system in years. 

What was in the envelope? 

It was a book entitled "The Princeton University Trivia Book." TB's mood, which Dubuque had rescued, was now even better.

What could be better than a Princeton University trivia book for TB, whose title includes the word "historian?" How about being in the acknowledgements as one of the book's selected sources, from TB's own "I Can Do Anything, Stories From The First 50 Years Of Women's Athletics At Princeton."

The trivia book was compiled by Helene Van Rossum and TB's longtime friend and University archivist  Daniel J. Linke. 

If you're interested, you can order it HERE. It'll be available on Amazon starting next month.

The book is divided into eight sections: History, Student Life, Princeton Culture, Learning and Teaching, People, Extracurricular, Around Campus and Fun Facts. 

Trust TigerBlog on this. You'll absolutely love it. 

 

Eight For Morrisroe

Today's entry is one of those where TigerBlog went to look something up, got distracted and then almost forgot what it was he was trying to find.

The Princeton women's lacrosse team defeated Brown 23-10 in Providence Saturday, on a day when freshman Meg Morrisroe tied the school record for goals in a game with eight. When TB went to the women's lacrosse record book, he saw that Morrisroe is now the third Princeton women's lacrosse player to reach eight goals in a game.

The first was Kathy Mahoney, who did so in 1981, also against Brown. The second was Catherine McCarthy, who had eight against Yale in 1989.

He figured he'd go to the Daily Princetonian archives to see what he could find out about both of the other record holders. When he went to the Monday edition after Mahoney's big game, he didn't find anything about those eight goals, but he did see a picture of Princeton's baseball shortstop at the time, Henry Milligan.

If you don't know who Henry Milligan is, he won 10 letters at Princeton between football, wrestling and baseball. None of those, though, was the sport in which he'd become most famous.

That would be boxing, where he was an excellent light heavyweight, despite weighing only 185 pounds or so. He reached the semifinals of the 1984 Olympic Trials at 201 pounds before he lost to, well, can you name who beat him? 

The person who beat him then lost to a different Henry, this one named Tillman, in the Olympic Trial final. Henry Tillman then won the Olympic gold medal.

Give up? It was an 18-year-old Mike Tyson.

Milligan fought as a professional and even had a cruiserweight title fight. He was also an engineer. 

Meanwhile, the story about Mahoney was actually in the Tuesday "Prince" that week. Mahoney broke the record held by none other than Emily Goodfellow, one of the very few people who can say "I won more letters at Princeton than Henry Milligan," as she won 12. Goodfellow scored seven against Radcliffe in 1974 to set the record, and Jody McNeil equaled that with seven against Hofstra in 1978.

That 1981 game against Brown, by the way, also had another Princeton player who scored seven, Wiz Lippincott. 

The 1989 game was a 17-3 romp over Yale. This is how McCarthy was described in the student paper after her first goal: 

"McCarthy, who plays like Ming the Merciless and shoots like Larry Bird, was just getting warmed up."

TigerBlog has no idea who Ming is. He doesn't sound like a fun guy though.

Meanwhile, back in the present, TigerBlog was watching the women's lacrosse game against Brown on ESPN+ before he headed over to the men's game. The first quarter ended at 9-6 Princeton and took 45 minutes to play. 

Princeton's defense tightened up. Princeton's offense kept going.

Morrisroe's eight goals came after she had scored six goals on 16 shots for the season to date. Against the Bears she went off for eight goals on 10 shots. 

If you didn't notice, Morrisroe's goal total was the most in the last 35 years. Think about all of the great players Princeton has had since then who never got there. 

It was an impressive win for Princeton, especially considering the quick turnaround from its loss at Loyola Wednesday night. The Tigers then had to come back from Baltimore and head up to Providence Friday for a noon game Saturday — against the No. 25 team in the country. 

Princeton sprinted away from the Bears, and when it was over, Princeton had run all the way into the Ivy League tournament, clinching a spot in the four-team field.  

With two weeks to go in the regular season, Princeton has three games to go. There is this coming Wednesday at home against Maryland, and then the league season concludes with Saturday's noon game against Dartmouth, also on Sherrerd Field, and then a trip to Harvard April 27. 

The Ivy standings right now have Yale at 5-0, followed by Princeton at 4-1 and then Harvard and Penn at 3-2. Yale finishes with Cornell and Columbia, and Princeton can only get a share of the title if the Bulldogs lose at least one of those. Should Yale win one more game, it would definitely host the league tournament.

