As the NCAA men's basketball brackets were being announced, the drama ended quickly for Princeton and harshly for Harvard.
Hey, to the victors, as they say, even if the margin for the victors is razor, razor thin.
To say that it was an extraordinary weekend for Princeton men's basketball would be an understatement.
It began with the Ivy League playoff game to determine the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament and continued through the selection show last night. The playoff game itself has already vaulted itself into one of the Top 10 moments in the history of a program that has had more than its share of top moments.
How could it not? With an NCAA bid on the line, Princeton was playing to complete the basketball revival that Sydney Johnson with the men and Courtney Banghart with the women began when they were hired four years ago.
In Princeton's case, getting to the tournament would mean going through a Harvard team that was the brash new kid on the block, one playing to get to the tournament for the first time since 1946, a team led by a high-profile coach who came to Cambridge and has ruffled many a feather since.
TigerBlog was walking up the stairs to the balcony in Jadwin Friday when Dan Mavraides came down the other way. Mavraides scored 11 points as a freshman on a team that went 6-23, and when that season was over, his wildest dreams for his career probably didn't take him to where he was at that moment.
And yet there he was Friday afternoon, a 1,000-point scorer, team captain, member of an Ivy League co-championship team, leader of a team that more-than-reversed that freshman record to 24-6.
Still, with all that, TB couldn't help but think that Mavraides' entire career would be framed by what happened in the playoff game. It's not that a loss would have ruined it all, but TB is sure that it would have left Mavraides - and fellow seniors Kareem Maddox and Bobby Foley - with a nagging feeling that might always be there.
And that's what was at stake Saturday at about 6 p.m., after it appeared Harvard would pull away and after Princeton (with a huge contribution from Brendan Connolly) had made it a tight game and after there had already been three lead changes since the 1:01 mark, including a basket by Harvard with 11 seconds left and then finally a blocked shot, possession to Princeton, with 2.8 to play.
As an aside, somewhat stunningly, neither coach chose to call timeout during the up-and-down flow of the final minute, as both teams kept scoring. In fact, from the under-four media timeout through Princeton's timeout with 2.8 to go, there was only one called timeout by a team, which came from Princeton with 1:41 to go. As a result, the final two minutes of the game took about four minutes to play, rather than 15 or so that it normally might have.
TigerBlog has been following Princeton basketball up close for more than a quarter-century, and he knows a lot about the years before he started covering the team, going all the way back to Year 1 in 1901.
He can cite from memory career statistics of people he's never met, who died long ago. He knows what happened in games from decades ago, let alone from the games he's seen through the years.
With all that background, he can honestly say that there haven't been many moments to eclipse what happened at the end of the game Saturday.
Mavraides inbounded the ball to Douglas Davis, who as everyone has seen everywhere by now, dribbles right, ducks back to his left and then calmly swishes a shot to ignite a massive celebration with the final score: Princeton 63, Harvard 62.
TB's first thought as he watched the celebration was "what if it didn't leave his fingers on time?" As the refs went to review it, TB couldn't help but think: "What in the world will happen if it's ruled to be no good? Would there ever have been such a reversal of competing emotions in a building split down the middle?"
Thankfully for Princeton, the shot was clearly out his hands before the clock went all zeroes, and it was Princeton who was off to the NCAA tournament.
The selection show, for Princeton fans, didn't last all that long, as the Tigers were in the first group of games shown. For Princeton, it'd be a 13 seed and a date with Kentucky in Tampa Thursday (2:45, CBS).
And Harvard? Well, TigerBlog was convinced that the Crimson would get an at-large bid, what with wins over Colorado and Boston College and an RPI of 35. And TB was more and more convinced that Harvard was in as team after team with RPIs in the 40s, 50s and even 60s got at-large bids.
But no, Harvard would not get the Ivy League's first at-large bid. Instead, the Crimson have to travel to Oklahoma State for the first round of the NIT.
Princeton has no easy task against Kentucky, and clearly the Tigers will be big underdogs. But hey, they were underdogs the last time they went into the tournament after winning an Ivy League playoff.
That was back in 1996, when Sydney Johnson was a player for the Tigers on the team that beat Penn and then UCLA in the first round of the tournament.
This time around, Johnson is the head coach, making him the first Princetonian to play in the NCAA tournament and then coach the Tigers in the tournament as well.
And how fitting is it?
More than anyone else, the Princeton basketball resurrection has been about Sydney Johnson. He came here with a last-place team and with three years experience as an assistant coach at Georgetown.
But more than anything else, he brought with him a love for Princeton basketball, a loyalty to a program that he felt obligated to restore to its glory days.
It's almost like he felt guilty, that here he had this great, championship, NCAA tournament experience at Princeton and how dare he not achieve that for the players who now were on his teams here?
And that's what drove him, drove him hard, and that's what made him so emotional after his team won Saturday.
He hadn't just won a game. He'd lived up to what he thought he owed Princeton.
It was a great weekend for Princeton basketball, especially the game Saturday.
It was a moment that, as Johnson casually said this morning, people will remember for awhile.
