Congratulations to Julia Johnson on her first collegiate goal and her first Ivy League Defensive Player of the Week honor.
While she's a freshman at Princeton, she is hardly a stranger to the campus. Her father? Former Princeton head men's basketball coach Sydney Johnson, who was the 1997 Ivy League Player of the Year and a huge part of those great Tiger teams of the late 1990s.
Sydney Johnson — now the head coach of the WNBA's Washington Mystics — was a five-time Ivy Rookie of the Week in the 1993-94 season. After that, he was the league Player of the Week once as a junior and once as a senior.
If you watched him play, you recall that Johnson was a player who impacted every part of the game all over the court but didn't necessarily put up the kind of individual numbers that would get him the weekly award.
He did once make 11 straight three-pointers over two games in one weekend once. He also guarded a player once who came into the game with 999 career points — and ended the game with 999 career points.
Have there been other parent/child Ivy Players of the Week at Princeton? There have been similar first-team All-Ivy selections. Player of the Week? That's harder to track.
Julia Johnson's next game will be tonight at 8, when Lehigh is at Princeton for the back end of a doubleheader. The Princeton women have been playing catch-up all season in the Ivy League race and now appear to be at their best at the right time.
The Tigers are all the way up to third in the league with nine points, one behind Harvard and Columbia with two Ivy games to go. The league tournament will be held in three weeks, and Princeton could still host it or miss it all together or anything in between.
The opening game of tonight's matches the Princeton men and Bryant, with kickoff at 5:30. The teams have never before met, and they've picked the right year to do so.
What seemed at the time it was scheduled to be a solid non-league game late in the regular season has taken on a whole new meaning now that it's here.
Princeton is the No. 1 team in the current RPI. Bryant in the No. 3 team. That's in all of Division I.
TigerBlog texted Princeton head coach Jim Barlow the other day to ask him if he had a sense that this game would have this kind of backdrop. His answer was what TB said, that the Bulldogs usually have a strong RPI and that it figured to be a good matchup.
It's better than that, actually.
Between them, the teams are a combined 23-1-2. They've combined to outscore their opponents 54-9. Both teams have a player who has outscored the opponents all by himself and another who has equaled the opponents.
You won't want to miss this one.
The Bulldogs have a very international flavor, led by eight players from Spain and three more from Portugal. There are also others from England, Northern Ireland, Israel and Belgium.
Bryant's share of that 23-1-2 record would be 13 wins, no losses and one tie. That draw came back on Aug. 21, an opening day 1-1 tie with LIU. Since then? Thirteen up, thirteen down — including wins over Dartmouth and Brown.
Ruben Resendes is the Bryant head coach, in his third year with the program. Prior to that, he led Franklin Pierce to the NCAA Division II national championship. While Resendes was doing that in 2022, Bryant was going 3-10-1.
In his first year at Bryant, Resendes took his team to a 16-2-2 record and its first-ever berth in the NCAA tournament, with a first-round win over Yale. Last year his Bulldogs lost 2-1 to Vermont on a goal with four minutes left in the America East tournament final. How did Vermont do after that? It won the NCAA championship.
The game tonight figures to be a fascinating one to watch. Perhaps this will be the first of two meetings between these teams?
It'll be a special late October evening on Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium. Kickoff is at 5:30. Admission for both games is free.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment