Hoosiers II - The Unhappy Ending

There are teams that TigerBlog roots for, and there are teams that TigerBlog roots against. And then there are the two teams that TigerBlog really, really roots against.

One of those two is the New York Yankees. The other is the Duke men's basketball team.

Of course, both are the current champion of their universes. Just as was the case in 2000-01, TB had to sit through a Yankees' World Series championship in the fall and then a Duke NCAA men's championship in the spring.

Last night's 61-59 Duke win over Butler was a great game. TigerBlog assumed it was going to be a blowout, and he kept switching over to one of his favorite movies, "Broadcast News," on a different channel. The game was so compelling, TB gave up on the movie after the scene where Aaron tells Jane that Tom is the devil, which is one of the 10 best scenes TB has ever seen in a movie.

As for the game, it was one in which neither team ever led by more than six and one in which Butler's Gordon Hayward came within millimeters of hitting a championship-winning shot from midcourt near the sideline.

By now, you've seen the shot and the replay, probably many times. Had Hayward's shot gone in, it would have been without question the single greatest play in sports history. As in, all-time, ever.

Now, perhaps the cynical side of TigerBlog wants to point out that to win the title, Duke had to defeat Arkansas-Pine Bluff, Cal (24-11), Purdue (minus its best player) and Baylor (finished four games back in the Big 12 regular-season) to get to the Final Four. Once there, the Devils beat West Virginia and Butler; had seeds held, that would have been Kentucky and either Kansas or Syracuse.

Still, a win is a win, and Duke and Butler certainly played a great, entertaining final, certainly more entertaining than last year's, when North Carolina blew out Michigan State before the first media timeout, and certainly more entertaining than tonight's women's final figures to be as UConn looks to be so much better than the field, in this case Stanford.

As an aside, perhaps UConn should play a combined team of the best players from the rest of women's basketball to see if it would be close.

Getting back to Butler's run to the championship game, consider that the school is a strong academic institution with an undergraduate population of just under 4,000.

The Bulldogs play in the Horizon League, a league in which TB dares you to name the second-place finisher or at least half of its 10 members without looking. And yet, despite that, and a coach who looks he should be the team manager, Butler managed to put together a team that went 33-5 and defeated Syracuse and Kansas State in the regional and then Michigan State in the Final Four before nearly knocking off Duke to win it all.

Does that give hope to an Ivy League school - say, the one in Central New Jersey, for starters - that it might someday be able to match that performance? The thing about basketball is that it doesn't take 20 players to be great. If a team could get a Hayward and build around him, that's a great start.

If you could get a Ryan Wittman-Louis Dale-Jeff Foote combination and have them play together for four years, as Cornell did, that's the way to get it done. Cornell, obviously, reached the Sweet 16 this year.

Princeton in 1997-98 had the pieces in place for a deep run in the tournament, only to run into the wrong team (Michigan State, with four starters who would start and win the NCAA final two years later) in the second round.

It takes luck, yes. You need the right guys to fall through the cracks to your team. Realistically, Duke could have recruited anyone it wanted on Butler's team and didn't.

Still, in basketball, you can win with a 6-5 forward who scores but doesn't attract offers from power conferences because he doesn't have the right body type or a 6-0 point guard (say, a Mitch Henderson type) who is fast and can pass and grows up in the heart of Big 10 country, only to have nobody notice him.

If nothing else, Butler's run has to give hope to non-power conference schools, just as George Mason did several years ago in reaching the Final Four from the CAA. It's not going to happen often, but it is going to happen. And why not another strong academic school with a young coach who put together a few strong classes consecutively and had them play together from Day 1? Why not Princeton? Is it realistic? Do the odds favor Princeton or any other Ivy or Patriot or Summit or MAAC or Southern or any other similar conference? Not in the least.

But they didn't favor Butler either, and look how that turned out? Why not hope?

Of course, had Butler won, it would have set off an endless number of "Hoosiers" comparisons. For those who've never seen "Hoosiers," please leave work right now and go watch it. And if you have seen it, maybe you should go watch it again.

The Final Four began when Princeton Director of Athletics Gary Walters emailed TB a picture of Walters and Bobby Plump (the picture above). For those who don't know, Plump was the hero of Milan High's 1952 Indiana state championship, and he was the inspiration for the Jimmy Chitwood character in "Hoosiers."

Walters, as a former chair of the men's basketball committee, goes every year to the Final Four. This year, he met up with Plump, who is also a Butler graduate.

A few days later, Plump's alma mater almost pulled off the same kind of miracle has his high school team had done.

Call it "Hoosiers II," only this one - like the World Series last fall- had an unhappy ending for TigerBlog.

Miles And Miles

When Pete Carril was the Princeton men's basketball coach, he drove a university car, a big blue Oldsmobile that TigerBlog assumes was part of his contract. When Carril retired in 1996, that car was moved to the Department of Athletics motor pool.

Through the years, TigerBlog spent a great deal of time in the old Olds, which was nicknamed "the Hall of Fame car." After that, there was a maroon minivan, as well as some Ford Tauruses and then some other cars before the department phased out its fleet of vehicles in favor of reimbursing for miles or renting as needed.

Ironically, TigerBlog used to ride on the bus for Princeton men's basketball during his newspaper days, largely because 1) Carril said it would be okay and 2) because TB could write his story while Carril spent his 45 minutes in the lockerroom after the game and just plug in the quotes afterward.

Princeton owned two buses back then and had at least one full-time bus driver, an amiable guy named Steve Gandy. TB remembers with great fondness traveling with those 1989-94 teams, especially the trip back from Dartmouth after the 1991 team finished its 14-0 Ivy regular season, a trip that ended in the Jadwin Gym parking lot with the entire team chanting "Steve is the man" to the bus driver. Among TB's other memories include seeing Carril violate all of the rules listed above the bus drivers head, all at the same time, including "standing in the stairwell" and "talking to the bus driver while the bus is in motion," while of course smoking his cigar (in violation of another).