Even for a Princeton basketball program, one that has had more than its share of glory, this was something special.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
Cycling Through
TigerBlog had a speaking role at yesterday's monthly department staff meeting, something that happens once every four or five meetings or so.
TB's topic was a general update of the department's webpage, which, in the one-month period leading up to yesterday, had 1.2 million page views.
TigerBlog also mentioned that in the period beginning one week ago today and lasting through the weekend, there were 53 stories posted to goprincetontigers.com. He also told the story of how he posted his men's lacrosse story after the Johns Hopkins game and then, by the time he drove back to New Jersey, it had cycled all the way through off the front page.
There were no Princeton athletic events yesterday, and still 12 stories were posted.
As an aside, one of those 12 stories was a feature on Randy Evans of the Class of 1969 and his efforts to bring the sport of lacrosse to inner-city kids in Jacksonville. The results have been tremendous, with success not only athletically but also educationally.
Back at goprincetontigers.com, because there are seven stories in the main section (the one with the big pictures) and then four more under the "news" tab, which is where the stories 8-11 go before being cycled off the front page, that means that on a day with no game stories, the first story posted in the morning was gone by the evening.
Yes, this is a busy time of year around here, with the winter season about to wind down and the spring season just getting into high gear.
The department policy is to treat all sports equally, which means that there are no value judgments made about whether a story from one sport is bigger than another. For TB, it's one of the best parts about working here.
Every now and then, certain stories will be kept on the front page in an ad space someplace, such as the ones that are currently there about Princeton's 25th place finish in the Directors' Cup after the fall or the seven winter Ivy League championship teams.
But almost exclusively, each sport is given its place in line, only to be pushed off by the next story.
This weekend, there are 11 teams competing, down from 17 last weekend.
By far, the most significant event involving a Princeton team this weekend will be the men's basketball playoff game against Harvard. TigerBlog can't help but think back to the 1996 playoff game against Penn as a night of the kind of sheer drama and emotion that only a winner-take-all game can generate.
That 1996 game is one of the most significant moments in Princeton athletic history, largely because of what happened next. First, Pete Carril announced his retirement immediately after the game. Then Princeton beat UCLA in the first round of the NCAA tournament, a win that gave Carril's career extra validation and helped him get into the basketball Hall of Fame two years later.
Tomorrow night's game won't have that kind of historical context to it, but it does offer the winner the chance to do something big in the NCAA tournament.
But still, it's not the only game for Princeton this weekend.
TigerBlog is sure that it's that attitude, the one that says everyone is treated the same, that has helped the program win 24 straight Ivy League unofficial all-sports points championships.
Will this be Year 25? It's nearly mathematically impossible for it not to be at this point.
Princeton, through the winter, has 132.5 points, ahead of second place Harvard's 103. No other school has more than 90.
For Harvard to catch Princeton, it would have to pick up more than two points per spring sport, which would mean finishing two places ahead of Princeton in eight of the spring's 13 Ivy sports and three places in five of them (or some other similar mathematical combination).
Should Princeton hold on, as is likely, then that would be a quarter-century in which Princeton fielded the top athletic program (unofficially) in the league, at least in terms of assigning points to Ivy League finishes.
TigerBlog, for one, is impressed. And, as always, he offers a cautionary tone, that just because it's been a quarter-century doesn't mean that next year is a guarantee.
Also for the meeting yesterday, TB put together a short video recapping the winter success.
For the music, TB chose the theme from "Patton" (though he did get an email from a coworker who said that he loved the music, loved "Animal House" and thinks of the scene with Blutarsky as he slides down the banner at the end every time he hears it).
Part of the reason for the music choice was the scene at the end, when Patton, fresh from conquering the Germans, walks alone and reminds himself and the audience, with the last words of the movie, that "all glory is fleeting."
TB's topic was a general update of the department's webpage, which, in the one-month period leading up to yesterday, had 1.2 million page views.
TigerBlog also mentioned that in the period beginning one week ago today and lasting through the weekend, there were 53 stories posted to goprincetontigers.com. He also told the story of how he posted his men's lacrosse story after the Johns Hopkins game and then, by the time he drove back to New Jersey, it had cycled all the way through off the front page.
There were no Princeton athletic events yesterday, and still 12 stories were posted.
As an aside, one of those 12 stories was a feature on Randy Evans of the Class of 1969 and his efforts to bring the sport of lacrosse to inner-city kids in Jacksonville. The results have been tremendous, with success not only athletically but also educationally.
Back at goprincetontigers.com, because there are seven stories in the main section (the one with the big pictures) and then four more under the "news" tab, which is where the stories 8-11 go before being cycled off the front page, that means that on a day with no game stories, the first story posted in the morning was gone by the evening.
Yes, this is a busy time of year around here, with the winter season about to wind down and the spring season just getting into high gear.
The department policy is to treat all sports equally, which means that there are no value judgments made about whether a story from one sport is bigger than another. For TB, it's one of the best parts about working here.
