So you've written a movie script and are trying to line up the funding to get it made.
Except your movie has no violence, no special effects, no explosions and nobody who takes their clothes off. And what does it have? Singing? Dancing? Cheesy backdrops?
And what's the plot again? Some creepy old guy tries to teach some pretty young woman how to speak properly, while her father tries to use this is a way to cash in?
And you expect to get this project going? Fat chance.
Which is a shame, because in 1964, this movie won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor (Rex Harrison, as the creepy old guy better known as Henry Higgins).
The movie, of course, was "My Fair Lady," and it will always rank among TigerBlog's favorite.
"My Fair Lady" is set in London, a city that TB has never set foot in, located in a country that TB likewise has never visited. The closest he's come is Ireland, and history suggests that that is not really the same.
TB has seen any number of movies that make London (and England, for that matter) seem as familiar as New York (a city that TB has been to), from musicals like "My Fair Lady" and "Oliver" and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" to Monty Python comedies to classic dramas like "Mrs. Miniver.
Of course, being an American, TigerBlog lives in a country that goes way back with the British, starting with "No Taxation Without Representation" and the Revolution and the War of 1812 and then, switching pages, as BFFs for the last 196 years (the War of 1812 didn't end until 1814). And hey, even "The Star Spangled Banner" came from the War of 1812.
Yes, it was a rocky start between the two, but you're going to have that when, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that have connected them to another.
British Airways used to make fun of that history when it had an ad campaign featuring Robert Morley, who would implore Americans to visit England by saying: "do come home; all is forgiven."
Maybe it's the centuries of history, or maybe it's the impact that the English have had on this country and its development and culture. Hey, the Beatles alone are reason enough to love the English.
Or maybe it's just the accents. In "My Fair Lady" alone, you have Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn (who, by the way, was born in Holland) and their inflections.
When TB first got the voicemail asking about the possibility of incorporating the Princeton-Brown football game into a British children's version of "The Apprentice," the first thing TB noticed was the accents. A British accent always makes everything sound so much more formal and important.
Anyway, after much back-and-forth between the powers that be, it was determined that in fact the show could be held here. And so Saturday, during Princeton-Brown football, Princeton Stadium will host the final two teams of three English kids ages 12-14.
The show is part of the CBBC, which is the children's BBC, or the English equivalent of PBS Kids.
The show is called "Trade Your Way To The USA," and it started with a group of 14 teams of three each, who have been competing towards the grand prize of coming to this country for the final.
TB has never seen "The Apprentice," but as he understands it, there are teams competing in different business models. The same holds true for "Trade Your Way," where the kids have been all over England in different contests to see who could sell the most of whatever that week's product was.
And now, the six kids have made their way to this country. They've been around New York City, and they'll be heading to Princeton tomorrow, where they'll film with the band, the cheerleaders and head coach Bob Surace.
The contact person from the BBC sends emails in which she refers to Frist as "the canteen" and spells "realize" with an "s" instead of a "z." In all of TB's dealings with the BBC, nobody's ever referred to the game; instead, it's always the match.
And what will they be doing during the match?
Hawking cookies, candy and the like. Two teams. Three kids. Who can sell the most?
At Princeton-Brown football Saturday.
It figures to be jolly good stuff.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Into The Light
This past August 5th was a Thursday. It was still nearly three weeks away from the start of fall practices for Princeton teams and just about a month away from the first games, which of course is now nearly six weeks in the past.
In other words, it was a long time ago.
Think of what you were doing on Aug. 5. The beach? The pool? Getting ready for vacation? Kids in camp? You weren't school shopping yet; there was way too much time for that.
In fact, Aug. 5 was 69 days ago. It was also the day that the mine collapsed in Chile, trapping 33 men 2,000 feet below the surface.
It would be 17 days before rescuers would be able to drill through into the emergency chamber where the men had taken up residence. In those first 17 days, the men had managed to make 48 hours worth of food and water sustain them, and when the first bore holes reached them, rescuers were at least able to send them necessary supplies to keep them alive.
Still, the men were told, it would be months before a hole large enough to get them out would be dug. And so they figured they were to be stuck in the ground until sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Instead, as TigerBlog writes this, the 14th miner is on his way up in the capsule, following the 13 who have already made the 15-20 minute trip. According to the plan, the last of the miners (and the two rescue workers who were lowered into the hole before the first miner was raised) will be out by the middle of the night tonight.
It's an amazing story on every possible level. The idea that they survived in the first place. The way they organized themselves into a society while trapped and how that kept them sane, a process that included switching on the headlights of the vehicles that they had there to keep them oriented to daytime and nighttime. The unimaginable conditions that they've endured, with temperatures in the 80s and 90s, very high humidity and of course no natural light. The rescue effort itself. The national pride that it is generating.
Think about the darkness itself for a moment. Imagine if you had to go 69 days without seeing a ray of natural light.
The miners long ago passed the record for the longest time trapped underground; nobody had ever survived that long in that kind of environment.
To see them on the video during their time trapped and now as their being rescued is inspiring. Maybe in their dark moments they was some sense of panic, some sense of doom, but it's never come out publicly.
Instead, these 33 men - 32 Chileans and one Bolivian - offer a chance for a little recharging of one's faith in the human spirit. The miners and their rescuers, that is.
TB has followed the story closely in amazement. One of the best pieces he read was on ESPN.com, a story about how one of the miners is a former pro soccer player in Chile.
TB cannot possibly imagine what it would be like to be stuck 2,000 feet underground like that. It would have taken him until, oh, Aug. 5 before he freaked out. Or maybe not. Maybe they just adjusted to where they were and made the best of it.
Still, 69 days is a long, long time. Since the mine first collapsed, those fall teams at Princeton have gone from summer vacation to fall practice to where they are now, which is in the heart of their seasons.
The men's soccer team is entering the stretch drive having won six straight games for the first time since 1989, when Bob Bradley was the head coach and current Tiger head coach Jim Barlow was the best player on the team.
More than just having won six straight, Princeton has scored at least three goals in each of those six games.
Has that ever happened before in Princeton's men's soccer history? Six straight games with at least three goals?
The short answer is yes. The long answer is yes, but not very often and not for awhile.
In fact, this is the fourth such streak in the history of a program that dates to 1938. Princeton actually reached at least three goals in seven straight games in 1942 and 1957 and did it in six straight most recently in 1977, 33 seasons ago.
The 1942 team went undefeated in the days before the Ivy League, and the 1957 team won the first league title awarded in men's soccer.
The 1977 team followed its six-game run by going 2-3 down the stretch, losing to Penn and Cornell to miss out on an Ivy title, though it did get an NCAA tournament bid.
And the 2010 team? It has six regular-season games remaining, including five in the ultra-stacked Ivy League, which is as competitive in men's soccer as it is in any sport.
For the men's soccer team, though, these are good days, a team that reached the NCAA tournament a year ago and is pushing for a return trip this year. It's also a team with as realistic a chance to win the league as anyone, and it's unlikely that any team will cruise through the league undefeated and possibly even with only a single blemish.
As for the rescue of the miners, it's as heartwarming a story as TB can remember. If the scenes of jubilant miners being lifted out of that capsule don't make you smile, it's possibly that you're made of stone.
In other words, it was a long time ago.
Think of what you were doing on Aug. 5. The beach? The pool? Getting ready for vacation? Kids in camp? You weren't school shopping yet; there was way too much time for that.
In fact, Aug. 5 was 69 days ago. It was also the day that the mine collapsed in Chile, trapping 33 men 2,000 feet below the surface.
It would be 17 days before rescuers would be able to drill through into the emergency chamber where the men had taken up residence. In those first 17 days, the men had managed to make 48 hours worth of food and water sustain them, and when the first bore holes reached them, rescuers were at least able to send them necessary supplies to keep them alive.
Still, the men were told, it would be months before a hole large enough to get them out would be dug. And so they figured they were to be stuck in the ground until sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Instead, as TigerBlog writes this, the 14th miner is on his way up in the capsule, following the 13 who have already made the 15-20 minute trip. According to the plan, the last of the miners (and the two rescue workers who were lowered into the hole before the first miner was raised) will be out by the middle of the night tonight.
It's an amazing story on every possible level. The idea that they survived in the first place. The way they organized themselves into a society while trapped and how that kept them sane, a process that included switching on the headlights of the vehicles that they had there to keep them oriented to daytime and nighttime. The unimaginable conditions that they've endured, with temperatures in the 80s and 90s, very high humidity and of course no natural light. The rescue effort itself. The national pride that it is generating.
Think about the darkness itself for a moment. Imagine if you had to go 69 days without seeing a ray of natural light.
The miners long ago passed the record for the longest time trapped underground; nobody had ever survived that long in that kind of environment.
To see them on the video during their time trapped and now as their being rescued is inspiring. Maybe in their dark moments they was some sense of panic, some sense of doom, but it's never come out publicly.
Instead, these 33 men - 32 Chileans and one Bolivian - offer a chance for a little recharging of one's faith in the human spirit. The miners and their rescuers, that is.
TB has followed the story closely in amazement. One of the best pieces he read was on ESPN.com, a story about how one of the miners is a former pro soccer player in Chile.
TB cannot possibly imagine what it would be like to be stuck 2,000 feet underground like that. It would have taken him until, oh, Aug. 5 before he freaked out. Or maybe not. Maybe they just adjusted to where they were and made the best of it.
Still, 69 days is a long, long time. Since the mine first collapsed, those fall teams at Princeton have gone from summer vacation to fall practice to where they are now, which is in the heart of their seasons.
The men's soccer team is entering the stretch drive having won six straight games for the first time since 1989, when Bob Bradley was the head coach and current Tiger head coach Jim Barlow was the best player on the team.
More than just having won six straight, Princeton has scored at least three goals in each of those six games.
Has that ever happened before in Princeton's men's soccer history? Six straight games with at least three goals?