When TB first came to work at Princeton, he began to drive, largely because the team would leave on Thursday night for Friday/Saturday weekends and TB didn't want to miss "Seinfeld." Eventually, it just became way more convenient to drive and not have to be dependent on the team's schedule.

Through the next few years, most of those trips were spent with Tom McCarthy, and often with Mark Eckel of the Trenton Times and radio man Ed Benkin. As they say, those were the days.

TigerBlog pulled out of the Gillette Stadium parking lot Saturday evening at 6:15, after Princeton's men's lacrosse win over Brown in the New England Lacrosse Classic. It was just TB and TigerBlog Jr., who had made the trip, and it would be nearly five hours before the two made it all the way back.

As long rides go, there are worse times to make them than when the NCAA men's basketball Final Four is just starting, as Butler-Michigan State and Duke-West Virginia would unfold on Westwood One during the trip. The only tough part was having to continually find a new station to listen to the games on as the car continued south and would find itself out of range of the ESPN affiliate in, say, Providence.

As an aside, TigerBlog, like 99.9% of the world, is rooting for Butler in tonight's game, though in TB's case, it's not just the whole underdog factor. TB did some research into Butler and found out that it was named for a 19th-century abolitionist named Ovid Butler, has fewer than 4,000 undergraduates and has plenty of on-campus housing.

Oh, and we all know who the only team to beat both Duke and Butler during the season was, right? Indeed, it was Georgetown. Speaking of the Hoyas, as the Butler-Michigan State game was starting, TigerBlog Jr. remarked that the man doing the color "sounded a lot like John Thompson." TB had to explain to TBJ that there actually was another John Thompson, the father of the John Thompson TBJ knows, and that the guy on the radio was the other John Thompson, who by the way had been a pretty good coach in his own right.

Somewhere along the way, TBJ asked TB how many miles he thought he'd driven going back and forth to Princeton sporting events, and it got TB to thinking. If you factor just the times driving, as opposed to going on the bus, it adds up something like this:

* probably 10 years worth of Ivy road trips, which according to mapquest is 705 miles to Harvard/Dartmouth and back and 466 to Yale/Brown. The Cornell/Columbia trip was usually made up and back to each, rather than Princeton to Cornell to Columbia and back. If you figure that, it's 50 miles to Columbia and 221 miles to Ithaca. Add those up, and it's 14,420 miles for those trips. In the last six or so years, TB hasn't made too many of those trips, but he's gone a few times. Let's add two more for each, so it's another 2,912 miles, or a total of 17,332 just to Ivy road trips. Add the 90 miles to Penn and back each time, and it's around 18,500. Non-Ivy trips? Let's say another 3,000, for a total of 21,500?

* football is probably around 15,000 miles.

* lacrosse is probably closer to 20,000.

* other sports are probably 2,000.

Added together, and that's around 58,500 miles driving to and from Princeton sports events. The circumference of the Earth is 24,901 miles, which means TB has basically driven twice around the Earth at the equator in his time traveling to Princeton events.

If you want to figure out how much time that is, take 58,500 miles and divide by, what, 70 miles per hour, to be safe? That's 835.7 hours, which translates into 34.8 days.

Much of that time has been spent in the middle of the night, riding past the same landmarks time after time, stopping at the same places to eat time after time. The favorite eatery, of course, is Rein's Deli, with its main location off exit 65 of I-84 in Vernon, Conn., just between Hartford and the Mass Pike, as well as its satellite location off I-91 in Springfield, Mass.

As for the other day, TigerBlog Jr. and TigerBlog talked about the usual stuff you'd imagine. What to eat. Which way to go. How long until we're in the next state.

The basketball games would be on for awhile and then a switch would be made to the Train CD, which consisted of the new album ("Save Me San Francisco") with some old favorites added, including "When I Look To The Sky," "Save the Day," "Meet Virginia," "Calling All Angels" and "Drops of Jupiter." TBJ does a pretty good falsetto on "Parachute" from the new album, and he could pretty much listen to "Hey Soul Sister" four or five times in a row without getting tired of it.

When not listening to the games or the music, the conversation went to areas like lacrosse - both Princeton and youth - school, family, how much driving through Connecticut stinks, friends, youtube, whether Subway is better than a local pizza place for subs, history, whether it would be fun to be a kid growing up in New York City, geography, anything.

TBJ would offer a line from "Family Guy" and start cracking up; TB would come back with a line from "The Godfather" or "The Odd Couple" or "Animal House" and crack up again.

The sun set early in the trip, and it was pretty late by the time the car rolled down the New Jersey Turnpike. Duke pulled away from West Virginia early, which meant a full-time switch to Train.

Eventually, the car reached its destination, getting there 10 minutes short of five hours. Hey, driving that far after it's been done so many times could get tedious, what with the never-changing routes and sights and such.

Looking back on this particular trip, driving back from Massachusetts with TigerBlog Jr., TigerBlog considers it among the best 4:50 of his life.

The Classics

Back on Nov. 22, the Jets lost 31-14 at New England. Then, a week later, the Jets defeated Carolina at home 17-6.

The win over Carolina sparked the Jets on a late-season surge that saw them get all the way to the AFC championship game.

The next team to play at Gillette Stadium one week and then at the Meadowlands the next will be none other than Princeton's men's lacrosse team. Princeton plays Brown tomorrow at Gillette Stadium, the home of the Patriots, at 2:30 in Game 2 of the New England Lacrosse Classic, which matches Cornell and Dartmouth in the first game at noon.

Next week, Princeton is part of a tripleheader at the new Meadowlands Stadium. The event on April 10 begins with Hofstra-Delaware and then continues with Virginia-North Carolina, which could be No. 1 vs. No. 2. If those two aren't in the top two, then it'll be because of Syracuse, whom Princeton plays at 6:30 in the last game of the day.