Every now and then, certain stories will be kept on the front page in an ad space someplace, such as the ones that are currently there about Princeton's 25th place finish in the Directors' Cup after the fall or the seven winter Ivy League championship teams.
But almost exclusively, each sport is given its place in line, only to be pushed off by the next story.
This weekend, there are 11 teams competing, down from 17 last weekend.
By far, the most significant event involving a Princeton team this weekend will be the men's basketball playoff game against Harvard. TigerBlog can't help but think back to the 1996 playoff game against Penn as a night of the kind of sheer drama and emotion that only a winner-take-all game can generate.
That 1996 game is one of the most significant moments in Princeton athletic history, largely because of what happened next. First, Pete Carril announced his retirement immediately after the game. Then Princeton beat UCLA in the first round of the NCAA tournament, a win that gave Carril's career extra validation and helped him get into the basketball Hall of Fame two years later.
Tomorrow night's game won't have that kind of historical context to it, but it does offer the winner the chance to do something big in the NCAA tournament.
But still, it's not the only game for Princeton this weekend.
TigerBlog is sure that it's that attitude, the one that says everyone is treated the same, that has helped the program win 24 straight Ivy League unofficial all-sports points championships.
Will this be Year 25? It's nearly mathematically impossible for it not to be at this point.
Princeton, through the winter, has 132.5 points, ahead of second place Harvard's 103. No other school has more than 90.
For Harvard to catch Princeton, it would have to pick up more than two points per spring sport, which would mean finishing two places ahead of Princeton in eight of the spring's 13 Ivy sports and three places in five of them (or some other similar mathematical combination).
Should Princeton hold on, as is likely, then that would be a quarter-century in which Princeton fielded the top athletic program (unofficially) in the league, at least in terms of assigning points to Ivy League finishes.
TigerBlog, for one, is impressed. And, as always, he offers a cautionary tone, that just because it's been a quarter-century doesn't mean that next year is a guarantee.
Also for the meeting yesterday, TB put together a short video recapping the winter success.
For the music, TB chose the theme from "Patton" (though he did get an email from a coworker who said that he loved the music, loved "Animal House" and thinks of the scene with Blutarsky as he slides down the banner at the end every time he hears it).
Part of the reason for the music choice was the scene at the end, when Patton, fresh from conquering the Germans, walks alone and reminds himself and the audience, with the last words of the movie, that "all glory is fleeting."
Thursday, March 10, 2011
1.7 Seconds To Go
The end of the Rutgers-St. John's game was already a disaster before the Johnnies Justin Brownlee traveled, stepped on the sideline and threw a dead ball with time still on the clock into the stands - and got away with all three.
TigerBlog was sort watching the game in his office, with the TV behind him, so he was only half paying attention when something got his attention. At one point, he heard the announcer remark that exactly two minutes remained in the second half, and TB decided to time how long it would actually take to play those two minutes.
As it turned out, only 1:58.3 was actually played - and it took just short of 18 minutes.
At various parts of the last two minutes, four different people wandered past TB's open door, ducked in, saw the time and score, stayed to watch and then left because it was taking forever.
And this wasn't even one of those games that featured an endless parade to the foul line as the team behind kept fouling. This was a game with one tie and three lead changes in the last two minutes.
But there were four called team timeouts in the last two minutes, er, 1:58.3 of the game. Jim Barlow, the men's soccer coach, was one of the four people who stopped in, and after one of the timeouts, he simply couldn't take it anymore.
As for the end of the game - oh wait, it's still not over - TigerBlog would offer the following points:
* TB has no idea how the three officials missed the walk and the stepping on the end line, but he doesn't buy into the conspiracy theorists who say that the league wanted St. John's to kee playing
* TB can never remember a conference issuing a statement so quickly after an official debacle like the one the Big East sent out yesterday
* what in the world was Brownlee thinking and why hasn't anyone written or said that if he had simply dribbled inbounds or even passed to either of two wide-open teammates, none of what happened next would have ever come up
* it was immediately obvious by the replay that Rutgers was owed 1.7 seconds or so, with a chance to inbound ball the ball near midcourt ... that's plenty of time to pass, catch and shoot
* were TB commissioner of the Big East, he's not 100 percent sure what he would have done, but he has a hunch
* stop talking about the officials as if they're stars; they're supposed to be invisible
To elaborate on some of the above, let's start with the replay.
If it's true that the play became non-reviewable because none of the officials made a call, so there was no call to review, then that's ridiculous. Brownlee's tossing of the ball into the stands by itself made it clear that even if there had been no travel or stepping on the sideline that the ball was no longer in play.
Even without a call per se, that becomes reviewable. How many times has the clock at a game kept going when it should have stopped and reached 0.0, only to have time added back onto it? No call was made in those situations, and yet time was put back on the clock.
Besides, the point of replay is to correct game-changing, game-ending, egregious errors. It's not to stop games for two or three minutes to see if there should be 14 or 15 seconds on the shot clock with 10 minutes left in the first half of a 19-18 game and then have the refs huddle with their arms around each other at midcourt (there is no one who can convince TB that the refs are doing that for any reason other than because they're on TV).
