Things Learned From Instagram

TigerBlog offered a picture of a dog in the driver's seat last week. 

This week, he gives equal time to a cat.  Ah, the things you see on Instagram.

In the case of the cat, that's the feed of Clara Roth from this past weekend, when she apparently moved from Chicago to New Jersey. It's a long drive, so it's not surprising that Roth would want to sit in the passenger seat for part of the ride. 

Roth, if you don't know, was the 2020 winner of the von Kienbusch Award as Princeton's top senior female athlete. She finished her career with 101 points, tied for 10th all-time in program history, despite the fact that she was only able to play as a freshman, sophomore and junior due to the pandemic. 

She led the field hockey team to the 2019 NCAA final while being named a first-team All-American and a Honda Award finalist. She then spent a graduate season at Northwestern, where she won the NCAA title in 2021.

This does beg the question of how many college athletes have ever reached the NCAA championship game with two different schools? TB can think of a few, and he's guessing there will be more and more with all the player movement in college sports going forward. 

And now, TB leaves the rest of your Wednesday to some other things he learned recently simply on Instagram. 

Getting back to Roth and her trip over the weekend, she offered these two:

Okay, if that had been TigerBlog, the entire tray of brownies would have been gone by, oh, 10:30. He would have tried his best, but he would have had no chance of not eating them all. 

As for Ohio, TB has driven across that start several times and Roth's post literally made him laugh out loud. Truer words have never been written, or at least posted on Instagram.

Next up there is former men's lacrosse player Austin deButts, someone TB hasn't spoken to in a few years. Ah, but he feels like knows a bit more about what's going on with Austin these days: 

Apparently congratulations are in order. 

Now over to the football team and to senior defensive back Solomon Williams, who has played in every game the last two years. Williams is doing work on his senior thesis in the Dominican Republic this summer.

And the subject? 

Hmmm. Do individual birds cooperate and respond to other birds with whom they are closely associated? 

TB guesses he'll have to wait until Williams' thesis is done. Or at least until football practice starts, when he can ask him. 

Speaking of summer research and academic work, the next stop on this Instagram tour is Ecuador, where rising junior men's lacrosse player Colin Vickrey is working for a hospital. Vickrey is, not surprisingly,  a pre-med student. 

Earlier this summer Colin posted a picture with a random dog behind him. This past weekend he posted another one, this time facing out at the mountains while he holds a lacrosse stick. 

And the dog is a different one.  

TB texted Colin to find out what he was doing there and who the dogs were. This was his response: 

Yes I am in Ecuador right now working for a hospital. It’s one of the IIP’s that Princeton has to offer. It’s been an unreal experience. The dog I posted a couple weeks ago was a stray but the recent one was a dog that stays at the conservatory refuge that I stayed at over the weekend.  I’m doing a couple things. Firstly is that I’ve gone to 12 remote community’s to provide healthcare. These communities have been anywhere from deep in the Amazon to indigenous communities 13,000 feet up. Another thing is my project which has been about two things, the caravanas and the hospital. I’ve spent a lot of time in the hospital shadowing doctors and surgeons and now will be presenting ways to improve/increase efficiency in the hospital and caravanas. Currently sitting in on an eye surgery as we speak. The dog’s name is Suca, she is a beautiful dog.

That's a summer well spent. 

TB could keep going all day with this. There's certainly no shortage of Instagram feeds to choose from, right? 

He'll close with this gem of Whitney and Wyatt Madalon, the two youngest of men's head lacrosse coach Matt Madalon (along with older daughter Waverly). If you ever need to be cheered up, check out the videos that Madalon's wife Ashley posts.