As TB has written before, he's played a card game with the MacDonalds in the past that revealed them to be ultra, ultra competitive. It didn't help that TB won, by the way.
Steve and Linda MacDonald, the patriarch and matriarch of the family, nearly came to blows. Well, not really. There was some mention of divorce after decades and decades of marital bliss, though TB is pretty sure it was in jest. Yes, they're still together.
Given all of this, TB can only imagine what's going between Mikey MacDonald, Princeton Class of 2015, and his younger sister Jami, a current Tiger senior. You remember Mikey MacDonald, right? He was the 2015 Roper Trophy winner as the top senior male athlete in his class.
Mikey MacDonald was a lacrosse player. So is Jami.
Here are two little facts that make TB chuckle:
* Mikey finished his Princeton career with 208 career points, which at the time was the fifth-highest total in program history and which is now seventh. Can you name the two players who've passed him, by the way?
Jami? She enters tomorrow's game at Virginia with, wait for it, 207 career points. Can you imagine the trash talk?
* There's also the fact that Jami was named the Ivy League Offensive Player of the Week yesterday after having four goals and four assists in Princeton's 19-13 win in its Ivy League opener at Harvard Saturday. It's the second time in her career Jami has been honored with the award.
Ah, but here's a little fact that probably has not escaped the notice of someone in their house. Mikey was a three-time Ivy League Player of the Week.
Of course, all of this got TB to thinking if Princeton has had another brother/sister combination where both have been Ivy Player of the Week. His first thought was of the Behnkes, where three soccer-playing siblings combined for six first-team All-Ivy League selections. Here's another trivia question: What were their names?
TB knows for a fact that the sister was an Ivy Player of the Week. He figures one of the brothers, or probably both, were also honored.
Is he overlooking anyone obvious?
The answer to the two questions, by the way, are this: 1) both Michael Sowers and Coulter Mackesy have passed MacDonald and in fact are 1-2 all-time for the Princeton men and 2) you had Griff, Matt and Emily Behncke.
There have to be others, right? TB always overlooks some obvious answers when he asks questions like this.
While the subject is Ivy League lacrosse Player of the Week awards, or at least tangentially related to that, TB would also like to mention Jack Stahl, the Ivy League men's Defensive Player of the Week. For all of the men's lacrosse players TB has known at Princeton, it's possible that Stahl is the quietest, or at least the one who least needs a spotlight.
Here is what TB wrote for the story on goprincetontigers.com:
It's possible that the Princeton men's lacrosse program has never had a player who shuns the spotlight more than Jack Stahl. Unfortunately for him with the way he is playing, that spotlight is going to find him.
Stahl was honored for Princeton's 20-9 win over Rutgers Saturday. The junior defenseman once again was given the other team's best offensive player to guard, and once again he did exactly what he was supposed to do.
This time, his assignment was Colin Kurlyda, an All-American who came in with 14 goals on the season. Stahl held Kurlyda to one goal, which came when the Tigers were ahead 19-5.
This came one week after Stahl held two other All-Americans, Syracuse's Joey Spallina and UNC's Owen Duffy, to a combined one goal. If you add those three performances together, Stahl allowed two goals on 20 shots, with five caused turnovers of his own.
Stahl would have been TB's nominee for Ivy Defensive Player of the Week after that, except that goalie Ryan Croddick had a weekend for the ages. As such, TB was happy to see that he got the recognition he did this time around — even if it probably made him roll his eyes or something.
Hey, play like he has been, and yes, this is what happens.
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