As an aside, those three games are the first events in the brand-new 82,500-seat building. If it's a nice day, not even a gorgeous day but a nice day, TigerBlog imagines that the three games coupled with the ability to get a look at the new building could mean a huge attendance.

For Princeton, it'll be back-to-back games in NFL stadiums, and it'll bring the number of games Princeton has played in NFL stadiums to three, the same as the number of games Princeton will have played at Class of 1952 Stadium.

Princeton is 1-0 this year in an NFL venue, having defeated Johns Hopkins in overtime back on March 6. That one was called the Konica Minolta Face-Off Classic.

The official name of the event at the Meadowlands is the Konica Minolta Big City Classic. That's three classics for Princeton in its first nine games. Actually, breaking it down, it's three classics, three home games and three away games.

It's a tough balance for a Division I lacrosse team. On one hand, there's the opportunity to play games in NFL venues, which has been exciting for the game every time it's happened. On the other, it's moving great matchups off campuses. This isn't just a Princeton thing; games like UNC-Virginia or Army-Navy or Johns Hopkins-Maryland are being played as part of the Classics.

On the other hand, there's the idea of playing games on home or at the home field of your big rivals (Princeton's Class of 2010 is the first who didn't play a game at Hopkins' Homewood Field in something like 70 years), as well as the idea of playing in front of intimate crowds.

Of course, when you're playing in front of 20,000 at M&T Bank Stadium or probably more than twice that at the Meadowlands, that isn't as big as issue.

As for Princeton, the game against Brown is huge for more than just the location. Princeton and Cornell are 2-0 in the league, while Brown is 1-0.

The Tigers and Bears have both lost one-goal games in the Research Triangle in which they rallied after trailing by five only to lose in the end, Princeton at North Carolina and Brown at Duke. The Brown-Duke game was this past Tuesday.

The Princeton-Brown game traditionally has been low scoring, but this year the teams are among the more explosive offensive teams in the country. Of the 13 games they've played between them, nine have seen both teams in the game reach double figures.

Princeton's defense was bolstered by the return last week of Chad Wiedmaier, who missed the first six games after having off-season knee surgery. Without Wiedmaier, Princeton allowed nearly 10 goals per game; with him the Tigers held Yale to six. Any more than that and Princeton would have lost, as it was a 7-6 win.

Princeton has also had a flair for the dramatic, with the big rally against North Carolina followed by comeback from 7-1 down to defeat Penn 11-10 in overtime before the tight, tense win over Yale. Freshman Jeff Froccaro scored the game-winner against both Penn and Yale, and he and fellow freshman Mike Chanenchuk have combined for 25 goals through seven games, three more than senior All-Americas Mark Kovler and Rich Sgalardi had through seven games last year. The huge hole that Kovler and Sgalardi left in the midfield was the biggest concern for the Tigers in the preseason.

It's been an interesting and mostly exciting start to the Chris Bates era with Princeton lacrosse. Of course, the goal is to have an exciting April and May, not just an exciting March, and the stretch drive begins with the Brown game.

Ahead for Princeton is six more regular season games, including the other three highest ranked Ivy teams (Brown, Harvard, Cornell), No. 2/3 Syracuse and a Rutgers team that is off to a great start and is pushing the Top 20, as well as a Dartmouth team that has given the Tigers fits through the years.

Beyond that is the first Ivy League tournament, which will have the top four teams in the league meet at the site of the league champion, and ultimately if all goes well the NCAA tournament.

That's a minimum of a six games and a maximum of 12. Two are guaranteed to be "Classics." The goal is to have some of the others fit that description as well.

Signing Off

When TigerBlog was in college, he heard the story of how an entire dorm got together and played a practical joke on a guy who lived there.

Seems the guy had a huge exam on Monday morning first thing, so he was going to go out Saturday night and then study all day Sunday. When he woke up Sunday, the entire dorm was pretending it was already Monday and that he had slept all day Sunday. Every one in the dorm was going through the normal Monday morning routine, which freaked the guy out.

As for TigerBlog, the best practical joke he was ever part of came here at HQ. The women's basketball team was supposed to play in Hawaii, and the women's basketball contact at the time, a woman named Jenn from South Carolina, was fired up about the free trip to paradise.

The rest of the office came up with the idea of telling Jenn that the trip was off and that instead Princeton would be playing at Cleveland State in a fictional event called the "Snowball Classic." Someone even came up with the idea of getting the SID from Cleveland State to fax over a note that said that we were playing in their tournament and that they needed our women's basketball quick facts.

Jenn was crushed, and she spent a good hour or so snapping at everyone before she was told that it was all a joke. She then laughed, but not before pointing her finger at everyone there, saying something TB will never forget:
"I'm gonna get y'all, and y'all and y'all."

Back when TB was a senior in high school, BrotherBlog had a summer job with the Army Corps of Engineers. Through him, TB was able to get a piece of official U.S. Army stationery, which he then used to write a letter to his friend Chris Martin informing him that he had not yet registered for the Selective Service and that if he didn't do so by 14 days from the date of the letter, he'd be arrested.

The Selective Service had just started requiring 18-year-old males to register at the post office, not for a draft but just to be able to figure out how many eligible males there were. Of course, there was a segment of the 18-year-old group who thought they were back in the 1960s who said they wouldn't register, and Chris was one of them.

Anyway, BrotherBlog said TB could have the paper but couldn't mail it, so we slipped it into the rest of the Martin's mail, which included college catalogs. As Chris finally found the letter and started reading it, someone else picked up a catalog and said "Is Tulane a good school," which was greeted with "Shut up; I'm in big trouble." About 10 minutes later, Chris had registered.