Princeton, though, is playing as well as it has all season. The game Saturday in Providence was another big step forward.

A Lot Of Athletes

A guy goes in for his physical, and he asks the doctor if she saw the eclipse. The doctor said she missed it, and the guy says the next total solar eclipse will be in 2079, when he'll be nearly 120 years old.

"Will you be around for it?" the doctor asks.

"Depends how good a doctor you are," the guy says. 

That was an actual conversation from TigerBlog's physical Tuesday, by the way.

*

There will be 15 Princeton teams who compete this weekend. Don't believe TB? See for yourself HERE.

Two of those teams will be the men's and women's track and field teams, who will host the Larry Ellis Invitational.

Larry Ellis, if you don't know, was the first Black head coach ever in the Ivy League. Hired in 1970 to coach the men's track and field team, he would serve in that position for 22 years. Before he coached at Princeton, he was the head coach at Jamaica High School in Queens, where he coached Bob Beamon (look him up if you don't already know), and before that he served in the Korean War.

Ellis, who was also an Olympic coach, was part of one of the most insightful moments TB has ever experienced. TB was walking down the Jadwin balcony when he saw Ellis and one of his athletes outside of his office, and TB heard the athlete ask the coach what he needed to do to be able to get to a certain time in his event.

And what did Ellis answer? With all the wisdom of the world, he said simply "run faster."

As anyone who ever met him could confirm, he was an extraordinarily kind man. He was a real gentleman, to quote a coach Ellis brought to Princeton in 1977 — Fred Samara.

Larry Ellis passed away in 1998. The Larry Ellis Invitational originated one year later.

* 

Of all the athletes who will be on this campus this weekend, one who bears watching is Dartmouth softball freshman pitcher Jensin Hall, who has been the Ivy Pitcher of the Week three of the last four weeks. Hall earned her most recent honor this past week after striking out 17 Brown Bears in a Big Green win.

The Ivy softball race is a good one, with Columbia currently on top at 7-2, followed by Yale at 9-3 and then Princeton and Dartmouth at 5-4 and Harvard at 6-6. The path to the NCAA tournament goes through the Ivy tournament, in which the top four teams will play.

Princeton and Dartmouth will play twice tomorrow, starting at 12:30, and then once more Sunday, at 12:30.

*

Here's something TigerBlog didn't realize about Karlie Samuelson when he wrote about her and the London Lions yesterday: She's Devin Cannady's sister-in-law.

Cannady, one of the great scorers in Princeton men's basketball history and an NBA player himself, is married to Katie Lou Samuelson, Karlie's sister who is two years younger and herself a professional basketball player. 

By the way, if you haven't seen the shot that Holly Winterburn hit to give London the win in the game the other day, look it up — and then imagine this had happened in an NBA playoff game or an NCAA championship game.

*

TigerBlog's longtime friend Matt Ciciarelli is a former Princeton baseball contact for the Office of Athletic Communications, but he hasn't been to Clarke Field in quite some time. He said he might come by for the Monmouth game, but it was moved up a day to Tuesday, which made it tougher for him.

What was the draw? The son of a friend of his plays for Monmouth. Turns out his name is Trey Porter, and it turns out that Ciciarelli missed out on something incredible by not being at the game.

First of all, Porter made his first start of the season Second of all, he made this catch:

Hey @SportsCenter we have a home run saving catch for you from freshman Trey Porter in today’s @MUHawksBaseball game at Princeton.

Watch the rest of the game here: https://t.co/N3rPRsHZF7#sctop10 #FlyHawks pic.twitter.com/Pz0DJI8WnC

— Monmouth Hawks (@MonmouthHawks) April 9, 2024

It doesn't get much better than that, does it? Apparently it does: It was only the No. 3 Play of the Day on SportsCenter.

As for the Ivy baseball standings, they also have Columbia on top, at 8-1. Behind the Lions, only four games separate second from eighth and only three games separate second from seventh. The race for the tournament spots will be intense.

Princeton currently sits tied for third with Penn at 5-4, one game behind Cornell and one game ahead of Yale. Princeton has three this weekend at home against Harvard (doubleheader tomorrow at 11:30, single game Sunday at noon) and then three with home against Penn followed by three-game trips to Yale and Columbia

*

There is a lacrosse doubleheader in Providence tomorrow, with the women's game at noon and the men's game at 3:30. By the end of the night, one or both (or neither) of the Princeton teams could have clinched an Ivy tournament spot. 