The short answer is yes. The long answer is yes, but not very often and not for awhile.
In fact, this is the fourth such streak in the history of a program that dates to 1938. Princeton actually reached at least three goals in seven straight games in 1942 and 1957 and did it in six straight most recently in 1977, 33 seasons ago.
The 1942 team went undefeated in the days before the Ivy League, and the 1957 team won the first league title awarded in men's soccer.
The 1977 team followed its six-game run by going 2-3 down the stretch, losing to Penn and Cornell to miss out on an Ivy title, though it did get an NCAA tournament bid.
And the 2010 team? It has six regular-season games remaining, including five in the ultra-stacked Ivy League, which is as competitive in men's soccer as it is in any sport.
For the men's soccer team, though, these are good days, a team that reached the NCAA tournament a year ago and is pushing for a return trip this year. It's also a team with as realistic a chance to win the league as anyone, and it's unlikely that any team will cruise through the league undefeated and possibly even with only a single blemish.
As for the rescue of the miners, it's as heartwarming a story as TB can remember. If the scenes of jubilant miners being lifted out of that capsule don't make you smile, it's possibly that you're made of stone.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
On Board
TigerBlog got an email yesterday welcoming him to the CAANJ board. A few days ago, TB had no idea what CAANJ was.
Last week, TB was at the CAANJ annual meeting, which was followed by an awards ceremony at which Princeton received the CAANJ Cup for having the top athletic program in Division I/II in the state of New Jersey.
CAANJ, by the way, stands for College Athletic Administrators of New Jersey. There are 48 member institutions, with four athletic conferences and then a fairly even distribution between the three other classifications - DI/II schools, DIII schools and junior colleges.
The day started when the outgoing CAANJ president turned over the top spot to the incoming one, Alexis Schug from New Jersey Institute of Technology. The old president? None other than Cindy Cohen, the longtime Princeton softball coach who won 560 games and 12 Ivy League titles while taking the Tigers to the Women's College World Series twice. Cohen is now an administrator at William Paterson College.
The meeting featured an energetic and well-informed speaker from the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, a Division III conference, who spoke about new media and its impact on college athletics.
And then it was time for the awards ceremony, which featured a male and female athlete of the year from each of the three classifications, as well as the top programs in each. The Division I winners of the athlete of the year awards were a baseball player from Seton Hall and a women's volleyball player from NJIT; the other top programs were The College of New Jersey in Division III and Gloucester County Colege for the jucos.
At the very end, Schug asked if anyone would volunteer to be the coordinator of the awards for the organization. Once assured that this wasn't too taxing of a position, TB volunteered, and so now he's on the board.
It was, to say the least, a very interesting experience to attend the meeting.
Back when the Ivy League had sports information meetings - and most of the decisions centered around the media - TB always thought it was odd for eight schools who had little in common geographically to be making decisions that were uniform for media purposes. For purposes of competition and admissions and financial aid and everything else? Yes, that makes complete sense.
But for the media? How could the group make decisions that treated rural schools like Dartmouth and Cornell the same as urban schools like Columbia, Penn and Harvard? These eight offices were connected by being in the same league, but that had nothing to do with the day-to-day operations and logistics of their dealings with their respective local medias.
TB had a similar feeling at the CAANJ meeting.
Yes, all of these schools were in New Jersey. At the same time, the issues that are faced by the community colleges are so different than the ones faced by, say, a BCS school like Rutgers.
TB sat at table during the luncheon with people from Brookdale Community College (where TB's eighth-grade graduation was held, back when he was the fourth-shortest boy in the class) and Mercer County College. One of the people from Mercer was John Simone, whom TB knows dating back to his days coaching at Notre Dame High School.
There was also a woman from Mercer who ran at TCNJ when current Princeton men's cross country coach Steve Dolan was the coach for the Lions and a woman from Brookdale who went to high school with Lorin Maurer, who was a Princeton Friends' Group fundraiser until her tragic death in a plane crash nearly two years ago. Lorin and the woman from Brookdale were from outside Reading, which of course sparked a conversation with Princeton Director of Athletics Gary Walters, who grew up in Reading.
The room was filled with people who do a great deal for New Jersey's college athletes, the overwhelming majority of whom do not compete at the Division I level.
These administrators give their athletes every opportunity they can to be successful, and they do so with far fewer resources than TB is used to dealing with here at Princeton.
The speaker from the MIAC spoke about things that TB takes for granted as an everyday part of doing business in athletic communications - thinks like livestats and video streaming and flip cams and content management systems and all of it.
At the same time, many of the people in the room had no experience in dealing with these. Why? They don't have the resources - financial and staffing - to so so.
By the time he left, TB had a better understanding of what a lot of people in college athletics go through each day in their attempts to put quality teams on the field. He also had renewed respect for the challenges that many of these dedicated people face.
He was also determined not to take for granted what he has at Princeton and just how lucky he is to be working at a place like this.
Last week, TB was at the CAANJ annual meeting, which was followed by an awards ceremony at which Princeton received the CAANJ Cup for having the top athletic program in Division I/II in the state of New Jersey.
CAANJ, by the way, stands for College Athletic Administrators of New Jersey. There are 48 member institutions, with four athletic conferences and then a fairly even distribution between the three other classifications - DI/II schools, DIII schools and junior colleges.
The day started when the outgoing CAANJ president turned over the top spot to the incoming one, Alexis Schug from New Jersey Institute of Technology. The old president? None other than Cindy Cohen, the longtime Princeton softball coach who won 560 games and 12 Ivy League titles while taking the Tigers to the Women's College World Series twice. Cohen is now an administrator at William Paterson College.
The meeting featured an energetic and well-informed speaker from the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, a Division III conference, who spoke about new media and its impact on college athletics.
And then it was time for the awards ceremony, which featured a male and female athlete of the year from each of the three classifications, as well as the top programs in each. The Division I winners of the athlete of the year awards were a baseball player from Seton Hall and a women's volleyball player from NJIT; the other top programs were The College of New Jersey in Division III and Gloucester County Colege for the jucos.
At the very end, Schug asked if anyone would volunteer to be the coordinator of the awards for the organization. Once assured that this wasn't too taxing of a position, TB volunteered, and so now he's on the board.
It was, to say the least, a very interesting experience to attend the meeting.
Back when the Ivy League had sports information meetings - and most of the decisions centered around the media - TB always thought it was odd for eight schools who had little in common geographically to be making decisions that were uniform for media purposes. For purposes of competition and admissions and financial aid and everything else? Yes, that makes complete sense.
But for the media? How could the group make decisions that treated rural schools like Dartmouth and Cornell the same as urban schools like Columbia, Penn and Harvard? These eight offices were connected by being in the same league, but that had nothing to do with the day-to-day operations and logistics of their dealings with their respective local medias.
TB had a similar feeling at the CAANJ meeting.
Yes, all of these schools were in New Jersey. At the same time, the issues that are faced by the community colleges are so different than the ones faced by, say, a BCS school like Rutgers.
TB sat at table during the luncheon with people from Brookdale Community College (where TB's eighth-grade graduation was held, back when he was the fourth-shortest boy in the class) and Mercer County College. One of the people from Mercer was John Simone, whom TB knows dating back to his days coaching at Notre Dame High School.
There was also a woman from Mercer who ran at TCNJ when current Princeton men's cross country coach Steve Dolan was the coach for the Lions and a woman from Brookdale who went to high school with Lorin Maurer, who was a Princeton Friends' Group fundraiser until her tragic death in a plane crash nearly two years ago. Lorin and the woman from Brookdale were from outside Reading, which of course sparked a conversation with Princeton Director of Athletics Gary Walters, who grew up in Reading.
The room was filled with people who do a great deal for New Jersey's college athletes, the overwhelming majority of whom do not compete at the Division I level.
These administrators give their athletes every opportunity they can to be successful, and they do so with far fewer resources than TB is used to dealing with here at Princeton.
The speaker from the MIAC spoke about things that TB takes for granted as an everyday part of doing business in athletic communications - thinks like livestats and video streaming and flip cams and content management systems and all of it.
At the same time, many of the people in the room had no experience in dealing with these. Why? They don't have the resources - financial and staffing - to so so.
By the time he left, TB had a better understanding of what a lot of people in college athletics go through each day in their attempts to put quality teams on the field. He also had renewed respect for the challenges that many of these dedicated people face.
He was also determined not to take for granted what he has at Princeton and just how lucky he is to be working at a place like this.
Monday, October 11, 2010
No Place Like Home
TigerBlog saw something that he would call, uh, unusual this morning as he made his way to Lot 21.
Driving down a Princeton side street, he saw an elderly man hurrying in his direction, wearing a sport coat and carrying a ping pong paddle. TigerBlog assumes that he has a regular game a neighbor's house and wasn't simply wandering the streets looking for a table and a little white ball.
It reminded TB of the very first episode of "Seinfeld," when Kramer walks into Jerry's apartment with two pieces of bread and says: "Do you have any meat?"
TB first played ping pong back at Camp Toledo, a sleepaway camp he attended for five summers, from ages 6-10. He learned to play from a girl named Joni Meister, who was probably two or three years older than TB and who used to keep her left hand behind her back while she simply returned every ball that was hit her way. It's been a long, long time, but TB remembers that she was somewhat unbeatable.
Through the years, TB has emulated that style ever since, rarely going for winners and simply keeping the ball in play. The theory is that eventually your opponent will lose patience and make a mistake.
TB's cousins Paul and Janet used to have a table in their basement, and Paul was famous for pounding the table with his paddle to try to fluster his opponent. The Joni Meister strategy was perfect for combating this, since it also kept you on an even keel for the whole game.
TB's strategy in Foosball is a little different. In Foosball, TB always keeps his left hand on the goalie and only moves his right hand to the other three positions. That way, if the ball moves quickly down the table, the goalie is always ready to keep the ball out of the goal, rather than just hanging out waiting for the quick transition from the two offensive rows to the defensive end.
In transitioning from defense to offense, TB likes to have the goalie move the ball up one row and then have the two defenders move it to the five guys in the middle. This is as opposed to simply hammering the ball up the table, because it could take any number of crazy hops along the way.
Foosball, of course, is the table soccer game where one or two players control four rows of players. These players can spin forward or backward, so it's possible to institute the mayhem strategy of simply spinning all the rows and hoping something good happens.
Real soccer is not played on a field made of cardboard with a ball that makes a "plunk" sound when it smashes into the sides. The players also don't spin forward and backward and don't have to move in four separate units.
Perhaps one exception to the spinning rule is the Brown women's soccer player who did her throw-ins after doing a complete flip forward, the point of which is to get the ball to travel further. She did it several times Saturday against Princeton, and her throws did set up several good chances for the Bears.
None of them paid off, though, as Princeton won 1-0 in a game that came after the men defeated Brown 3-0. Two games, 180 minutes, two wins - Princeton 4, Brown 0.
The wins left both the men and women undefeated and untied in the Ivy League.
The women's team is the only team without a loss or tie in the league. At 3-0-0, the Tigers have nine points, two ahead of 2-0-1 Columbia, Princeton's next league opponent (at Columbia Saturday at 4).
The women's Ivy standings have Princeton with nine points, Columbia with seven and Harvard and Penn with six each at 2-1-0; Princeton still plays all three.
On the men's side, each team has played two league games instead of three, and Princeton and Penn are both 2-0-0, followed by Harvard at 1-0-1. That Brown is not 2-0 might be something of a surpise: the Bears came to Princeton 7-0-2 having outscored their opponents 16-1 before Princeton scored three times.
The real winners at Princeton soccer, though, are the fans, who get to watch the games at Roberts Stadium. The facility, now in its third year, continues to amaze TB every time he's there.
It doesn't matter where you sit in the building, because you are so close to the field at every point, but TB likes the view from directly behind the goals. The field itself is pristine, to the point where when you look at it from the stands, you can't tell where the real grass of Myslik Field ends and the field turf practice field begins.
Clearly the local soccer fans have noticed. Though TB has no numbers to back this claim up, it's his belief that attendance at Princeton soccer has definitely gone up since the stadium opened. And the crowds that come are a cross section of the local Mercer County soccer fans (a large group) and an army of soccer-playing kids in their varied youth jerseys. In short, it's everything Princeton Athletics is looking to have at its events.
The teams have also responded: Princeton's men's and women's teams are combined 3-5 on the road and 10-2-1 at home.
Of course, neither is going to win their league without being able to compete successfully away from home.
Still, it's nice to know that your home facility is nothing short of spectacular.
Driving down a Princeton side street, he saw an elderly man hurrying in his direction, wearing a sport coat and carrying a ping pong paddle. TigerBlog assumes that he has a regular game a neighbor's house and wasn't simply wandering the streets looking for a table and a little white ball.
It reminded TB of the very first episode of "Seinfeld," when Kramer walks into Jerry's apartment with two pieces of bread and says: "Do you have any meat?"
TB first played ping pong back at Camp Toledo, a sleepaway camp he attended for five summers, from ages 6-10. He learned to play from a girl named Joni Meister, who was probably two or three years older than TB and who used to keep her left hand behind her back while she simply returned every ball that was hit her way. It's been a long, long time, but TB remembers that she was somewhat unbeatable.
Through the years, TB has emulated that style ever since, rarely going for winners and simply keeping the ball in play. The theory is that eventually your opponent will lose patience and make a mistake.
TB's cousins Paul and Janet used to have a table in their basement, and Paul was famous for pounding the table with his paddle to try to fluster his opponent. The Joni Meister strategy was perfect for combating this, since it also kept you on an even keel for the whole game.
TB's strategy in Foosball is a little different. In Foosball, TB always keeps his left hand on the goalie and only moves his right hand to the other three positions. That way, if the ball moves quickly down the table, the goalie is always ready to keep the ball out of the goal, rather than just hanging out waiting for the quick transition from the two offensive rows to the defensive end.
In transitioning from defense to offense, TB likes to have the goalie move the ball up one row and then have the two defenders move it to the five guys in the middle. This is as opposed to simply hammering the ball up the table, because it could take any number of crazy hops along the way.
Foosball, of course, is the table soccer game where one or two players control four rows of players. These players can spin forward or backward, so it's possible to institute the mayhem strategy of simply spinning all the rows and hoping something good happens.
Real soccer is not played on a field made of cardboard with a ball that makes a "plunk" sound when it smashes into the sides. The players also don't spin forward and backward and don't have to move in four separate units.
Perhaps one exception to the spinning rule is the Brown women's soccer player who did her throw-ins after doing a complete flip forward, the point of which is to get the ball to travel further. She did it several times Saturday against Princeton, and her throws did set up several good chances for the Bears.
None of them paid off, though, as Princeton won 1-0 in a game that came after the men defeated Brown 3-0. Two games, 180 minutes, two wins - Princeton 4, Brown 0.
The wins left both the men and women undefeated and untied in the Ivy League.
The women's team is the only team without a loss or tie in the league. At 3-0-0, the Tigers have nine points, two ahead of 2-0-1 Columbia, Princeton's next league opponent (at Columbia Saturday at 4).
The women's Ivy standings have Princeton with nine points, Columbia with seven and Harvard and Penn with six each at 2-1-0; Princeton still plays all three.
On the men's side, each team has played two league games instead of three, and Princeton and Penn are both 2-0-0, followed by Harvard at 1-0-1. That Brown is not 2-0 might be something of a surpise: the Bears came to Princeton 7-0-2 having outscored their opponents 16-1 before Princeton scored three times.
The real winners at Princeton soccer, though, are the fans, who get to watch the games at Roberts Stadium. The facility, now in its third year, continues to amaze TB every time he's there.
It doesn't matter where you sit in the building, because you are so close to the field at every point, but TB likes the view from directly behind the goals. The field itself is pristine, to the point where when you look at it from the stands, you can't tell where the real grass of Myslik Field ends and the field turf practice field begins.
Clearly the local soccer fans have noticed. Though TB has no numbers to back this claim up, it's his belief that attendance at Princeton soccer has definitely gone up since the stadium opened. And the crowds that come are a cross section of the local Mercer County soccer fans (a large group) and an army of soccer-playing kids in their varied youth jerseys. In short, it's everything Princeton Athletics is looking to have at its events.
The teams have also responded: Princeton's men's and women's teams are combined 3-5 on the road and 10-2-1 at home.
Of course, neither is going to win their league without being able to compete successfully away from home.
Still, it's nice to know that your home facility is nothing short of spectacular.
Friday, October 8, 2010
I'll Play The Carpenters; I'll Play Barry Manilow
TigerBlog has 1,129 songs on his I-tunes.
Of those, 130 are by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, followed in second place by Train with 45 songs and in third by Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes with 42.
TB isn't sure how the random-play function on I-tunes works, since it seems like some songs are played way more than others. In fact, there are six songs that have played at least 160 times each: "My City of Ruins," "Waitin' on a Sunny Day" and "The Land of Hope And Dreams" by Bruce, "Teenage Idol" by Ricky Nelson and "Don't Let Him Go" by REO Speedwagon are all on that list, which is led by Bruce's "Meet Me At Mary's Place," which tops the chart, so to speak, with 167 plays.
As an aside, TB-Baltimore, during his time in the next office here in the OAC, used to cringe everytime he heard "I got seven pictures of Buddha" and vowed never to listen to the song again after he left here.
There are a lot of different groups that have at least one song on the list, including 19 that begin with the letter "A" alone. Some are one-hit wonders, and others have a solid block of songs.
Included in the 1,129 songs are 10 by The Carpenters and three by Barry Manilow. If you're in TB's age range, you probably 1) love both and 2) would never admit it publicly.
The lead singer for The Carpenters was Karen Carpenter, who had an angelic voice and died from anorexia at the age of 32 back in 1983. She left behind a string of hits, including "We've Only Just Begun," "Close to You," "Yesterday Once More," "Top Of The World" and many more. Her brother Richard played the guitar.
As for Barry Manilow, he's still going fairly strong at the age of 67, with his familiar mega-hits like "Copacabana," "I Write The Songs," "Weekend In New England," "Even Now" and many others as well.
For some reason, The Carpenters and Barry Manilow weren't quite cool enough for the average teenager back then to admit that he/she was a fan. Also for some reason, though, everyone knew all the words to all of their songs.
The whole Carpenters/Manilow thing is captured perfectly in two television comedies. One was on an episode of "Family Guy," when Peter and his buddies hear the news that Manilow is going to be playing a concert in Quahog and begin by making fun of it, only to admit that they secretly love his music.
The other is from "WKRP in Cincinnati," which could quite possibly be the most underrated comedy in TV history.
Anyway, Dr. Johnny Fever was the top deejay at WKRP, a devoted rocker from the ’60s and ’70s. On one episode, when a bomber attacks the radio station's transmitter (where Johnny and Venus Flytrap had gone because they thought the station was the target), Johnny just gets out on time because he hears sirens coming and thinks it's the "phone cops," who know he just destroyed a phone (back in those days, the phone company owned the telephones). Venus chases Johnny out the door, just before the bomb goes off.
The two end up back at the station, where Johnny tries to hide from the phone cops. He screams to Travis (the program director): "I'll play The Carpenters; I'll play Barry Manilow."
If there is an equatable situation today, TigerBlog says it's with Miley Cyrus, beloved by the under 10 girls and, grudgingly, by their parents. Hey, go listen to "Make Some Noise" and come back and tell TigerBlog that that's not a great song.
Still, even TB was surprised yesterday afternoon, when he was on his way to the E-level storage room, located next to the Princeton Varsity Club weightroom, which was busy with activity. And the song that was blaring? "Party In The USA."
TigerBlog was down there to get the 1959 football roster to answer a question that had been asked. It turned out to be quite an educational trip.
The 1959 roster included 66 names. Here are your questions, to be answered in a paragraph or two:
* how many players weighed more than 200 pounds?
* how much did the heaviest player weigh?
The current Princeton roster has 81 players who weigh more than 200 pounds, 38 who weigh at least 250 and five who weigh more than 300.
Back then? Of the 66, 14 weighed more than 200 and nobody weighed more than 225.
Football players of varying weights will be playing this weekend on Powers Field at Princeton Stadium, beginning tonight with sprint football against Post and continuing tomorrow with the football game against Colgate.
As an aside, TB has always wondered how to transition from talking about sprint to talking about the other football team. Both are varsity sports, so you can't call one sprint and the other varsity. Former sprint coach Tom Murray used to call his team the lightweight team and the other the heavyweight team.
It's a big home weekend for Princeton Athletics, with eight games on campus between tonight and Sunday.
The sprint game is as intriguing as any, since the matchup is between the Tigers, who has lost 66 straight to CSFL opponents, and Post, who is 0-2 in its first year with a CSFL team.
The (other/heavyweight/Saturday) football game is the first of three straight home games, with Brown and Harvard due in the following two weeks. Interestingly, in Princeton's last 10 games, the home team has won nine (Princeton won at Dartmouth last year), and you know the Tigers can't wait to play again after last week's 42-14 loss to Columbia.
The women's volleyball team, fresh off its stunning rally from two games down to defeat defending Ivy champ Penn, hosts Brown tonight and Yale tomorrow.
There is also a soccer doubleheader tomorrow after football, with the men at 4 and the women at 7, both against Brown. The women's team is 2-0-0 in the league, tied for first with Penn, while the men won their Ivy opener last week in impressive fashion, 3-0 over Dartmouth.
The third-ranked field hockey team away today at No. 4 Virginia in a huge matchup, and then there is a quick turnaround for Sunday's 1 p.m. home game against No. 8 Louisville.
The men's water polo team is home tomorrow against Bucknell at 2.
Eight games in 44 hours, seven of which have no admission charge.
What's not to like?
Of those, 130 are by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, followed in second place by Train with 45 songs and in third by Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes with 42.
TB isn't sure how the random-play function on I-tunes works, since it seems like some songs are played way more than others. In fact, there are six songs that have played at least 160 times each: "My City of Ruins," "Waitin' on a Sunny Day" and "The Land of Hope And Dreams" by Bruce, "Teenage Idol" by Ricky Nelson and "Don't Let Him Go" by REO Speedwagon are all on that list, which is led by Bruce's "Meet Me At Mary's Place," which tops the chart, so to speak, with 167 plays.
As an aside, TB-Baltimore, during his time in the next office here in the OAC, used to cringe everytime he heard "I got seven pictures of Buddha" and vowed never to listen to the song again after he left here.
There are a lot of different groups that have at least one song on the list, including 19 that begin with the letter "A" alone. Some are one-hit wonders, and others have a solid block of songs.
Included in the 1,129 songs are 10 by The Carpenters and three by Barry Manilow. If you're in TB's age range, you probably 1) love both and 2) would never admit it publicly.
The lead singer for The Carpenters was Karen Carpenter, who had an angelic voice and died from anorexia at the age of 32 back in 1983. She left behind a string of hits, including "We've Only Just Begun," "Close to You," "Yesterday Once More," "Top Of The World" and many more. Her brother Richard played the guitar.
As for Barry Manilow, he's still going fairly strong at the age of 67, with his familiar mega-hits like "Copacabana," "I Write The Songs," "Weekend In New England," "Even Now" and many others as well.
For some reason, The Carpenters and Barry Manilow weren't quite cool enough for the average teenager back then to admit that he/she was a fan. Also for some reason, though, everyone knew all the words to all of their songs.
The whole Carpenters/Manilow thing is captured perfectly in two television comedies. One was on an episode of "Family Guy," when Peter and his buddies hear the news that Manilow is going to be playing a concert in Quahog and begin by making fun of it, only to admit that they secretly love his music.
The other is from "WKRP in Cincinnati," which could quite possibly be the most underrated comedy in TV history.
Anyway, Dr. Johnny Fever was the top deejay at WKRP, a devoted rocker from the ’60s and ’70s. On one episode, when a bomber attacks the radio station's transmitter (where Johnny and Venus Flytrap had gone because they thought the station was the target), Johnny just gets out on time because he hears sirens coming and thinks it's the "phone cops," who know he just destroyed a phone (back in those days, the phone company owned the telephones). Venus chases Johnny out the door, just before the bomb goes off.
The two end up back at the station, where Johnny tries to hide from the phone cops. He screams to Travis (the program director): "I'll play The Carpenters; I'll play Barry Manilow."
If there is an equatable situation today, TigerBlog says it's with Miley Cyrus, beloved by the under 10 girls and, grudgingly, by their parents. Hey, go listen to "Make Some Noise" and come back and tell TigerBlog that that's not a great song.
Still, even TB was surprised yesterday afternoon, when he was on his way to the E-level storage room, located next to the Princeton Varsity Club weightroom, which was busy with activity. And the song that was blaring? "Party In The USA."
TigerBlog was down there to get the 1959 football roster to answer a question that had been asked. It turned out to be quite an educational trip.
The 1959 roster included 66 names. Here are your questions, to be answered in a paragraph or two:
* how many players weighed more than 200 pounds?
* how much did the heaviest player weigh?
The current Princeton roster has 81 players who weigh more than 200 pounds, 38 who weigh at least 250 and five who weigh more than 300.
Back then? Of the 66, 14 weighed more than 200 and nobody weighed more than 225.
Football players of varying weights will be playing this weekend on Powers Field at Princeton Stadium, beginning tonight with sprint football against Post and continuing tomorrow with the football game against Colgate.
As an aside, TB has always wondered how to transition from talking about sprint to talking about the other football team. Both are varsity sports, so you can't call one sprint and the other varsity. Former sprint coach Tom Murray used to call his team the lightweight team and the other the heavyweight team.
It's a big home weekend for Princeton Athletics, with eight games on campus between tonight and Sunday.
The sprint game is as intriguing as any, since the matchup is between the Tigers, who has lost 66 straight to CSFL opponents, and Post, who is 0-2 in its first year with a CSFL team.
The (other/heavyweight/Saturday) football game is the first of three straight home games, with Brown and Harvard due in the following two weeks. Interestingly, in Princeton's last 10 games, the home team has won nine (Princeton won at Dartmouth last year), and you know the Tigers can't wait to play again after last week's 42-14 loss to Columbia.
The women's volleyball team, fresh off its stunning rally from two games down to defeat defending Ivy champ Penn, hosts Brown tonight and Yale tomorrow.
There is also a soccer doubleheader tomorrow after football, with the men at 4 and the women at 7, both against Brown. The women's team is 2-0-0 in the league, tied for first with Penn, while the men won their Ivy opener last week in impressive fashion, 3-0 over Dartmouth.
The third-ranked field hockey team away today at No. 4 Virginia in a huge matchup, and then there is a quick turnaround for Sunday's 1 p.m. home game against No. 8 Louisville.
The men's water polo team is home tomorrow against Bucknell at 2.
Eight games in 44 hours, seven of which have no admission charge.
What's not to like?
Thursday, October 7, 2010
CAANJ Champs
When TigerBlog was a student past junior high or so, his favorite kinds of questions on tests were essay questions.
Why? Because TB always felt that essay questions tested you on what you knew, and other questions tested you on what you didn't know.
TB had a math teacher in high school - actually, TB had him for probability and statistics - named Mr. Iovino, and it was his theory that on multiple choice questions, the correct answer is "B" a disproportionate amount of the time. He also had another high school teacher who gave the class a true/false test once on which every answer was false - mostly as a psychological experiment to see if the people taking the test would be okay with answering "false" to every question.
In a college astronomy class - fascinating stuff, by the way - the professor's tests consisted of clusters of unrelated questions. There would be seven clusters on the test, with three or four or five questions in each cluster - and students could pick any five clusters to answer.
For today, though, let's start out with a little "fill in the blank" exercise. Ready? Here goes:
Princeton Athletics competes in __________________.
TB is pretty sure that most people would give the easiest and most correct answer: The Ivy League.
Others could point out the ECAC or the CSFL or the IRA or any of the other affiliations and events Princeton has.
You could even say Orange and Black. Or Princeton Stadium and Baker Rink and all the other venues.
How many of you, though, came up with this answer:
New Jersey.
Since we're playing the "fill in the blank" game, here's another one:
There are ____________________ Division I schools in New Jersey. We'll get to that in a moment.
Princeton is first and foremost an Ivy League school, and winning Ivy League championships has always been the No. 1 goal. And then, depending on the sport, there are natural rivals outside of the league in a variety of places.
But Princeton is, of course, located in New Jersey. And while there isn't the greatest of natural rivalries within the state beyond possibly Rutgers, Princeton does compete against its closest geographical rivals for the CAANJ Cup.
"CAANJ" stands for "College Athletic Administrators of New Jersey." Each year, CAANJ honors athletes and athletic programs in the state in a variety of ways.
Included in this is the CAANJ Cup, which goes to the top athletic program in the state. This year's winner is Princeton, which has won often in the past as well.
The Cup is awarded to the team that has the highest point total according to the CAANJ formula. Points are awarded for seven men's sports and seven women's sports based on conference finish and national competition.
There are separate divisions for Division I and for Divisions II and III.
It's not necessarily easy to figure out the exact sports to nominate, because the points system is a bit complex, so a sport like men's lightweight rowing, which won the national championship, didn't earn as many points as men's water polo, which won an NCAA tournament game.
The CAANJ Cup will be awarded today at the annual banquet. Like the first "fill in the blank" question above, the answer to what Princeton's first goal each year is is not to win the CAANJ Cup, but it's still a very nice honor.