TigerBlog brings these up because, obviously, it is April Fools' Day. A year ago, TigerBlog's April 1st post was about how TB has always wanted to put a great April Fools' story on goprincetontigers.com, but unfortunately TB came to the realization that in the world we live in today, there was nothing too outrageous not to be believed.

And so that brings us to April Fools Day 2010. If anything, the last 12 months have made the general public even more jaded to the point of believing anything. Tiger Woods. Sandra Bullock's situation. The show Jersey Shore. All of it.

TigerBlog thought about how nothing is stunning anymore yesterday, when he met with University officials who decided that TigerBlog would have to be shut down and that today's post would be the last one.

TigerBlog found the timing ironic.

TigerBlog started two years ago with the idea of doing in-game blogging and posting general announcements that didn't necessarily need to be on the main site. Eventually, when readership didn't respond to that, TB began to go in its current direction.

Unfortunately, it appears that there were two problems. First, it was thought that TB was taking up too much time. Second, it seems that it was a little too informal for an official part of the athletic department.

TigerBlog thought about continuing to do it anyway, but he didn't want to run afoul of the University administration. Clearly, TB disagrees with both points that were made.

And so, this is it. TB has had a great time doing this, and he wants to leave his readers with one more thing:

None of this was true. TB will be back tomorrow and next week and next month, and there was no meeting with the administration. But admit it. You believed TB, which proves the other main point of what TB wrote last year: People, TB included, believe what they read.

So, TigerBlog is signing off, but only until tomorrow.

Happy April Fools Day everyone. Go pull a great prank on your best friend.

Weekend Forecast

The water was gushing into the basement at a fairly rapid rate, and the resulting flood wasn't exactly a lot of fun to clean up.

The wet vac - like a snow blower, it's something you buy with the hopes of never using - says it holds 16 gallons at a time, and TigerBlog had to empty it nine times. Doing the math, that adds up to 144 gallons of water. If you think in terms of gallon jugs of milk, well, let's just say it was a lot of water - it took two-plus hours to finish the job.

The paper this morning that this month has been the rainiest March in the history of Central New Jersey. This of course comes on the heels of a most snow in any winter in Central New Jersey history, a record set by a wide margin.

And so, as today is the last day of March and spring is now ready for full bloom, what's next? Well, here's the forecast for Princeton for the next few days:
Today - Sunny and 65
Tomorrow - Sunny and 71
Friday - Sunny and 72
Saturday - Sunny and 71
Sunday - Sunny and 71

A few days ago, the forecast called for temperatures in the 80s, but TigerBlog is happy with 1) sunshine and 2) something resembling spring. A few years ago, this area went from having two glorious spring months to going directly from winter to summer. Spring is much better.

And, the great forecast for the next few days coincides with a great deal of bolded events on Princeton's all-sport schedule page. Bold, of course, stands for home games.

The Princeton campus will host 17 athletic events from Friday to Sunday, with a wide range of sports on display. Oh, and every single one of those events will be free of charge.

It starts Friday afternoon, when Princeton-Harvard softball and Princeton-Yale men's tennis both begin at 2. If you stand beyond the leftfield fence at softball, you can essentially watch both at the same exact time.

There's also the Sam Howell Invitational in men's and women's track, which starts at 5 on Friday and continues Saturday at 11 in the morning. Sam Howell, for those who don't know, was a 1950 Princeton grad who worked here for 38 years, including 21 years (1970-91) as an Associate Athletic Director. There is a plaque in Sam's memory outside the ticket office in Jadwin Gym, and it refers to him as "warm-hearted." TigerBlog didn't know Sam well, but he did know him; warm-hearted is a word TB would definitely have used to describe him.

The men's volleyball team, who is having a strong first season under new coach Sam Shweisky, hosts George Mason Friday at 7 and Ramapo Saturday at 1. The Friday match is a big one as the Tigers go for second-place behind national power Penn State. How big is it? The Princeton band will be playing at the match, something that is believed to be a first.

The softball team plays Dartmouth on Saturday beginning at 12:30, and the baseball team plays its home opener Saturday against Harvard (noon) and Sunday against Dartmouth (also noon). If there are two sports where records mean nothing heading into the league, it's baseball and softball, who almost never practice outside prior to their first games, which are usually against Western or Southern teams that have played 20 games or so by that point.

The men's heavyweight and lightweight crews row Saturday morning against Georgetown and Columbia, while the women's open crew rows against Rutgers and Columbia as well. The men's tennis team completes its weekend against Brown at 2.

There is also a women's lacrosse home game against Cornell at 1 in Princeton Stadium Saturday.

Seventeen events. All free.

If you want to pay some money and drive four-plus hours, you can go to the New England Lacrosse Classic at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass. That doubleheader begins with Cornell-Dartmouth at noon and concludes with Princeton-Brown at 2:30.

But if you're going to be in the Princeton area this weekend, you might as well stay on campus and go to something here. Take advantage of the weather.

And you can always listen to the men's lacrosse game on the radio.

Hall Of Famers

If you starting heading west from the Palestra and Franklin Field, you will walk up a few stairs and then pass the Engineering school on your right. When you get across 34th Street, you'll walk up a few more stairs, and then you'll be entering the heart of the Penn campus on what is called "Locust Walk."

The Fine Arts building will be on your left, and it's a building most Penn students never go into in their four years, or at least that was TigerBlog's experience. That, of course, is a shame, since it's about as cool a building as there is on the campus.

Continuing west, you'll pass College Hall, with the big Ben Franklin statue in front of it and the big library whose name TB can't remember (with the big button sculpture in front). Eventually, you'll reach a row of fraternity houses, the Wharton School, the place where the bookstore used to be and then over the bridge over 38th Street and into the heart of Superblock, where the three 24-story high-rise dorms are.

Or, at least that's how the tour used to go, back in the days when TB went to school there. Penn is smack in the middle of West Philadelphia, but the way Locust Walk, without any cars permitted, cuts through the heart of the campus, it's easy to forget that you're in a city.

Locust Walk is flooded with people all day and night. Anyone who lives in the high-rises has to walk east to get to classrooms, the library, athletic facilities and any number of other spots. People who live in the Quad or in Hill House intersect with Locust Walk to get where they're going, and during peak class hours, basically anyone who goes to Penn is on Locust Walk.

TigerBlog walked a lot of miles up and down Locust Walk, and it's almost certain that he walked past Patty Kennedy on many of those occasions. Of course, he didn't know who she was at the time, but he can guess she was carrying a bag with her field hockey or lacrosse stick in it, hurrying off to yet another practice.

It seems odd to type the name "Patty Kennedy," since TB has never heard anyone call her "Patty." No, to everyone, she is simply "PK," and she is something of an institution here at Princeton.

As near as TigerBlog can figure it, there are three Penn alums who work for the Princeton Department of Athletics. PK is one. TigerBlog is one. Men's track and field coach Fred Samara is one.

Of those three, two are now members of the Penn Athletic Hall of Fame (or least will be when the current class if inducted on May 8). TigerBlog probably won't be inducted anytime soon, though he did have a standout intramural career in flag football, floor hockey and basketball.

Samara was part of the second Penn athletics Hall of Fame class, which was selected in 1998. PK will be part of the newest one.

PK was a field hockey/lacrosse standout, All-Ivy and honorable mention All-America in both, and she also won the Fathers' Award as the top female athlete of her Penn class. She played internationally with the U.S. in women's lacrosse on many occasions, and she has gone on to be a law school graduate, a lecturer at Princeton and a longtime assistant coach with the women's lacrosse team.

Her husband is Jim Barlow, the men's soccer coach. They have a one-eyed dog named Petey, and you should never say the word "pupparoni" - the name of a dog treat - around Petey unless you want to see the beagle go nuts.

PK teaches a class called "Human Rights In the Age of Terror" as a freshman seminar. In her role as an instructor here at Princeton, she has taught any number of freshman athletes, helping them in their transition to college life and college athletics.

Princeton fans can rattle off the names of most head coaches, but there is an army of lower-profile assistant coaches without whom Princeton's athletic success wouldn't exist. TB has never known a head coach here who failed to acknowledge how valuable the assistants are.

PK is well-known and universally liked and respected in the department. She was a member of the women's lacrosse staff during their dominating NCAA championship runs in 2002 and 2003, and she returned to the program last year after taking four years off.

The motto of the athletic department is "Education Through Athletics," and Director of Athletics Gary Walters often speaks about the integration of athletics into the educational mission of the University. Few people here encompass that as much as PK.

Speaking of PK, it was a big weekend for her team and her boss, women's lacrosse coach Chris Sailer. Princeton defeated Georgetown 15-14 in four OTs Sunday afternoon in D.C., and the win was the 300th for Sailer, making her just the second women's Division I coach ever to reach that milestone.

Princeton women's lacrosse dates to 1973, and the program had an all-time record of 62-79 before Sailer took over in 1987.

Since then, she has gone 300-104, winning three NCAA championships and nine Ivy League championships along the way. She was inducted into the U.S. Lacrosse Hall of Fame last year.

Last week, TigerBlog asked the question of whether or not Alicia Aemisegger is the greatest woman athlete in Princeton history. Today he asks the question of whether or not Chris Sailer is the greatest women's coach in Princeton history.

Like last week, TB does not answer the question, and there have certainly been some great female coaches past (Betty Constable, Cindy Cohen, Beth Bozman, Louise Gengler) and present (Julie Shackford, Gail Ramsay, Lori Dauphiny, Susan Teeter, Kristen Holmes-Winn), who have won big over an extended period of time (as always TB apologizes if he left someone out in his haste). And while a case can be made for almost of the ones listed as being the best Princeton has ever had, any such discussion has to include Sailer either at the top or near the top.

Sailer, of course, is one of the head coaches who has always credited her assistants for the program's success. In her case that has often meant giving PK her due, something Sailer has always done.

One Hall-of-Famer to another.

Burritos To Go

TigerBlog Jr. played the tenor sax for the middle school jazz band at the high school music festival this past weekend. One of the songs they played was entitled "Burritos To Go."

This piece, a nice catchy tune, apparently has no lyrics, and as is the case with all such music, it left TigerBlog to wonder why it's called "Burritos To Go." Really, it could be called anything. Why not "Apples and Oranges" or "Grass Stains" or "Stroll Down Fifth Avenue?" Who would be able to tell the difference?

TB has two containers of body wash in his locker in Caldwell Field House. One is called "Ocean Breeze," while the other is called "Mountain Fresh," both of which smell essentially the same. TigerBlog has spent much more time at the ocean than in the mountains, though he's spent enough time at both to know they have completely different scents.

In other words, it's all in the marketing. There were probably endless focus groups that concluded that "Ocean Breeze" and "Mountain Fresh" conjure up images of fresh air and happy times, and therefore the huge vats of body wash could be pumped into bottles that will then have alternating labels placed on them. Or maybe the composer of the piece felt that "Burritos To Go" sounded better than "Chicken Parmigiana Sub To Go."

And, in truth, the marketing works. TigerBlog was low on one body wash, so he bought the other. And, "Burritos To Go" is a catchy tune, and it comes across as having a little Southwestern/Mexican flair to it that it wouldn't have if it had been called "Stuck In The Mud In Ohio."

TigerBlog watched the NCAA basketball games this weekend, and it's his contention that the NCAA's "We're All Going Pro In Something Other Than Sports" campaign is perhaps the best example of branding/marketing he's ever seen.

If you've never seen the ads, they basically show athletes in a variety of sports balancing their academic and athletic responsibilities and always conclude with: "There are more than 400,000 NCAA student-athletes, and most of us are going pro in something other than sports."