And then there are the refs themselves. All TB heard yesterday from Mike Francesa (who actually did a great job in many ways during the one-hour rant TB listened to) was that these were "Hall of Fame" refs. Please, refs should be anonymous. They shouldn't be bigger than the game.
As for Francesa, he often doesn't know the rules or procedures of things he's railing against, like earlier in the day, when he said that the three play-in games that were added were strictly for the No. 16 seeds (not true). But when he talked about the Rutgers-St. John's ending, he was speaking for every fan who watched the game and felt cheated out of an ending that never happened and seemed so easy to correct.
Which brings TB to the notion of what he'd have done had he been in charge, and that's this: He would have made the teams come back on the court and play the final 1.7 seconds.
And hey, Rutgers had time to pull it out at that point.
TigerBlog hopes the Ivy League playoff game Saturday night in New Haven doesn't include any such controversy at the end.
Yesterday was a steady stream of people in and out of Jadwin until all the tickets here were sold, as were the ones that Harvard had to sell and the ones that Yale sold. Every seat in the John J. Lee Amphitheater has been sold.
As for the game itself, it features the Ivy League Player of the Year (Harvard's Keith Wright) and Defensive Player of the Year (Princeton's Kareem Maddox).
Both teams had one first-team All-Ivy League selection (Wright and Maddox) and two second-team selections (Harvard's Kyle Casey and Brandyn Curry and Princeton's Dan Mavraides and Ian Hummer).
In other words, the teams have what the coaches believe are six of the top 10 players in the league.
Also, for whatever it's worth, which is not much, this will be Princeton's eighth time in an Ivy League playoff game.
In six of the previous seven, Princeton and its playoff opponent split their regular season games. The only exception was 1996, when Penn swept Princeton during the regular season and Princeton won the playoff.
Of the six times that Princeton and its opponent split during the regular season, in five of those years, the team that won the first game and lost the second won the playoff game.
The only exception that pattern came back in 1963, when Princeton beat Yale in the first meeting between the two, lost the second and the lost the playoff. In 1959, 1968, 1980, 1981 and 2002, the team that won the first and lost the second won the playoff.
Of course, Princeton won the first and lost the second against Harvard this year.
And, of course, none of that historical stuff will matter if it's a one-point game with two minutes to go Saturday.
If it is, be prepared. The last two minutes will take close to 20. It's how college basketball works these days.
Not playing the last 1.7 seconds? That's not how it's supposed to work.
TigerBlog was sort watching the game in his office, with the TV behind him, so he was only half paying attention when something got his attention. At one point, he heard the announcer remark that exactly two minutes remained in the second half, and TB decided to time how long it would actually take to play those two minutes.
As it turned out, only 1:58.3 was actually played - and it took just short of 18 minutes.
At various parts of the last two minutes, four different people wandered past TB's open door, ducked in, saw the time and score, stayed to watch and then left because it was taking forever.
And this wasn't even one of those games that featured an endless parade to the foul line as the team behind kept fouling. This was a game with one tie and three lead changes in the last two minutes.
But there were four called team timeouts in the last two minutes, er, 1:58.3 of the game. Jim Barlow, the men's soccer coach, was one of the four people who stopped in, and after one of the timeouts, he simply couldn't take it anymore.
As for the end of the game - oh wait, it's still not over - TigerBlog would offer the following points:
* TB has no idea how the three officials missed the walk and the stepping on the end line, but he doesn't buy into the conspiracy theorists who say that the league wanted St. John's to kee playing
* TB can never remember a conference issuing a statement so quickly after an official debacle like the one the Big East sent out yesterday
* what in the world was Brownlee thinking and why hasn't anyone written or said that if he had simply dribbled inbounds or even passed to either of two wide-open teammates, none of what happened next would have ever come up
* it was immediately obvious by the replay that Rutgers was owed 1.7 seconds or so, with a chance to inbound ball the ball near midcourt ... that's plenty of time to pass, catch and shoot
* were TB commissioner of the Big East, he's not 100 percent sure what he would have done, but he has a hunch
* stop talking about the officials as if they're stars; they're supposed to be invisible
To elaborate on some of the above, let's start with the replay.
If it's true that the play became non-reviewable because none of the officials made a call, so there was no call to review, then that's ridiculous. Brownlee's tossing of the ball into the stands by itself made it clear that even if there had been no travel or stepping on the sideline that the ball was no longer in play.
Even without a call per se, that becomes reviewable. How many times has the clock at a game kept going when it should have stopped and reached 0.0, only to have time added back onto it? No call was made in those situations, and yet time was put back on the clock.
Besides, the point of replay is to correct game-changing, game-ending, egregious errors. It's not to stop games for two or three minutes to see if there should be 14 or 15 seconds on the shot clock with 10 minutes left in the first half of a 19-18 game and then have the refs huddle with their arms around each other at midcourt (there is no one who can convince TB that the refs are doing that for any reason other than because they're on TV).