As for the answer to how many Division I schools there are in New Jersey? Who had "eight?" If you did, you are correct:
Princeton, Rutgers, Seton Hall, Monmouth, St. Peters, Rider, Fairleigh Dickinson and NJIT.
It's not the same as competing against Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell, Columbia and Penn.
Then again, Princeton is more than happy to be the home of the 2010 CAANJ Cup.
Why? Because TB always felt that essay questions tested you on what you knew, and other questions tested you on what you didn't know.
TB had a math teacher in high school - actually, TB had him for probability and statistics - named Mr. Iovino, and it was his theory that on multiple choice questions, the correct answer is "B" a disproportionate amount of the time. He also had another high school teacher who gave the class a true/false test once on which every answer was false - mostly as a psychological experiment to see if the people taking the test would be okay with answering "false" to every question.
In a college astronomy class - fascinating stuff, by the way - the professor's tests consisted of clusters of unrelated questions. There would be seven clusters on the test, with three or four or five questions in each cluster - and students could pick any five clusters to answer.
For today, though, let's start out with a little "fill in the blank" exercise. Ready? Here goes:
Princeton Athletics competes in __________________.
TB is pretty sure that most people would give the easiest and most correct answer: The Ivy League.
Others could point out the ECAC or the CSFL or the IRA or any of the other affiliations and events Princeton has.
You could even say Orange and Black. Or Princeton Stadium and Baker Rink and all the other venues.
How many of you, though, came up with this answer:
New Jersey.
Since we're playing the "fill in the blank" game, here's another one:
There are ____________________ Division I schools in New Jersey. We'll get to that in a moment.
Princeton is first and foremost an Ivy League school, and winning Ivy League championships has always been the No. 1 goal. And then, depending on the sport, there are natural rivals outside of the league in a variety of places.
But Princeton is, of course, located in New Jersey. And while there isn't the greatest of natural rivalries within the state beyond possibly Rutgers, Princeton does compete against its closest geographical rivals for the CAANJ Cup.
"CAANJ" stands for "College Athletic Administrators of New Jersey." Each year, CAANJ honors athletes and athletic programs in the state in a variety of ways.
Included in this is the CAANJ Cup, which goes to the top athletic program in the state. This year's winner is Princeton, which has won often in the past as well.
The Cup is awarded to the team that has the highest point total according to the CAANJ formula. Points are awarded for seven men's sports and seven women's sports based on conference finish and national competition.
There are separate divisions for Division I and for Divisions II and III.
It's not necessarily easy to figure out the exact sports to nominate, because the points system is a bit complex, so a sport like men's lightweight rowing, which won the national championship, didn't earn as many points as men's water polo, which won an NCAA tournament game.
The CAANJ Cup will be awarded today at the annual banquet. Like the first "fill in the blank" question above, the answer to what Princeton's first goal each year is is not to win the CAANJ Cup, but it's still a very nice honor.
As for the answer to how many Division I schools there are in New Jersey? Who had "eight?" If you did, you are correct:
Princeton, Rutgers, Seton Hall, Monmouth, St. Peters, Rider, Fairleigh Dickinson and NJIT.
It's not the same as competing against Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell, Columbia and Penn.
Then again, Princeton is more than happy to be the home of the 2010 CAANJ Cup.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
9,327? Is That Good?
Did anyone notice something unique about yesterday, at least as it pertained to the world of sports?
TigerBlog didn't pick up on it until someone else in the office mentioned it. Since the Major League Baseball playoffs don't start until today, that left yesterday as one of those rarest of days, one without any regular-season or post-season games in any of the four major professional sports in America.
The days before and after the MLB all-star game also fit the bill. Aside from that, there aren't too many that TB can think of, as there are now NBA games on Christmas, an outdoor NHL game on New Year's Day and basically something every other day of the year as well. In fact, can it really be only the days around the all-star game and yesterday?
When TB worked at the newspaper, the days around the all-star game were awesome ones to work on the desk, since there were never any late games to have to worry about. Usually, when you worked the desk (which TB had to do in the summer), you'd have everything done for the early editions and then sub out advances or wire stories for the game stories that came in from the Yankees, Mets and Phillies.
Sometimes, when there would be an early story (something written before the game) or an early notes column, people on the desk would write things like "The Phillies led the Pirates 3-2 in the seventh inning at press time." TB always hated that, since when you got your paper, the game was long over.
Eventually, for the last edition, with a deadline then of around 2 a.m., you'd be waiting for box scores for MLB games from the West Coast. You'd also have to take the AP story and add it to the American League or National League wrap, which meant having to cut something out of the earlier entries to make it all fit.
And you had to do all this in the middle of the night, long after most of the rest of the newsroom had gone home (or out, which is what most of them did) and after one of the greatest cafeterias of all-time had closed for the day.
Except for the Monday before and Wednesday after the all-star game. On those days, it was an all-star preview, some stats, local American Legion and Little League baseball and wrap it up by 9 or so.
Of course, this was all in the pre-internet days, so getting late final scores (or even early ones) wasn't as easy as, say, looking at your phone (which in those days was mounted on your wall).
Those were the days, no?
The MLB playoffs used to start on Tuesdays, not Wednesdays, so sports world went from Monday Night Football to baseball playoffs.
Back when TB was in grade school, all of the postseason games were played during the day, and he can remember way back in 1973, when a teacher wheeled in a TV so that the class could watch the Mets-Reds in the NLCS.
TB isn't as interested in the 2010 playoffs. He's rooting against the Yankees, but he basically has nothing against any of the other seven teams. He has the Giants ranked just ahead of the Yankees in his rooting preference, since they knocked out the Padres.
His first choice would be the Braves, and his second was the Twins; TB doesn't see either winning in the first round.
So why isn't TB as into the playoffs as he used to be, when he would watch every game all the way through? Is it because he's older and has more important things to worry about?
Or is it because the sport of baseball has done basically everything it could do in the last 20 years to alienate its fan base?
Whether it's labor issues or steroids or 1-0 regular season games that go more than three hours or playoff games that end after 11:30 in the East or ticket prices that have destroyed the idea that baseball was affordable family entertainment or the staggering of playoff games to squeeze every nickel out of television or World Series games in November or any number of other decisions that baseball has made, it's no longer what it was back when TB was a kid, let alone when FatherBlog was growing up in the '40s and '50s in New York City.
What's the moral of the story? Don't assume that just because someone is interested in your product today means they're going to be interested tomorrow. The decisions you make have a huge impact.
TigerBlog can't imagine that Princeton fans feel the same about sports here as TB does about baseball. Perhaps some old-time football fans remember days when Palmer Stadium was routinely filled, but for the most part, Princeton athletics of today is providing as high a quality product - from a viewing standpoint - as it ever has.
Still, it took exactly one home football game here at Princeton this season for TigerBlog to be hit by the familiar conversation, which goes something like this:
"What was the attendance for the Lafayette game?"
"9,327."
"Is that good?"
Again, the question with no answer. A crowd of nearly 10,000? Was it a good crowd or a bad crowd? And how do the decisions that we continue to make here at Princeton impact the people who come or don't come?
It's a familiar theme for TB, who wrote a great deal about this very subject not long ago, with a Part I and a Part II.
The questions then are the same as they are now. One home game into the 2010 football season, and they haven't changed.
So now Princeton has three straight home games coming up, the first of which is Saturday against Colgate. Last year, attendance was 5,685 for a Thursday night. This year's forecast for Saturday is for sunny and 73 degrees; in other words, the weather will be perfect.
Coming up after that are back-to-back games against Brown and Harvard. All three games kick off at 1; the Lafayette game was at 6.
So what should attendance be? What would be considered good? What factors are playing into it? Is Princeton's marketing efforts working?
Michael Cross, now the Director of Athletics at Bradley, used to have discussions with TB all the time back when he worked at Princeton over whether or not it was important to set goals for attendance.
If you want to average, say, 12,000 fans per game but only average 10,000, are you unsuccessful? Or is working towards a goal a good thing? And if you are, what should that goal be?
Like all the other questions related to that subject, this one often went unanswered.
TB is not stating a goal for attendance for the next three weekends. He's in more of a "let-see-what-happens-and-if-it-teaches-us-anything" mode.
TigerBlog didn't pick up on it until someone else in the office mentioned it. Since the Major League Baseball playoffs don't start until today, that left yesterday as one of those rarest of days, one without any regular-season or post-season games in any of the four major professional sports in America.
The days before and after the MLB all-star game also fit the bill. Aside from that, there aren't too many that TB can think of, as there are now NBA games on Christmas, an outdoor NHL game on New Year's Day and basically something every other day of the year as well. In fact, can it really be only the days around the all-star game and yesterday?
When TB worked at the newspaper, the days around the all-star game were awesome ones to work on the desk, since there were never any late games to have to worry about. Usually, when you worked the desk (which TB had to do in the summer), you'd have everything done for the early editions and then sub out advances or wire stories for the game stories that came in from the Yankees, Mets and Phillies.
Sometimes, when there would be an early story (something written before the game) or an early notes column, people on the desk would write things like "The Phillies led the Pirates 3-2 in the seventh inning at press time." TB always hated that, since when you got your paper, the game was long over.
Eventually, for the last edition, with a deadline then of around 2 a.m., you'd be waiting for box scores for MLB games from the West Coast. You'd also have to take the AP story and add it to the American League or National League wrap, which meant having to cut something out of the earlier entries to make it all fit.
And you had to do all this in the middle of the night, long after most of the rest of the newsroom had gone home (or out, which is what most of them did) and after one of the greatest cafeterias of all-time had closed for the day.
Except for the Monday before and Wednesday after the all-star game. On those days, it was an all-star preview, some stats, local American Legion and Little League baseball and wrap it up by 9 or so.
Of course, this was all in the pre-internet days, so getting late final scores (or even early ones) wasn't as easy as, say, looking at your phone (which in those days was mounted on your wall).