The message is crystal clear and it speaks to something TB has often said when asked about the state of college athletics. Big-time college football and men's basketball is the highest profile part of college athletics, but they are a small part of what college athletics is all about.

It has to make the NCAA cringe when stories come out about football and men's basketball players who get arrested or who get kicked out of school or any of the other headlines that are so common that they don't even raise an eyebrow anymore. And that doesn't even take into account all of the high profile coaches who bolt from one school to the next without any sense of loyalty to anyone or anything other than themselves and their bank accounts and egos.

And really, while that may be what college athletics seems to be to the casual observers, that's hardly what it is in reality. The NCAA is right. They do have more than 400,000 student-athletes, and almost none of them will ever play a professional sport. Most of them will never play in front of huge crowds or for coaches who make millions of dollars a year.

Their love for the games they play may not be greater than those who get more of the spoils of big-time DI football and men's basketball, and maybe the 99% who play at a much less visible level would gladly change places with those who fly charters and play every game on ESPN. But the point isn't if they would. It's that they can't, and they still put in all of that effort to compete.

There was another ad during yesterday's games about NCAA TV/broadcasting revenues and what the money actually goes to. It was a commercial TB had never seen before, and it essentially said that 96% of the revenue goes to funding most of the athletic programs that don't make any money. It ends with: "In other words, we're putting our money where our mission is."

It's another great ad. Basically, the point of the NCAA's campaigns is to show that college athletics are a positive, character-building endeavor that provides wide-ranging opportunities to many people who use that opportunity to the fullest.

Princeton had 19 teams compete this past week as the winter season championships continued to overlap with spring events. Of the 19 teams who competed, only two did so in games that were televised. The men's basketball CBI semifinal game was on HDNET, while the women's lacrosse game at Georgetown was on Verizon Fios 1, but only in Washington, D.C.

If you ad up the attendance for the 19 teams that competed, it pales in comparison to the crowds that the NCAA men's basketball tournament drew, and those crowds in turn pale in comparison to what an average BCS football game draws.

And yet the athletes who competed for Princeton this week make up exactly what the NCAA ads are screaming about. They were athletes who are committed to playing their sport at the highest level they can, to the best of their ability, and at the same time they are not shutting themselves off to the rest of what is available to other Princeton students. Through competition, they are learning valuable lessons for the rest of their lives, while at the same time making lifelong friends and having experiences they won't forget.

It is what we have branded "Education Through Athletics," which fits with the NCAA's broader themes.

Not every one of the 19 teams had a successful week in terms of wins and losses, but that wasn't the whole goal of what they were doing. No, these Princeton athletes, like so many in so many sports around the country, were participating in something very special, something very remarkable - intercollegiate athletics.

It wasn't about having the biggest stage or the richest coach or the fanciest plane. It was about doing what they love to do, until that day when they go pro - in something other than sports.

Noon Hoops

TigerBlog did something Monday that he hadn't done since May of 2008: He played squash.

TB, for some reason, thought he was capable of playing lacrosse against people half his age, and the result was a patellar tendon that needed to be sewn back together. And though it took nearly two years, TB made it back to his favorite form of exercise, playing squash. And, he's probably going to stay away from lacrosse again.

Squash is a tremendous workout, for those who've never played it. Also, if your response is "I've played racquetball," well, it's a completely different game from squash. For starters, the ball bounces all over the place in racquetball; in squash it hardly bounces at all. The result is that you have to chase the ball all over the court, and TB guarantees you'll be very, very sore the day after you play for the first time.

TB turned to squash about five or six years ago after being a regular in the Jadwin Gym lunchtime basketball game. Squash proved to be a great substitute, and TB was soon playing up to four or five times a week. Then, of course, lacrosse derailed it all.

One of the great parts of working in a gymnasium is the access to a workout during the day, and with the huge numbers of young people and former college athletes who work here, there are far more people who are exercising than those who don't.

On any given day, you can see people running, lifting weights, riding bikes, playing squash or pretty much anything.

Still, as far as Jadwin Gym and working out go, the granddaddy of them all is the lunchtime basketball game.

It's an even that dates back as far as the building itself, back to when Pete Carril would shoot 30 foot set shots against Hank Towns and Cap Crossland while smoking a cigar. It continues literally to this day, as there will probably be a game today.

TigerBlog first played in the mid-'90s, after watching for a few weeks after he started working here. His first-ever made basket at lunchtime was a hook shot from the baseline, which prompted then-assistant coach Bill Carmody to say: "who are you, Rick Hielscher?"

Just for some time context, and all.

TB once made a list of all the players he'd played against at lunchtime, and it was a list that had more than 200 names on it. They include Carril, Carmody, Joe Scott and John Thompson, four of the last five head men's coaches at Princeton, and playing with and against those guys was an education.

For starters, none of the four ever stopped talking while they played. If any of them played on Carril's team, they had hand signals and verbal signals that only they knew, which often resulted in back cuts, wide open looks and the like.

By the time TB began to play, Carril was way past his prime as a player, but he was a reliable shooter from as far back as he wanted to go. He was the worst player to have to guard, because you figured you needed to take it easy on him because of his age. As soon as you did, of course, he'd step further back and hit another set shot.

He was also, of course, funny, in his usual way. One time, when another player went down with a knee injury that turned out to be a torn ACL, everyone gathered around while someone ran to get an athletic trainer. In the silence, while the player was down, Carril walked up to him and said: "Now might not be the best time to tell you that you traveled."

Thompson is the most prolific passing forward in Princeton history, and he played the same way at lunch. He would rarely shoot, and would for the most part only shoot if the person guarding him dropped off to defend passing lanes. He spent the whole time moving people around, and he would always, always find the open man.