And then there are the refs themselves. All TB heard yesterday from Mike Francesa (who actually did a great job in many ways during the one-hour rant TB listened to) was that these were "Hall of Fame" refs. Please, refs should be anonymous. They shouldn't be bigger than the game.
As for Francesa, he often doesn't know the rules or procedures of things he's railing against, like earlier in the day, when he said that the three play-in games that were added were strictly for the No. 16 seeds (not true). But when he talked about the Rutgers-St. John's ending, he was speaking for every fan who watched the game and felt cheated out of an ending that never happened and seemed so easy to correct.
Which brings TB to the notion of what he'd have done had he been in charge, and that's this: He would have made the teams come back on the court and play the final 1.7 seconds.
And hey, Rutgers had time to pull it out at that point.
TigerBlog hopes the Ivy League playoff game Saturday night in New Haven doesn't include any such controversy at the end.
Yesterday was a steady stream of people in and out of Jadwin until all the tickets here were sold, as were the ones that Harvard had to sell and the ones that Yale sold. Every seat in the John J. Lee Amphitheater has been sold.
As for the game itself, it features the Ivy League Player of the Year (Harvard's Keith Wright) and Defensive Player of the Year (Princeton's Kareem Maddox).
Both teams had one first-team All-Ivy League selection (Wright and Maddox) and two second-team selections (Harvard's Kyle Casey and Brandyn Curry and Princeton's Dan Mavraides and Ian Hummer).
In other words, the teams have what the coaches believe are six of the top 10 players in the league.
Also, for whatever it's worth, which is not much, this will be Princeton's eighth time in an Ivy League playoff game.
In six of the previous seven, Princeton and its playoff opponent split their regular season games. The only exception was 1996, when Penn swept Princeton during the regular season and Princeton won the playoff.
Of the six times that Princeton and its opponent split during the regular season, in five of those years, the team that won the first game and lost the second won the playoff game.
The only exception that pattern came back in 1963, when Princeton beat Yale in the first meeting between the two, lost the second and the lost the playoff. In 1959, 1968, 1980, 1981 and 2002, the team that won the first and lost the second won the playoff.
Of course, Princeton won the first and lost the second against Harvard this year.
And, of course, none of that historical stuff will matter if it's a one-point game with two minutes to go Saturday.
If it is, be prepared. The last two minutes will take close to 20. It's how college basketball works these days.
Not playing the last 1.7 seconds? That's not how it's supposed to work.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
On To New Haven
TigerBlog walked into Jadwin Gym this morning from Lot 21 and saw an unusual sight as soon as he came in the side door, under Gary Walters' office.
It was a line. An actual line of people, waiting outside the ticket office, waiting to buy tickets for the Princeton-Harvard men's basketball playoff game, which Princeton forced with a huge second half last night at Penn that turned an eight-point deficit into a 70-58 win.
The result is that Princeton and Harvard both finished 12-2 in the league, and as such they are co-champions of the Ivy League. The playoff game Saturday - at 4 p.m. at Yale - decides who will represent the league in the NCAA tournament.
As TigerBlog looks around the landscape of college basketball the last few days, he sees conference tournaments that 1) bounced the best team in the a particular league from representing that league in the NCAA tournament or 2) in the bigger conferences mean next to nothing.
And once again he is convinced that the last thing in the world the Ivy League should do is go to a conference tournament and that in fact traditional one-bid leagues should abandon theirs.
Fairfield? Won the MAAC title by two games over the field and by four over a St. Peter's team that beat the Stags in the semifinals and then took out Iona in the final. The result is that St. Peter's, a team that went 17-13 in the regular-season, will now take the league's bid over a team that was 23-6.
Which won would have a better chance of getting a win and making the MAAC a big story next week?
Want an even better example? In the America East, Vermont won the regular season at 13-3, one game ahead of Boston University and five games ahead of fifth-place Stony Brook. So what happens? Stony Brook gets to the semis and beats Vermont, sending a 23-8 team home and a 15-16 team to within a game of the NCAA tournament (Stony Brook meets BU for the bid Saturday at noon).
There's no way a league should risk lowering its NCAA seed - and destroy its chances for a win that the entire sporting country will notice - to have a conference tournament.
In the Ivy League, Princeton and Harvard have spent the last 14 games establishing 1) that they are by far the best teams in the league and 2) on a given night, either could lose to another team in the league (Princeton lost to Brown; Harvard lost to Yale).
What if there was an Ivy tournament, and the same thing happened again? Where would the sense be in that?
And TB said the same thing each of the last three years, when it was Cornell that won the regular-season title.
Again, the Ivy League knows that the winner of Saturday's game is giving the league its best chance to win next week in the tournament. And that's how it should be.
For you history buffs out there, this will be the eighth playoff since the formation of the Ivy League, and Princeton will have been involved in all eight.
Of the previous seven, Penn has been in four, Yale two and Dartmouth and Columbia one each. If you noticed that that adds up to eight, it's because the most recent playoff, in 2002, came after a three-way tie between Princeton, Penn and Yale.