Those were the days, no?
The MLB playoffs used to start on Tuesdays, not Wednesdays, so sports world went from Monday Night Football to baseball playoffs.
Back when TB was in grade school, all of the postseason games were played during the day, and he can remember way back in 1973, when a teacher wheeled in a TV so that the class could watch the Mets-Reds in the NLCS.
TB isn't as interested in the 2010 playoffs. He's rooting against the Yankees, but he basically has nothing against any of the other seven teams. He has the Giants ranked just ahead of the Yankees in his rooting preference, since they knocked out the Padres.
His first choice would be the Braves, and his second was the Twins; TB doesn't see either winning in the first round.
So why isn't TB as into the playoffs as he used to be, when he would watch every game all the way through? Is it because he's older and has more important things to worry about?
Or is it because the sport of baseball has done basically everything it could do in the last 20 years to alienate its fan base?
Whether it's labor issues or steroids or 1-0 regular season games that go more than three hours or playoff games that end after 11:30 in the East or ticket prices that have destroyed the idea that baseball was affordable family entertainment or the staggering of playoff games to squeeze every nickel out of television or World Series games in November or any number of other decisions that baseball has made, it's no longer what it was back when TB was a kid, let alone when FatherBlog was growing up in the '40s and '50s in New York City.
What's the moral of the story? Don't assume that just because someone is interested in your product today means they're going to be interested tomorrow. The decisions you make have a huge impact.
TigerBlog can't imagine that Princeton fans feel the same about sports here as TB does about baseball. Perhaps some old-time football fans remember days when Palmer Stadium was routinely filled, but for the most part, Princeton athletics of today is providing as high a quality product - from a viewing standpoint - as it ever has.
Still, it took exactly one home football game here at Princeton this season for TigerBlog to be hit by the familiar conversation, which goes something like this:
"What was the attendance for the Lafayette game?"
"9,327."
"Is that good?"
Again, the question with no answer. A crowd of nearly 10,000? Was it a good crowd or a bad crowd? And how do the decisions that we continue to make here at Princeton impact the people who come or don't come?
It's a familiar theme for TB, who wrote a great deal about this very subject not long ago, with a Part I and a Part II.
The questions then are the same as they are now. One home game into the 2010 football season, and they haven't changed.
So now Princeton has three straight home games coming up, the first of which is Saturday against Colgate. Last year, attendance was 5,685 for a Thursday night. This year's forecast for Saturday is for sunny and 73 degrees; in other words, the weather will be perfect.
Coming up after that are back-to-back games against Brown and Harvard. All three games kick off at 1; the Lafayette game was at 6.
So what should attendance be? What would be considered good? What factors are playing into it? Is Princeton's marketing efforts working?
Michael Cross, now the Director of Athletics at Bradley, used to have discussions with TB all the time back when he worked at Princeton over whether or not it was important to set goals for attendance.
If you want to average, say, 12,000 fans per game but only average 10,000, are you unsuccessful? Or is working towards a goal a good thing? And if you are, what should that goal be?
Like all the other questions related to that subject, this one often went unanswered.
TB is not stating a goal for attendance for the next three weekends. He's in more of a "let-see-what-happens-and-if-it-teaches-us-anything" mode.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Kills, Digs, Blocks, Spikes
Down on E level of Jadwin Gym, there is a storage closet that has a bunch of old file cabinets that used to be in the back room of the OAC, in a spot that is now the shiny new offices of Associate Athletic Director Chris Brock and Assistant Athletic Director Kelly Widener.
These file cabinets include drawers labeled "football, pre-1930" and "men's basketball, 1945-1967." They are filled with old papers, yellowing and crinkly, that have all kinds of information on them, from old rosters to box scores to preseason releases - and, of course, stats.
In fact, there are decades' worth of stats that are hand-written on old notebook paper, with simple columns like "goals" and "points" and "touchdowns."
Back when TigerBlog first covering Princeton in his newspaper days, the shift to computerizing stats was just happening, though not yet for in-game. Instead, then - and through TB's first year or two here in the OAC - stats at all games were still done by hand, with a group of four or five or so people armed with papers, charts, pencils, a typewriter (to type the play-by-play) and blank box scores to fill in. It would take at least 30 minutes after a game to have a finished box.
After the game, TB would have to go into a different office here in Jadwin, then occupied by Marge DeFrank (a longtime administrative assistant here who passed away several years ago), and use Marge's computer to update the cumulative stats. It was an annoying, arduous process.
For men's lacrosse stats, TB developed an excel spreadsheet on which he would have to enter that game's goals, assists, saves, etc., and then excel would do the rest, updating season and career stats.
Eventually, the trend in college sports went to doing computerized in-game stats, which seemed like the very invention of computers themselves to many SIDs at the time.
There were a few companies that were vying for the emerging market of college stats, most notably one called StatMan (which nobody but TB liked) and another called StatCrew (which everyone else liked). TB doesn't know what happened to StatMan, but basically every college now uses StatCew for all of its computerized statting.
StatCrew has programs that are basically structured the same for football, basketball, lacrosse, soccer, field hockey, volleyball, baseball and softball. These programs have come light years from what they were in the mid-1990s, and the advances in StatCrew software - ability to do live stats, compatibility with the web, ease of NCAA reporting, variety of reports it can create - have done so much to help make athletic communications a much more efficient venture.
All of the programs work in the same manner. Games are set up with the opponents and their rosters, and then all statistical entering is done by uniform numbers, not by names. The programs are designed to anticipate everything that can happen off of a given situation, so if you enter, say, a shot in soccer, the program knows that the next thing for that shot has to be that it was a goal, was a save, went wide, hit the post, was blocked, etc.
Within seconds after the game is over, final stats and updated cumulative stats can be on your web page.
While there are still some in the sports info world who are still intimidated by the process of entering stats, it is something that can be learned with relative ease.
If you ask any SID what the hardest sport to do is, they will almost unanimously say volleyball. TigerBlog has never done StatCrew for a volleyball match, and he'd basically be lost if he tried. The stats are somewhat complex, with digs and kills and assists and aces and everything else, and the game moves quite rapidly.
Princeton's women's volleyball team made the Penn stat crew stay later than anyone thought would be the case when the defending Ivy champion Quakers went up 2-0 in Saturday night's Ivy League opener.
But the Tigers stormed back, winning the final three games 25-23, 25-19 and then 25-9 to shock Penn.
Women's volleyball in the Ivy League works just like basketball, with a double round-robin travel-partner format that determines the league champion and the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. Should there be a tie for the title at the end, there would be a playoff to determine the automatic bid.
For Princeton and Penn, it was just the opener. Dartmouth and Yale are off to 2-0 starts, and the Big Green are 11-2 overall. Princeton this weekend is home to Brown and Yale as the league race begins to sort itself out.
Of course, for decades, the face of Princeton volleyball was Glenn Nelson, a somewhat beloved figure in Tiger athletic history for his humor, his laid-back style - and his success on the court.
Jolie Ward is now in Year 2 as the head coach, as is her assistant (and the men's head coach) Sam Schweisky, who took the Tiger men to the EIVA final in his first year. While much was made a year ago about how Chris Bates took over from Bill Tierney in men's lacrosse, Ward and Schweisky stepped into as enormous a shadow in Dillon Gym.
With football and a soccer doubleheader Saturday, a big chance for sprint football Friday night and another game against a Top 15 team in field hockey Sunday (all at home), it's possible to overlook women's volleyball, an indoor sport (along with men's water polo) among mostly outdoor fall sports. This is a big weekend for the Tigers in Dillon, where the atmosphere for matches can be outrageous.
And where else can you get stats like this (from the story after the Penn game): Lydia Rudnick recorded 26 kills, 12 digs and a .300 attack percentage in the win. Junior Cathryn Quinn, Princeton's most experienced starter, also had a strong effort for the Tigers. The middle recorded 18 kills and six blocks while providing important leadership after the Tigers found themselves in an early hole.
These file cabinets include drawers labeled "football, pre-1930" and "men's basketball, 1945-1967." They are filled with old papers, yellowing and crinkly, that have all kinds of information on them, from old rosters to box scores to preseason releases - and, of course, stats.
In fact, there are decades' worth of stats that are hand-written on old notebook paper, with simple columns like "goals" and "points" and "touchdowns."
Back when TigerBlog first covering Princeton in his newspaper days, the shift to computerizing stats was just happening, though not yet for in-game. Instead, then - and through TB's first year or two here in the OAC - stats at all games were still done by hand, with a group of four or five or so people armed with papers, charts, pencils, a typewriter (to type the play-by-play) and blank box scores to fill in. It would take at least 30 minutes after a game to have a finished box.
After the game, TB would have to go into a different office here in Jadwin, then occupied by Marge DeFrank (a longtime administrative assistant here who passed away several years ago), and use Marge's computer to update the cumulative stats. It was an annoying, arduous process.
For men's lacrosse stats, TB developed an excel spreadsheet on which he would have to enter that game's goals, assists, saves, etc., and then excel would do the rest, updating season and career stats.
Eventually, the trend in college sports went to doing computerized in-game stats, which seemed like the very invention of computers themselves to many SIDs at the time.
There were a few companies that were vying for the emerging market of college stats, most notably one called StatMan (which nobody but TB liked) and another called StatCrew (which everyone else liked). TB doesn't know what happened to StatMan, but basically every college now uses StatCew for all of its computerized statting.
StatCrew has programs that are basically structured the same for football, basketball, lacrosse, soccer, field hockey, volleyball, baseball and softball. These programs have come light years from what they were in the mid-1990s, and the advances in StatCrew software - ability to do live stats, compatibility with the web, ease of NCAA reporting, variety of reports it can create - have done so much to help make athletic communications a much more efficient venture.