EuroCup Champs

TigerBlog said before the NCAA basketball tournaments started that the women would outdraw the men if Caitlin Clark got to the final, and that's exactly what happened.

Oh, and it wasn't even close — the women drew four million more people than the men for the championship games.The NBA Finals and the World Series couldn't match Clark either. Again, what other athlete has ever had this kind of impact? 

There were more than 18 million who watched the women's game. You have to be either college or NFL football to exceed that number. 

There were far fewer viewers for the basketball game TigerBlog watched from start to finish yesterday. It seemed like viewership peaked around 7,000, at least according to the tracker on YouTube.

This one, though, was about as crazy as you can hope for out of a championship game. In fact, TigerBlog has never really seen anything quite like it. You could even say it was a championship game where the winner wasn't important.

The game was between the London Lions and Turkish team Besiktas, who were playing Game 2 of the EuroCup women's finals at the Copper Box Arena in London. The first game had been seven days earlier in Istanbul, where Besitkas had won 75-68.

The way the series works is that it's a two-game, home-and-home, total points situation. Because of that, Besitkas went into the game yesterday needing only to lose by fewer than seven to win the championship. 

It was a very strange way to watch a game. London led throughout, but the lead jumped above and below seven a bunch of times. It put all kinds of craziness on the proceedings — and on the play-by-play man, who kept giving the score as this particular game first and then aggregate second.

What was TigerBlog's interest? First and foremost, there was Abby Meyers, the 2022 Ivy League Player of the Year at Princeton who played in the WNBA last summer and who was in her first season with the Lions this year. 

Then there was the fact that when TB was in England this past winter, he went to write a story about Meyers and saw the Lions play twice, once in the Copper Box. It was a great experience for TB in terms of the facility and the fan base in addition to the basketball, and he has been following the team ever since.

London made its way through the EuroCup playoffs, becoming the first team from England ever to reach the final. And now all the Lions had to do was win by eight or more. 

Meyers came off the bench to hit a huge three and a layup in the first half, on a night when every single point mattered. Then, midway through the second half, she came off the bench to take two foul shots when Karlie Samuelson, who played at Stanford and for Great Britain the Olympics, was hurt while being fouled. Meyers had missed two free throws earlier in the half, but, again with the pressure of knowing every point mattered, she knocked down both.

London was in control of the game itself, and had that been all that mattered, the final few minutes would have been played much differently. Not on this night.

The fourth quarter began with London ahead 60-55, or minus-2 in the aggregate. It was 60-59 two minutes into the fourth, but the Lions scored five straight. Minus-1. 

It was 68-61 with 4:01 left. Even. It was even again at 70-63 and 73-66, the latter with under two minutes left. 

Now what? Turkey cut it to 73-68, but plus-two, with 1:35 left. A London three made it plus-one Lions with 1:16 to go. With 31 seconds left, Besitkas scored again. 76-70. London now minus-1. 

Holly Winterburn, who played at Oregon and is another great young English player at 23, drained a three-pointer with 12 seconds left. 79-70. London plus-two. That was the biggest shot of the night, one that became the game-winner when Samuelson came up with a steal and then Megan Gustafson, who held the career scoring record at Iowa before Caitlin Clark, sealed it with two foul shots. 

Final score: London 81, Besitkas 70. Lions, plus-four. 

When TigerBlog was there in December, he met a teacher named Becky Power, who had brought her daughter Elsie to that game. They were both there yesterday for the clincher.

These were the videos that Becky sent postgame last night:

 

What do you see there? You see joy. You see a huge crowd. And you see a lot of men in the audience. 

You also get to see Elsie at the very end of the second video. 

Here is what Becky said about the game: "We were there!!! It was amazing!!! I've never seen the Copper Box so packed! Elsie's been to a few sport games, including the Premier League and even a Women's World Cup game, and she said this was the best event she's been to."

This was also a very high level of basketball. It just shows you how much the women's game has grown, especially in Europe. 

Congrats to the London Lions and to Abby Meyers. And to the London fans, who were treated to something very special.

Do you think the NBA playoffs would be better if that was the format for the first round?