Shouting Out

Before anything else today, TigerBlog would like to give a shout-out to the men and women who took the pothole-decimated roads around his house and turned it into what you see here. 

Fresh oil and chips for everyone. Don't get the reference? It's what the sign said when the road was recently paved. TB mentioned it last week. 

Who else is worthy of a shout-out today? 

Jami MacDonald had a goal and an assist as Canada did in fact defeat Wales very early yesterday morning at the women's lacrosse World Championships in Tokyo. The Canadians finished the round-robin portion at 3-0 and advanced to the quarterfinals, which begin began today. 

Canada was to play the host Japanese team at 7 pm local time, which, if TB is doing this correctly, would be 6 am in the Eastern United States. If so, then the game might already be finished by the time you read this. 

The winner of the Canada-Japan game will play Friday against the winner of the game between England and the Haudenosaunee. That game started at 2 am today, so unless you were either up really late or really early, that game is now over. 

The other side of the bracket has Israel and Australia and the United States against Puerto Rico. Those games are probably over by now as well. 

The finals will be Sunday. The last three championship games matched the U.S. and Canada. 

Meanwhile, TB sends a shout-out to his longtime friend and former colleague Craig Sachson, who, along with TB's current athletic communications friend and colleague Warren Croxton and another Princeton Athletics employee whose name might be familiar (head football coach Bob Surace) are ridiculously avid Philadelphia 76ers fans. 

TB texted them yesterday to ask if they were okay with having their team assemble a roster of completely unlikeable players. To that, Craig responded with: 

Not sure what you’re talking about. If you remember correctly, we’ve always loved Lebron. And Jaylen Brown. 

Well played, Craig. Surace, for his part, said he was bummed that Draymond Green resigned with Golden State or it would have been yet another member of the unlikeable club. Surace also referred to the coming rivalry with the New York Knicks (also known as the NBA champion New York Knicks) as "our dream team against Villanova."

It's an interesting phenomenon, of course. If you've always rooted against a player and suddenly he's on YOUR team, do you suddenly like that player? 

TB has always thought of that when thinking about where some of his all-time favorite Princeton athletes might have gone had they not come become Tigers.  He would have had to root against all of them, though he would never have liked them in the first place since, you know, they could have been Tigers and chose not to be. 

Next on the shout-out list would be all of the Princeton rowers who won medals at the U-23 World Championships in Duisberg, Germany. The men's four race had, obviously, 12 total medalists. Of those 12, nearly half — five — are Princetonians. Tristan Wenger and Marcus Chute made up half of the gold medal boat from Great Britain. 

You can read more about that HERE.  

The women's open team had four rowers who won medals, including Joely Cherniss and Lauren Dubois, who won gold with the United States eight boat. You can read about the women's success HERE.

Another shout out goes the way of the four women's hockey players who will be competing at the USA Women's National Festival next week: Uma Corniea, Megan Healy, Gabby Kim and Rosie Klein. As it says in THIS story: 

At the conclusion of the camp, USA Hockey will name the U.S. Collegiate Women's Select Team, which will face Canada in a three-game series Aug. 12-15 in Richmond, British Columbia.

Lastly, TB sends himself a shout out. Coming up later today (or maybe already, depending on what time he gets this posted) will be his latest feature story, this one on Ryan Croddick, the goalie on the NCAA championship men's lacrosse team this past spring and the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four. 

Here's the first paragraph: 

A ball moving at 80 miles per hour will travel 10 yards in 0.256 seconds. That’s two-hundred-fifty-six-one-thousandths of a second. Two-hundred-fifty-six-one-thousandths of a second.

 

As the great writer John Irving once said, the first paragraph should tell the entire story of a novel. TB thinks this paragraph does that for his feature on Croddick.