Stacie Too

 

TigerBlog was at the final Department of Athletics staff meeting of 2025-26 yesterday.

One of the staples of each meeting is an update in competitive success — and Princeton has certainly had its share of it this academic year.

In fact, there are 12 Ivy League tournaments each year. How many has Princeton won this academic year?

How about more than half of them? 

Here's the list: men's soccer, field hockey, women's volleyball, women's squash, women's basketball, men's lacrosse, women's lacrosse. That's seven out of 12. 

That makes the final scoreboard for 2025-26 Princeton 7, Everyone Else 5 (that's what it will be when the baseball tournament ends this weekend). 

And that doesn't count men's and women's Heps cross country and indoor track and field and men's and women's swimming and diving, all of which Princeton won, though they aren't technically in the team tournament format. Also, men's and women's Outdoor Heps hasn't happened yet either; they will be held this weekend at Princeton's Weaver Track and Field Stadium. 

Or, for that matter, women's soccer, which was the Ivy League champion by winning the regular season title. Or women's tennis, who won the Ivy title in a sport where there is no tournament. Or women's hockey, who won the ECAC regular season championship. Or men's water polo, who won the NWPC championship. Or women's lightweight rowing, who won Eastern Sprints. Or the other three rowing teams, who compete this weekend for Ivy title. 

So that's a fair amount of winning.

TigerBlog has been here a long time, and he's said the same thing time after time after time: None of this winning is guaranteed. He's even linked to the last scene of the movie "Patton" to hammer home the point: 

TigerBlog isn't sure how many athletic department meetings he's attended. One possible answer would be: "Not as many as Stacie Traube."

Stacie Traube has also been at Princeton longer than TigerBlog. If TB has the numbers correct, she is finishing her 41st year at Princeton, the last 37 of which have been spent in the football office, after four years in the Politics department. 

For all the years TB has know her, he never knew this, which he learned from her bio: 

She began her career at Princeton in the politics department, working closely with the late Prof. Walter F. Murphy. Her name (nee Scofield) can be found within in Murphy's acknowledgements in the preface of the Con-Interp textbook.

That's impressive. 

What's really impressive would be the number of athletes with whom she has worked, beginning before their recruiting visits and continuing long after their graduations. Given the size of the roster and the number of years, that's probably somewhere around 1,000 football players, maybe more, given that she started at a time when there was still freshman football. 

Stacie in many ways is Princeton Football. TB isn't sure how many home games she's missed in all those years, but it's not a lot. There's more to it than that, though.

She's always been super-protective of the program from a standpoint of the people who have played and coached here and any public messaging that has gone out. She has always been dialed in 100 percent on making sure every aspect of the program is properly represented. 

And there's no aspect of the program that hasn't had her fingerprints on it. In a sport where there are offensive coordinators and defensive coordinators and special teams coordinators and running game coordinators and so on, Stacie was just a coordinator. Recruits. Current players. Alums. Coaches. 

Ask any of them what Stacie Traube has meant to Princeton Football. They'll all smile and gush over here, and why wouldn't they? She's made every one of their experiences better. 

You can consider this the third in TB's series of "She's retiring." First it was Karen Malec, from the events staff. Then it was Nancy Donigan, from compliance. 

In this case, it's Stacie Traube who will be stepping away at the end  of the academic year. Those three? That's a combined 116 years of service to Princeton Athletics — loyal, hard-working, high-quality, high-quantity service at that. 

And that's something that deserves to be saluted. 

Again, as TB has said before — twice now — their retirements will leave a huge void around here.