All of the programs work in the same manner. Games are set up with the opponents and their rosters, and then all statistical entering is done by uniform numbers, not by names. The programs are designed to anticipate everything that can happen off of a given situation, so if you enter, say, a shot in soccer, the program knows that the next thing for that shot has to be that it was a goal, was a save, went wide, hit the post, was blocked, etc.
Within seconds after the game is over, final stats and updated cumulative stats can be on your web page.
While there are still some in the sports info world who are still intimidated by the process of entering stats, it is something that can be learned with relative ease.
If you ask any SID what the hardest sport to do is, they will almost unanimously say volleyball. TigerBlog has never done StatCrew for a volleyball match, and he'd basically be lost if he tried. The stats are somewhat complex, with digs and kills and assists and aces and everything else, and the game moves quite rapidly.
Princeton's women's volleyball team made the Penn stat crew stay later than anyone thought would be the case when the defending Ivy champion Quakers went up 2-0 in Saturday night's Ivy League opener.
But the Tigers stormed back, winning the final three games 25-23, 25-19 and then 25-9 to shock Penn.
Women's volleyball in the Ivy League works just like basketball, with a double round-robin travel-partner format that determines the league champion and the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. Should there be a tie for the title at the end, there would be a playoff to determine the automatic bid.
For Princeton and Penn, it was just the opener. Dartmouth and Yale are off to 2-0 starts, and the Big Green are 11-2 overall. Princeton this weekend is home to Brown and Yale as the league race begins to sort itself out.
Of course, for decades, the face of Princeton volleyball was Glenn Nelson, a somewhat beloved figure in Tiger athletic history for his humor, his laid-back style - and his success on the court.
Jolie Ward is now in Year 2 as the head coach, as is her assistant (and the men's head coach) Sam Schweisky, who took the Tiger men to the EIVA final in his first year. While much was made a year ago about how Chris Bates took over from Bill Tierney in men's lacrosse, Ward and Schweisky stepped into as enormous a shadow in Dillon Gym.
With football and a soccer doubleheader Saturday, a big chance for sprint football Friday night and another game against a Top 15 team in field hockey Sunday (all at home), it's possible to overlook women's volleyball, an indoor sport (along with men's water polo) among mostly outdoor fall sports. This is a big weekend for the Tigers in Dillon, where the atmosphere for matches can be outrageous.
And where else can you get stats like this (from the story after the Penn game): Lydia Rudnick recorded 26 kills, 12 digs and a .300 attack percentage in the win. Junior Cathryn Quinn, Princeton's most experienced starter, also had a strong effort for the Tigers. The middle recorded 18 kills and six blocks while providing important leadership after the Tigers found themselves in an early hole.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Another Week, Another Chance
FatherBlog has talked about the 1951 National League race between the Giants and Dodgers more than any other sporting event that TigerBlog can remember. As for TB, he rooted hard for the Red Sox to hold off the Yankees in 1978, though it wasn't to be.
Maybe the best race TB can remember was in 1993, when the Braves outdid the Giants by a single game, as Atlanta won 104 games and San Francisco won 103.
For those who don't remember, before 1969 there were no divisions in Major League Baseball, just a National League and an American League, and the winner of each played in the World Series. From 1969 until 1993, there were two divisions in each league, so the division winners played each other to see who would play in the World Series.
The first year of the wild card would have been 1994, except a strike wiped out the last six weeks of the regular season and the postseason. That was essentially the end of the line for the Montreal Expos, who had a six game lead on the Braves when the strike came. The Expos, who would have definitely won the 1994 World Series, never really recovered; today they are the Washington Nationals.
The idea of the wild card was to have as many teams as possible remain in contention through the end of the year. Plus, with expansion, there was a need for more than two divisions.
Still, there was something much better about when teams had to win their division. The 2010 Yankees-Rays race is a clear example of that, as neither team tried to win the AL East, which ultimately went to the Rays. Still, would you take the Rays over the Yankees to win the AL at this point? Maybe, maybe not. Other than possibly an extra home game, there is no reward for winning the division.
The NL race between the Padres and Giants for the West title was tempered by the fact that the one that didn't win still had a shot at the wild card. As it turned out, the Padres took the Giants to the wire before losing yesterday, and Atlanta's win over Philadelphia yesterday gave the Braves the wild card.
If you go back to the first two weeks of the Major League Baseball season, you will see that the San Diego Padres lost two of three to the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Colorado Rockies and the Atlanta Braves. At the time, who even noticed?
Now that the season has ended, any game would have been the difference between postseason or no postseason for the Padres. Some rainy night in April, or an extra inning game in July, or some day-game-after-night-game in August - any one game made the difference.
It's hard to think in terms of that over the course of a 162-game season. Some old-time manager - TB thinks it was Leo Durocher - used to say that you start out with 50 wins and 50 losses and that the rest of the games will determine your season, but he never said how you know if the game you just lost was one of your predetermined 50 or one of the determining games.
That's the nature of baseball. Football, on the other hand, is a much different animal.
TigerBlog has always been struck by the difference between playing yesterday, today, tomorrow and so on versus playing once a week.
There is no sport that can compare to football in terms of the disparity of the ratio of practice time to playing time, and the result is that in football, every game is like it's own mini-season, regardless of whether or not it's for first place or last place.
To TigerBlog, it's that way of thinking that would sustain him if he played for Princeton's sprint football team. Every week offers another chance, another opportunity for that mini-season to be a success.
Of course, not all weeks are created equal, and this one certainly isn't like many of the others for the Tigers.
The Princeton sprint football team has lost 26 straight games overall and 66 straight to its league opponents. The only win for Princeton since 1999 came in 2005 against VMI, who put together a club team to play two games that year.
This Friday night, Princeton will play its fourth straight home game. Before looking ahead, let's look back at the first three games of this year, compared to similar scores of last year:
2009
vs. Cornell - lost, 44-0
vs. Penn - lost 57-7 and 91-13
vs. Mansfield - lost 33-0 and 26-14
2010
vs. Cornell - lost 33-12
vs. Penn - lost 48-12
vs. Mansfield - lost 10-6
In other words, the scores this year are much closer than they were a year ago and in most recent years.
And then there's this week. Coming up Friday at 7 on Powers Field at Princeton Stadium, Princeton will host Post, a first-year program in the CSFL. Post is not C.W. Post or any other school; it's a college in Waterbury, Conn., and judging by its website, everyone who goes there likes everyone else and has a lot of fun.
Post, nicknamed the Eagles, is playing four games in its first year, much like Mansfield did a few years ago. For schools that don't want to get into the cost of fielding a heavyweight team, sprint might start to catch on - it's much easier to run operationally, and it brings to the school full tuition-paying students.
The Eagles are 0-2, with losses of 42-12 to Penn and 22-14 to Cornell the last two weekends. After playing Princeton, Post will be off for two weeks before taking on Mansfield. TB assumes the service academies will join the schedule next year.
Princeton will come into the game with a reasonable degree of confidence after its results so far this year. The close game against Cornell should make Post feel that it has a chance as well.
The Eagles have 42 players on their roster, 41 of whom are freshmen or sophomores and one of whom is a junior. Most of the team comes from Connecticut, but the roster does include players from as far away as Florida, Idaho and Tennessee.
If nothing else, it shapes up as the most interesting sprint football game in awhile. Call it the biggest game of this mini-season for the Tigers.
Maybe the best race TB can remember was in 1993, when the Braves outdid the Giants by a single game, as Atlanta won 104 games and San Francisco won 103.
For those who don't remember, before 1969 there were no divisions in Major League Baseball, just a National League and an American League, and the winner of each played in the World Series. From 1969 until 1993, there were two divisions in each league, so the division winners played each other to see who would play in the World Series.
The first year of the wild card would have been 1994, except a strike wiped out the last six weeks of the regular season and the postseason. That was essentially the end of the line for the Montreal Expos, who had a six game lead on the Braves when the strike came. The Expos, who would have definitely won the 1994 World Series, never really recovered; today they are the Washington Nationals.
The idea of the wild card was to have as many teams as possible remain in contention through the end of the year. Plus, with expansion, there was a need for more than two divisions.
Still, there was something much better about when teams had to win their division. The 2010 Yankees-Rays race is a clear example of that, as neither team tried to win the AL East, which ultimately went to the Rays. Still, would you take the Rays over the Yankees to win the AL at this point? Maybe, maybe not. Other than possibly an extra home game, there is no reward for winning the division.
The NL race between the Padres and Giants for the West title was tempered by the fact that the one that didn't win still had a shot at the wild card. As it turned out, the Padres took the Giants to the wire before losing yesterday, and Atlanta's win over Philadelphia yesterday gave the Braves the wild card.
If you go back to the first two weeks of the Major League Baseball season, you will see that the San Diego Padres lost two of three to the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Colorado Rockies and the Atlanta Braves. At the time, who even noticed?
Now that the season has ended, any game would have been the difference between postseason or no postseason for the Padres. Some rainy night in April, or an extra inning game in July, or some day-game-after-night-game in August - any one game made the difference.
It's hard to think in terms of that over the course of a 162-game season. Some old-time manager - TB thinks it was Leo Durocher - used to say that you start out with 50 wins and 50 losses and that the rest of the games will determine your season, but he never said how you know if the game you just lost was one of your predetermined 50 or one of the determining games.
That's the nature of baseball. Football, on the other hand, is a much different animal.
TigerBlog has always been struck by the difference between playing yesterday, today, tomorrow and so on versus playing once a week.
There is no sport that can compare to football in terms of the disparity of the ratio of practice time to playing time, and the result is that in football, every game is like it's own mini-season, regardless of whether or not it's for first place or last place.
To TigerBlog, it's that way of thinking that would sustain him if he played for Princeton's sprint football team. Every week offers another chance, another opportunity for that mini-season to be a success.
Of course, not all weeks are created equal, and this one certainly isn't like many of the others for the Tigers.