Scott played somewhat the same as Thompson, and his most famous lunchtime command was "stay wide," which basically meant "get out of the way of our offense." Alexander Wolff, the great writer from Sports Illustrated, actually participated in one of the games and wrote about his experiences as part of his book about basketball around the world entitled "Big Game, Small World." In it, he quotes Scott as telling him to "stay wide." He also mentions what a great passer TigerBlog is, but that's another story for another day.

Carmody could pass, dribble and shoot, and he was a tenacious defender. He was also a running commentary on the game, with quips like "What? You don't like layups?"

The games then were a combination of pickup game and Princeton offense, because that's how everyone wanted to play when Carril was on the court. It continued when Carril left and the other coaches remained, because that's how they wanted to play.

The game wasn't only about those four. It also attracted some less-well-known people, such as the guy named James who wandered in off the street one day and stayed for about five years. Turned out his was a psychology graduate student who became a regular, and he brought with him a quick first step, no defense and the desire to call too many fouls.

The football office has long provided great depth during lunchtime basketball, and this group has usually been 1) young, 2) in shape, 3) physical and 4) competitive. It's a pretty good combination.

TigerBlog remembers playing with a part-time assistant named Jeff Vartabedian, who stood about 6-4 and could have scored 1,000 points had he played basketball and not football in college. Vartabedian, it appears from Google, is now the head coach at Wilbraham and Monson Academy. When Vartabedian put up a 15-foot jump shot, it had about an 80% chance of going in.

The lunchtime game has a long history of including women, and there are several former women's college stars who rank among the best players to play at lunchtime. Jen Scanlon and Mary Gleason, assistant women's coaches here under Richard Barron, were both great three-point shooters who could also go to the basket. Leah Scott (formerly Spraragen), who is married to Joe Scott, was a point guard at Princeton during her playing days, and he almost never turned the ball over at lunch. Carrie Moore, who scored 2,216 points in college, today is among the leading scorers at lunchtime.

There have been others who have left quite a mark on the noontime games. Chuck Yrigoyen, now the commissioner of the Iowa Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, played for decades first as a member of the Princeton Office of Athletic Communications and then after he moved to the Ivy League. Chuck could be relied on for shooting 12-foot shots with no arc that would either go in (50% of the time) or elicit comments like "I am the worst basketball player of all time" (the other 50% of the time).

Chuck Sullivan was an intern in the OAC when he played. Carril guarded him, and after Chuck managed to throw one in without looking, Carril announced that his man "has every shot in the deck." Today, more than 15 years later, Sullivan still regards that as among his proudest moments.

The game used to evolve from a bunch of early-morning phone calls and walks up to the basketball office and down to the football office. Eventually, TigerBlog put together an email list looking for people who were in. The goal is to get at least eight players, but 10 is better. There have been times where there have been twice that many and two games have been played. Usually, there's around 10-13 players, and those who lose are off for the next game, with the extra spots filled by making foul shots.

The email list was transfered from TB to John Mack, now at Northwestern, when TB turned to squash. Mack, a 10-time Heptagonal champion, turned over that job to Jon Kurian, who is the unofficial lunchtime basketball commissioner today. His daily email goes to 67 people, many of whom don't work here anymore.

One who recently left is Mike Cross, who went to be the athletic director at Bradley. Anytime Princeton athletics made a hire in the 10 years that Cross was here, his standard assessment was to suggest whether or not this person was "making us stronger at lunchtime."

See, for those who've played or continue to play, lunchtime basketball is more than just a game. It's one of those things that stands out about working here, something that has fostered great friendships and battles, classic games and even a fight or two.

TigerBlog is glad to be back on the squash court, and hopefully there won't be any more setbacks to playing.

One day, though, he'll venture back to the basketball court at lunchtime. When he does, all of the memories will come flooding back.

Like everyone else who's played there, TB will cherish those experiences forever.

Lake Effect

TigerBlog was at an event at Little Miss TigerBlog's elementary school when he noticed one of those learning posters that hang on the walls.

This particular one was a math poster, done by a professional company, not by the school or a teacher or a student. And there, on the poster, was the following problem:
If three pounds of bananas cost $1, how much do 11 pounds of bananas cost?

The poster then solved the problem, except it solved it by figuring out how much one pound of bananas would cost. The mistake was either that it was supposed to say "how much does one pound of bananas cost" or be solved for 11 pounds of bananas. Of course, had it meant to be solved for one pound, it would have changed "do" to "does."

It all left TigerBlog wondering how in the world this poster ever made it past all of the eyes that have to have seen it without anyone's noticing this, from the production of it through the school itself?

As an aside, the correct answer is $3.67.

Since TB aced that little test, he came up with another one for himself.

If Princeton has 1,000 varsity athletes and the four rowing teams account for 200 athletes (using approximations, of course), what percentage of the Princeton athletics are rowers?

Or, even better than that, what percentage of the undergraduate population of 4,900 are varsity rowers?

The first answer, of course, is that approximately 20% of Princeton's varsity athletes are rowers. The second answer, let's see, 200 divided by 4,900, so that's two divided by 49 so that's, well, a little more than 4%.

In other words, if you're in a lecture with 200 random students, then eight of those 200 would be varsity rowers.

Each varsity program at Princeton has its unique features, and rowing certainly does. For starters, there are more rowers than any other kinds of athletes.

Each gender has two varsity programs within the main program, yet all four (men's lightweight, men's heavyweight, women's open, women's lightweight) consider themselves to be one entity of Princeton Rowing. All four share one office, with no sub-divisions within that office.

To say it's a close-knit group would be an understatement. It has great camaraderie among its coaches and athletes, and its alumni group is as loyal and supportive as any.

It's also a Princeton team through and through. There are four head coaches, three of whom are Princeton alums: men's heavyweight coach Greg Hughes, men's lightweight coach Marty Crotty, women's lightweight coach Paul Rassam. The one who is not a Princeton alum, women's open coach Lori Dauphiny, has been here for 19 years, 14 of which have been spent as head coach.