If you're expecting a great, down-to-the-wire game Saturday, you might not get one, if the past is an indication.
There have been eight Ivy League men's basketball playoff games all-time, beginning with Princeton-Dartmouth in 1959. That year, the teams were both 10-0 in the league and then, in a weird bit of scheduling, played a game Saturday and then again the following Friday, as each team won once. They won out from there, going 13-1, and then Dartmouth beat Princeton 69-68 on Rudy LaRusso's buzzer-beater.
In 1980, Penn beat Princeton 50-49 in the only other playoff game to be decided by a point.
Of the remaining six games, five were decided by at least 12 points (Princeton over Yale in 1963). The others in that group: Columbia by 18 over Princeton in 1968, Princeton by 14 over Penn in 1981, Yale over Princeton by 16 in 2002 and then Penn by 19 over Yale that same year.
The remaining game? Well, that was the classic of all classics, Princeton's 63-56 overtime win over Penn in the 1996 game at Lehigh. As every Princeton fan knows, that was the night that Princeton finally beat Penn after losing eight straight, including one by 14 four days earlier at the Palestra, and then the night that Pete Carril announced the end of his 29-year coaching career at Princeton.
Princeton then beat UCLA in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
The main man that night for Princeton was Sydney Johnson, who made every big play in the overtime (none bigger than his corner three to beat the shot clock with just under a minute to play). Johnson will be New Haven Saturday, this time as the Tigers' head coach. In fact, Johnson will attempt to become the first person to win an Ivy playoff game as both a player and head coach.
Both Princeton and Harvard took great pride - rightfully so - in earning their share of the league championship. For Harvard, it was the first one ever.
For Princeton, it was the 26th, and first since 2004. Johnson has already coached his team to a 24-6 record in just his fourth season, a career that began when his team went 6-23 three years ago.
And hey, it's possible that the loser of the playoff game Saturday could end up in the NIT and make a real run, while the winner of the playoff gets bounced quickly in the NCAA tournament.
But it's also possible that Saturday's winner does something magical next week, something akin to Princeton in 1996 or Cornell a year ago, something that people will talk about reverently forever.
It was a line. An actual line of people, waiting outside the ticket office, waiting to buy tickets for the Princeton-Harvard men's basketball playoff game, which Princeton forced with a huge second half last night at Penn that turned an eight-point deficit into a 70-58 win.
The result is that Princeton and Harvard both finished 12-2 in the league, and as such they are co-champions of the Ivy League. The playoff game Saturday - at 4 p.m. at Yale - decides who will represent the league in the NCAA tournament.
As TigerBlog looks around the landscape of college basketball the last few days, he sees conference tournaments that 1) bounced the best team in the a particular league from representing that league in the NCAA tournament or 2) in the bigger conferences mean next to nothing.
And once again he is convinced that the last thing in the world the Ivy League should do is go to a conference tournament and that in fact traditional one-bid leagues should abandon theirs.
Fairfield? Won the MAAC title by two games over the field and by four over a St. Peter's team that beat the Stags in the semifinals and then took out Iona in the final. The result is that St. Peter's, a team that went 17-13 in the regular-season, will now take the league's bid over a team that was 23-6.
Which won would have a better chance of getting a win and making the MAAC a big story next week?
Want an even better example? In the America East, Vermont won the regular season at 13-3, one game ahead of Boston University and five games ahead of fifth-place Stony Brook. So what happens? Stony Brook gets to the semis and beats Vermont, sending a 23-8 team home and a 15-16 team to within a game of the NCAA tournament (Stony Brook meets BU for the bid Saturday at noon).
There's no way a league should risk lowering its NCAA seed - and destroy its chances for a win that the entire sporting country will notice - to have a conference tournament.
In the Ivy League, Princeton and Harvard have spent the last 14 games establishing 1) that they are by far the best teams in the league and 2) on a given night, either could lose to another team in the league (Princeton lost to Brown; Harvard lost to Yale).
What if there was an Ivy tournament, and the same thing happened again? Where would the sense be in that?
And TB said the same thing each of the last three years, when it was Cornell that won the regular-season title.
Again, the Ivy League knows that the winner of Saturday's game is giving the league its best chance to win next week in the tournament. And that's how it should be.
For you history buffs out there, this will be the eighth playoff since the formation of the Ivy League, and Princeton will have been involved in all eight.
Of the previous seven, Penn has been in four, Yale two and Dartmouth and Columbia one each. If you noticed that that adds up to eight, it's because the most recent playoff, in 2002, came after a three-way tie between Princeton, Penn and Yale.
If you're expecting a great, down-to-the-wire game Saturday, you might not get one, if the past is an indication.
There have been eight Ivy League men's basketball playoff games all-time, beginning with Princeton-Dartmouth in 1959. That year, the teams were both 10-0 in the league and then, in a weird bit of scheduling, played a game Saturday and then again the following Friday, as each team won once. They won out from there, going 13-1, and then Dartmouth beat Princeton 69-68 on Rudy LaRusso's buzzer-beater.
