Turning 80,000

Congratulations to Princeton's own Anna McNatt!!!

The junior was named the Ivy League's cross country Athlete of the Week after finishing second in a field of 250 at the Princeton Fall Classic. Next up will be the Ivy League Heptagonal Championships at Van Cortlandt Park a week from Friday, which is also Halloween. 

If you've never been to Heps cross country at Van Cortlandt, you definitely need to go. It's a great experience all around, with some great racing mixed in. 

That's for next week though. 

For today, there is another reason to congratulate Anna McNatt. The story of her Ivy League honor was the 80,000th posted to GoPrincetonTigers.com in its history, a figure that was called to TigerBlog's attention by his colleague Warren Croxton.  

Anna McNatt wasn't even born yet when the first one was posted, back in the late summer of 1998. TigerBlog remembers the evolution from back then, from no webpage to a non-commercial webpage to the one that you've come to rely on all of these years. 

There was a time, hard as it may seem to you young ones out there, where there was no internet, let alone college athletic websites. Wanted to find out the score of the Princeton-Bryant men's soccer game? The best way was to call the venerable Tiger Sportsline. 

Oh, those were the days. It was a torturous experience to update it and make it as user-friendly as possibly. Did you ever call it? 

"Thank you for calling the Tiger Sportsline. Press 1 for scores only, 2 for upcoming schedules, 3 for highlights of men's sports and 4 for highlights of women's sports." 

Then the first try at a webpage came along. This was called the Tiger Web Locker Room, complete with an animated Tiger at a locker. 

That page was a subset of princeton.edu. It also came with no content management system, so everything the Office of Athletic Communications posted — or at least tried to post — required HTML coding. And how was it done? Copy and paste obviously. 

Seriously. You'd have to copy the last story and then change the particulars to match the story you wanted to add. Today it seems quaint. Back then? It was challenging every time.  

There was a lot of human error, much of it courtesy of TigerBlog. 

Then, after a long back-and-forth, the University agreed to allow Athletics to have a .com website with ads on it. TB believes the convincing final piece of those negotiations was something along the lines of "everyone else is doing it."

And so goprincetontigers.com was born. 

And now it has 80,000 entries. That's a ton of athlete bios, stories, tickets sold, schedules, record sections and everything else.  

Everything about communicating with Princeton fans changed the day that the first story went up. The ability for alums outside of the general area to follow their teams went from reliance on a quarterly newsletter or something like that to pretty much an endless stream of information. 

TigerBlog has mentioned this many times before, but the amount of alumni giving to the Friends' Groups went way up once the webpage came along. Of course, the ability to give became easier as technology advanced, but the impact of the information on the webpage shouldn't be overlooked. 

There have been many different designs, along with a few different web providers. It hasn't always been easy to balance having so many teams and so many events. 

Through it all though has been a non-stop flow of Princeton Athletics information. And an audience that has continued to click on these offerings. 

Warren first called the milestone number to TB's attention yesterday afternoon. By Warren's calculations, Princeton has averaged eight different posts per day for the entirety of the webpage's existence. That sounds about right. 

 What's next? That's hard to say. 

These days, social media engagement is on a whole different level from the webpage numbers, but there will always be a need for much of what goprincetontigers.com brings to you. 

And for that, TB says thank you for your support. 

Eighty-thousand. That's a lot of mileage on the GPT odometer.