There are also five assistant coaches, of whom four are Princeton grads.

For a pretty good look at what life in the boathouse is like, you might try watching this video.

Rowing itself is a physically demanding sport, one that completely zaps its competitors each time out. It's much like cross country in that it leaves the rowers wiped out the second they reach the finish line, except that in rowing, there's the extra issue that each rower has to be completely aligned with the others in the boat or else the boat will not go in the right direction.

The 2010 Princeton spring rowing season opens this Saturday, with women's open racing at Princeton while the men's lightweights are on the road. This begins a stretch where for about two months there will be racing on Lake Carnegie on most Saturdays.

Racing days at the boathouse are huge athletic/social events, and they begin first thing in the morning with novice races and third varsity races and build their way up to the first varsity.

One of the best parts of crew is the history of it, as the sport dates to June 13, 1872, the date of Princeton's first-ever race.

Each week, the teams row against one or two or three opponents, often for exotic sounding prizes such as The Eisenberg Cup, The Class of 1984 Plaque, The Childs Cup, The Compton Cup and many others.

TigerBlog was the rowing contact in 1998, when Princeton won the men's lightweight and heavyweight national championships on the Cooper River in Camden less than 30 minutes apart. There is a picture in the boathouse of the massive post-race celebration, and TB remembers standing next to the photographer as it was taken.

It's a picture of complete joy, one of the great celebration pictures that TB has ever seen. It's blown up in the boathouse to be several square feet.

TB's experience with the rowing programs was brief, but it did show him what a unique sport it is and how much the people who compete and coach for Princeton love it.

Check them out one Saturday morning. They're well worth watching.

And The Ban Played On

TigerBlog isn't afraid of Shirley Tilghman. She's a very nice person, and she oversees a campus where dissenting thought and opposing viewpoints are encouraged.

So, with that in mind, TB decided to take up the issue posted by someone yesterday:
"You know, it may be too sensitive to address if President Tilghman has voted against Ivy participation in football playoffs, but...Could you address the, how to put it, anomaly of so many Ivy athletes participating in the post season when the League resolutely denies the football players the same opportunity?"

It's a legitimate issue. Currently, there are two Ivy League men's basketball teams who are still playing in the postseason, and there are two men's hockey teams about to start. In a few months, there could be as many as four Ivy men's lacrosse teams, and between the men and the women, there will be at least five or six lacrosse teams in the NCAAs.

Back in the fall, four Ivy men's soccer teams played in the NCAA tournament. The champion in almost every Ivy sport advances automatically to the NCAA tournament for that particular sport.

Except football, of course.

TigerBlog always chuckles when he hears people say things like "the NCAA should do this or that," because the NCAA has no actual power. All decisions originate within the member schools; the NCAA exists to enforce the rules. Think of the schools as lawmakers and the NCAA as the police.

It's the same with the Ivy League, where it's the eight school presidents who have the final say in all major athletic decisions. Most rules changes originate from coaches' groups to the directors of athletics, and most minor changes to league policies go unnoticed by people outside of those sports themselves.

For something like sending the Ivy League champion to the FCS playoffs, of course, the publicity would be much greater. And, to date, obviously, it's not something the Ivy presidents have wanted to do.

The argument that it's hypocritical for teams in every other sport to play in the NCAA tournament while football sits at home doesn't work for TB, because it's obvious that that's the case. It's not something that anyone looking at the situation couldn't help but notice, because it's completely apparent.

Clearly, decades have gone by with complete turnover on the presidential level within the league, and the situation hasn't changed. It's not because none of those presidents, past and present, is unaware that football is the only sport that doesn't get to go.

TigerBlog has always thought that the league can be progressive in any area it wants except for two - not offering athletic scholarships and no postseason for football - because those two points were what the entire league was founded on.

At the time that formal Ivy League competition began in 1956, Princeton had already played in two NCAA men's basketball tournaments. The first appearance by a Princeton team in the NCAA baseball tournament was in 1951. Its first NCAA golf championship was in 1914.

Basically, the precedent was already in place - football cannot play in the postseason, while other sports can.

Also, back in the mid-50s, there were no women's sports and no NCAA tournaments yet in sports like soccer (not until 1959) and men's lacrosse (not until 1971). TigerBlog has never read or seen any comments about whether or not there was discussion about whether or not Ivy League teams should be able to participate or if it was never even an issue.

Football competed at the Division I level until 1978, when I-AA was formed. That same year, there was a four-team tournament to determine the first champion of what is now the Football Championship Subdivision. For the first 22 years of formal Ivy football, then, the ban on postseason meant a ban on competing in a bowl game.

Patriot League participation in the I-AA playoffs dates back 17 years. It is really during that time that the "how can everyone else go and football can't" argument in the Ivy League really began to heat up.

It's also not like there's universal agreement below the presidential level that the Ivy champ should advance. TB would say that there's more "go" than "not-go" sentiment out there, but there is also strong opinions against it.

Much of that comes from the Harvard-Yale faithful, who like that their game is always the last for the teams in the year. And there are some who love the rhythm of an Ivy League football season - 10 weeks, 10 games, no off weeks, all building to the championship.

TigerBlog's position on these matters has no continuity, he admits. For instance, he is pro-Ivy League lacrosse tournament but anti-Ivy League basketball tournament.

And TB acknowledges that every Ivy League football player and coach knew when he signed up that there was a ban on participating in the postseason. And, to be honest, TB would rather see eight teams play an 11th game than one team play in the NCAA tournament.

But then TB comes back to how many Ivy League athletes in so many different sports he's seen have great NCAA tournament experiences.

So, for that reason, if push came to shove and the eight Ivy presidents called on TigerBlog to cast the deciding vote, he'd probably lean in the direction of sending the Ivy champion to the playoffs.