In 1980, Penn beat Princeton 50-49 in the only other playoff game to be decided by a point.
Of the remaining six games, five were decided by at least 12 points (Princeton over Yale in 1963). The others in that group: Columbia by 18 over Princeton in 1968, Princeton by 14 over Penn in 1981, Yale over Princeton by 16 in 2002 and then Penn by 19 over Yale that same year.
The remaining game? Well, that was the classic of all classics, Princeton's 63-56 overtime win over Penn in the 1996 game at Lehigh. As every Princeton fan knows, that was the night that Princeton finally beat Penn after losing eight straight, including one by 14 four days earlier at the Palestra, and then the night that Pete Carril announced the end of his 29-year coaching career at Princeton.
Princeton then beat UCLA in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
The main man that night for Princeton was Sydney Johnson, who made every big play in the overtime (none bigger than his corner three to beat the shot clock with just under a minute to play). Johnson will be New Haven Saturday, this time as the Tigers' head coach. In fact, Johnson will attempt to become the first person to win an Ivy playoff game as both a player and head coach.
Both Princeton and Harvard took great pride - rightfully so - in earning their share of the league championship. For Harvard, it was the first one ever.
For Princeton, it was the 26th, and first since 2004. Johnson has already coached his team to a 24-6 record in just his fourth season, a career that began when his team went 6-23 three years ago.
And hey, it's possible that the loser of the playoff game Saturday could end up in the NIT and make a real run, while the winner of the playoff gets bounced quickly in the NCAA tournament.
But it's also possible that Saturday's winner does something magical next week, something akin to Princeton in 1996 or Cornell a year ago, something that people will talk about reverently forever.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Turning 80 and 40
In the movie "On Golden Pond," Henry Fonda plays a retired professor named Norman Thayer Jr. from, of all places, the University of Pennsylvania (there's a scene where a story about him from the Daily Pennsylvanian can be seen framed on the wall).
TigerBlog grudgingly saw the movie in New York City when it opened in 1981, and he's had a love-hate thing going with it ever since. On the one hand, 1) it wasn't his first choice of what to see that day and 2) he's never been a big fan of Jane Fonda, who plays Norman's daughter in the movie as well; on the other hand, he can respect how well made the movie is.
In fact, "On Golden Pond" won four Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Fonda and Best Actress for Katharine Hepburn (who had not only never worked together before but had never even met). And the shots of Golden Pond itself - which was actually a lake in New Hampshire - are spectacular.
Early in the movie, Norman is celebrating a milestone birthday, and which leads to the following exchange:
"What's it feel like to be 80?"
"Twice as bad as it did to be 40."
TigerBlog hopes the opposite is true for a newly minted octogenarian, Princeton's own John McPhee. On a campus crawling with fascinating people, there aren't many who can give Mr. McPhee a run for his money.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 28 books, McPhee also teaches a writing course here each spring semester. His connection to Princeton goes back as far as he does, as his father Harry was the Princeton athletics doctor - and the U.S. Olympic team doctor - for decades, and John is a product of the Princeton public schools, with a postgrad year at Deerfield mixed in. He then attended Princeton and graduated in 1953.
His writing career began at Time magazine, and his big career break came when "The New Yorker" published his piece on Bill Bradley's senior year entitled "A Sense of Where You Are," which referred to Bradley's ability to adjust his shot depending on where he was on the court. The magazine piece was eventually expanded into McPhee's first book.
Since then, he has written 27 more non-fiction books and countless pieces for the magazine. His books have been on a wide variety of subjects, and TigerBlog has read ones about the history of growing oranges in Florida, the evolution of family practice medicine in Maine, the New Jersey Pine Barrons, a plane without wings, a conservationist who shares the name John McPhee and how that caused problems for him and others.
His most recent book is "Silk Parachutes," a compilation of short pieces, mostly from the magazine. Among the stories is "Spin Left, Shoot Right," McPhee's story about the sport of lacrosse.
McPhee is an academic athletic fellow for the men's lacrosse team, and he was TB's roommate on the team's trip to Spain and Ireland in 2008. Since then, TB has gotten to know McPhee fairly well, and he ranks him in the top five of interesting people he's ever met.
McPhee was a longtime tennis opponent of Pete Carril's, and the two played basketball together at lunchtime for years as well. These days, McPhee gets his exercise on a bicycle, and he and TB ride indoors together when the weather doesn't let him get outside.
During those times on the stationary bike, McPhee tells one story after another - all of which amaze TB. Translate those to his books and magazine stories, and it's easy to see why he's one of the great American non-fiction writers of all time.
So happy birthday to Mr. McPhee.
And how old was John McPhee the last time Princeton didn't have a team or individual win a national championship for an academic year?
Not 70.
Not 60.
Not 50.
Yup, 40. Princeton's streak is now at 40 years and counting after Todd Harrity won the men's squash individual national championship this past weekend at Dartmouth. With some national contenders for both teams and individuals in the spring, perhaps Harrity will not be the only winner this year.
But he'll be at least one, and that will keep the streak alive.