The Princeton sprint football team has lost 26 straight games overall and 66 straight to its league opponents. The only win for Princeton since 1999 came in 2005 against VMI, who put together a club team to play two games that year.
This Friday night, Princeton will play its fourth straight home game. Before looking ahead, let's look back at the first three games of this year, compared to similar scores of last year:
2009
vs. Cornell - lost, 44-0
vs. Penn - lost 57-7 and 91-13
vs. Mansfield - lost 33-0 and 26-14
2010
vs. Cornell - lost 33-12
vs. Penn - lost 48-12
vs. Mansfield - lost 10-6
In other words, the scores this year are much closer than they were a year ago and in most recent years.
And then there's this week. Coming up Friday at 7 on Powers Field at Princeton Stadium, Princeton will host Post, a first-year program in the CSFL. Post is not C.W. Post or any other school; it's a college in Waterbury, Conn., and judging by its website, everyone who goes there likes everyone else and has a lot of fun.
Post, nicknamed the Eagles, is playing four games in its first year, much like Mansfield did a few years ago. For schools that don't want to get into the cost of fielding a heavyweight team, sprint might start to catch on - it's much easier to run operationally, and it brings to the school full tuition-paying students.
The Eagles are 0-2, with losses of 42-12 to Penn and 22-14 to Cornell the last two weekends. After playing Princeton, Post will be off for two weeks before taking on Mansfield. TB assumes the service academies will join the schedule next year.
Princeton will come into the game with a reasonable degree of confidence after its results so far this year. The close game against Cornell should make Post feel that it has a chance as well.
The Eagles have 42 players on their roster, 41 of whom are freshmen or sophomores and one of whom is a junior. Most of the team comes from Connecticut, but the roster does include players from as far away as Florida, Idaho and Tennessee.
If nothing else, it shapes up as the most interesting sprint football game in awhile. Call it the biggest game of this mini-season for the Tigers.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Transactions And T Sherry
As months go, October is way up there among TigerBlog's favorites. It begins with average temperatures in the 70s and ends with Halloween, the greatest holiday of them all.
Along the way, you see the leaves change colors, get into the heart of football season, have fall youth lacrosse, watch Heps cross country on what is traditionally the last really nice day of the year and, thanks to the way the world works now, enjoy the start of the Christmas holiday season. What more could anyone ask?
November's not bad either, with Thanksgiving and all, but you also have the overlap of seasons that makes every weekend an adventure in athletic communications, as well as temps that down into the range of actually being cold. For October, you have it all - including the opportunity to spend about half of it wearing the great clothing combination of shorts with hooded sweatshirt.
TigerBlog didn't realize it was October until he was reminded of that fact by this morning's newspaper.
As TigerBlog has said in the past, he reads the morning paper - the one he used to write for - in this order: front page, op-ed, front page of sports, quick trip through the rest of sports, transactions, daily Jumble, Doonesbury, Dilbert. He can usually time it so that the entire process equals the time it takes to eat one bowl of Corn Flakes, unless it happens to be Rice Krispies that day.
Today's transactions included word that Scott Lowe had been hired as an assistant athletic director at Loyola, where he had formerly worked before heading out on his own into sports marketing years ago. Before that, Lowe worked here in the OAC, back in the glory days of Kurt Kehl, Mark Panus, Mike Falk and Mike Jackman, just before TB arrived.
The transactions section always fascinates TB, because of the casualness with which monumental events and turning points in so many different lives are announced:
X University - announced the resignation of Y coach so-and-so.
B University - named so-and-so head whatever coach.
Why did so-and-so resign? What's next for so-and-son? How big a decision was it for so-and-so to get that new job?
Each transaction has a human side to it, and that never comes through in the cold manner these transactions display.
This week, TB saw a story that wasn't exactly in transactions, but it did hit home hard with its human side.
The University of California dropped five sports this past week - men's and women's gymnastics, men's rugby (transitioning to a newly created status of varsity club), women's lacrosse and baseball.
The San Francisco Chronicle story about the announcement drew more than 150 comments, which were somewhat evenly divided between the "how could a school like Cal drop sports?" and "why in the world do tax dollars support college athletics?" camps.
TB, as someone who works in college athletics, feels badly anytime he sees sports being dropped, because it means the loss of jobs for coaches and loss of opportunities for athletes. And, the discussion of why colleges field athletic teams isn't worth having: They obviously have teams, and these teams are so ingrained in the culture and history of American college education that there is no possible contrary argument other than perhaps that if you were starting from scratch today, you might do things differently.
The situation at Cal is different because of who the women's lacrosse coach is.
Theresa Sherry will be in her fourth - and final - year as head coach of the Bears women's lacrosse team. Sherry was an assistant coach at Cal in 2007 before becoming the head coach a year later, and she was named the league Coach of the Year in her first season.
Sherry was a two-sport athlete at Princeton before graduating in 2004, and goprincetontigers.com named her the No. 5 female athlete of the last decade at Princeton.
She was a three-time first-team All-America in lacrosse, and she scored the game-winning goal in overtime in the 2003 NCAA final to give Princeton its second straight national title. In soccer, she was a four-year letterwinner and top scorer for a team that won three Ivy League championships.
She also was well-known for singing the national anthem before home games in both sports.
Sherry - known simply as "T" or "T Sherry" to most - speaks softly, smiles easily, laughs a lot, comes from a close family and is as nice as anyone you're ever going to meet.
She's also fiercely competitive, and she worked hard to build Cal into a respectable Division I program. As Cal is shutting down its program, the sport continues to grow throughout the West, with teams at places like Stanford, Oregon, Fresno State and UC Davis and more on the way.
And then, just like that, her program was gone. The same is true for baseball, a sport that dates back more than 100 years at Cal, and three others.
The cuts affect 265 athletes, as well as the coaches.
TigerBlog has no doubt that Theresa Sherry will find another job and will be a head coach again. It's just that when you read the transactions each day, make sure you stop and remember that these are real people with real lives who are affected by all of these moves.
This week, it scooped up one of Princeton's all-time greatest women athletes.
Along the way, you see the leaves change colors, get into the heart of football season, have fall youth lacrosse, watch Heps cross country on what is traditionally the last really nice day of the year and, thanks to the way the world works now, enjoy the start of the Christmas holiday season. What more could anyone ask?
November's not bad either, with Thanksgiving and all, but you also have the overlap of seasons that makes every weekend an adventure in athletic communications, as well as temps that down into the range of actually being cold. For October, you have it all - including the opportunity to spend about half of it wearing the great clothing combination of shorts with hooded sweatshirt.
TigerBlog didn't realize it was October until he was reminded of that fact by this morning's newspaper.
As TigerBlog has said in the past, he reads the morning paper - the one he used to write for - in this order: front page, op-ed, front page of sports, quick trip through the rest of sports, transactions, daily Jumble, Doonesbury, Dilbert. He can usually time it so that the entire process equals the time it takes to eat one bowl of Corn Flakes, unless it happens to be Rice Krispies that day.
Today's transactions included word that Scott Lowe had been hired as an assistant athletic director at Loyola, where he had formerly worked before heading out on his own into sports marketing years ago. Before that, Lowe worked here in the OAC, back in the glory days of Kurt Kehl, Mark Panus, Mike Falk and Mike Jackman, just before TB arrived.
The transactions section always fascinates TB, because of the casualness with which monumental events and turning points in so many different lives are announced:
X University - announced the resignation of Y coach so-and-so.
B University - named so-and-so head whatever coach.
Why did so-and-so resign? What's next for so-and-son? How big a decision was it for so-and-so to get that new job?
Each transaction has a human side to it, and that never comes through in the cold manner these transactions display.
This week, TB saw a story that wasn't exactly in transactions, but it did hit home hard with its human side.
The University of California dropped five sports this past week - men's and women's gymnastics, men's rugby (transitioning to a newly created status of varsity club), women's lacrosse and baseball.
The San Francisco Chronicle story about the announcement drew more than 150 comments, which were somewhat evenly divided between the "how could a school like Cal drop sports?" and "why in the world do tax dollars support college athletics?" camps.
TB, as someone who works in college athletics, feels badly anytime he sees sports being dropped, because it means the loss of jobs for coaches and loss of opportunities for athletes. And, the discussion of why colleges field athletic teams isn't worth having: They obviously have teams, and these teams are so ingrained in the culture and history of American college education that there is no possible contrary argument other than perhaps that if you were starting from scratch today, you might do things differently.
The situation at Cal is different because of who the women's lacrosse coach is.
Theresa Sherry will be in her fourth - and final - year as head coach of the Bears women's lacrosse team. Sherry was an assistant coach at Cal in 2007 before becoming the head coach a year later, and she was named the league Coach of the Year in her first season.
Sherry was a two-sport athlete at Princeton before graduating in 2004, and goprincetontigers.com named her the No. 5 female athlete of the last decade at Princeton.
She was a three-time first-team All-America in lacrosse, and she scored the game-winning goal in overtime in the 2003 NCAA final to give Princeton its second straight national title. In soccer, she was a four-year letterwinner and top scorer for a team that won three Ivy League championships.
She also was well-known for singing the national anthem before home games in both sports.
Sherry - known simply as "T" or "T Sherry" to most - speaks softly, smiles easily, laughs a lot, comes from a close family and is as nice as anyone you're ever going to meet.
She's also fiercely competitive, and she worked hard to build Cal into a respectable Division I program. As Cal is shutting down its program, the sport continues to grow throughout the West, with teams at places like Stanford, Oregon, Fresno State and UC Davis and more on the way.
And then, just like that, her program was gone. The same is true for baseball, a sport that dates back more than 100 years at Cal, and three others.
The cuts affect 265 athletes, as well as the coaches.
TigerBlog has no doubt that Theresa Sherry will find another job and will be a head coach again. It's just that when you read the transactions each day, make sure you stop and remember that these are real people with real lives who are affected by all of these moves.
This week, it scooped up one of Princeton's all-time greatest women athletes.
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