Yes, not every year has produced a team NCAA champion. And yes, Princeton has a huge advantage towards winning a national championship each year, given its strength in sports like rowing and squash.
But so do a few other schools, and they don't have a streak that nearly compares to Princeton's.
So congrats to all of Princeton's national champions of the last 40 years:
2011 - Todd Harrity (squash)
2010 – men’s lightweight rowing
2009 – men’s lightweight rowing, women’s squash
2008 – women’s squash
2007 – women’s squash
2006 – women’s open rowing (1st varsity 8), Yasser El Halaby (squash),
2005 – Yasser El Halaby (squash)
2004 – Yasser El Halaby (squash)
2003 – women’s lightweight rowing, women’s lacrosse, Yasser El Halaby (squash)
2002 – women’s lightweight rowing, women’s lacrosse, Tora Harris (indoor and outdoor high jump)
2001 – women’s lightweight rowing, men’s lacrosse, Soren Thompson (epee fencing), David Yik (men’s squash
2000 – women’s lightweight rowing, Eva Petchnigg (foil fencing), Julia Beaver (women’s squash), Peter Yik (men’s squash
1999 – women’s squash, women’s lightweight rowing, Julia Beaver (women’s squash), Peter Yik (men’s squash)
1998 – men’s lacrosse, men’s heavweight rowing, men’s lightweight rowing, women’s squash
1997 – men’s lacrosse, Katherine Johnson (women’s squash)
1996 – men’s lacrosse, men’s lightweight rowing, men’s heavyweight rowing, Max Pekarev (saber fencing)
1995 – women’s open rowing
1994 – men’s lacrosse, women’s lacrosse, men’s lightweight rowing, women’s open rowing, Harald Winkmann (epee fencing)
1993 – men’s squash, women’s open rowing
1992 – men’s lacrosse
1991 – women’s squash
1990 – women’s open rowing, men’s swimming 200-yard medley relay (Mike Ross, Ty Nelson, Leroy Kim, Erik Osborn)
1989 – men’s lightweight rowing , women’s squash, Demer Holleran (women’s squash), Jeff Stanley (men’s squash), men’s swimming 200-yard medley relay (Mike Ross, Ty Nelson, Rich Korhammer, Rob Musslewhite)
1988 – men’s lightweight rowing, Jeff Stanley (men’s squash)
1987 – Demer Holleran (women’s squash)
1986 – men’s lightweight rowing, Demer Holleran (women’s squash)
1985 – men’s heavyweight rowing
1984 – women’s squash
1983 – women’s squash
1982 – men’s squash
1981 – women’s squash, John Nimik (men’s squash)
1980 – women’s squash
1979 – women’s squash
1978 - women’s squash
1977 – men’s squash
1976 – women’s squash, Nancy Gengler (women’s squash)
1975 – women’s squash, men’s squash, Wendy Zaharko (women’s squash)
1974 – women’s squash, men’s squash, Wendy Zaharko (women’s squash)
1973 – women’s squash, Cathy Corcione (100 butterfly, 100 free), 200-yard freestyle relay (Cathy Corcione, Jane Fremon, Barb Franks, Carol Brown)
1972 – Wendy Zaharko (women’s squash), Charlie Campbell (200-yard backstroke)
Monday, March 7, 2011
You're A Firework
TigerBlog's musical taste has been framed by decades of listening to what is commonly called "Classic Rock" and a few years of listening to Little Miss TigerBlog's preferences.
As a result of the latter, he's gotten to hear more Katy Perry songs that he would have otherwise chosen to, and he'll say this about her: She's no Miley, but she's not awful.
Still, there'd be a long jump between saying that and actually referencing her in an edition of TigerBlog, so clearly today's entry comes from a different member of the TigerBlog family:
This is real, so take a chance
And don't ever look back, don't ever look back.
Those lyrics are part of Katy Perry's billboard #1 song “Teenage Dream.” They're also the story of a Princeton men's swimming and diving team that turned a potential nightmare season into one of the most memorable weekends in program history.
Go back a year, and you'll find a Princeton team that led its competition by more than 100 points at the end of every session. It had won two straight Ivy League titles and was led by a sophomore class that seemed destined for a third soon enough.
Go back a month, and you'll find a team with seemingly more questions than answers. After getting stunned by Harvard at H-Y-P, Princeton saw a home win streak of more than 20 years end at the hands of a Navy team that would eventually win the Patriot League Championship by more than 430 points.
All of a sudden, it was fair to ask if Princeton had a realistic shot at winning a third straight Ivy title. Two regular season losses were in the books, and the Tigers were going to need to defeat the Crimson in its own pool to win the title, a feat unaccomplished since 2002.
With three weeks left to prepare for the biggest weekend of the season, Princeton went somewhere outside the pool to find inspiration.
They went to YouTube.
Freshman swimmer Daniel Hasler, one of the key figures in another strong recruiting class for head coach Rob Orr, had been battling in a far tougher place than the water. Illness ended his season far earlier than anybody hoped, and while prospects for a full recovery and a return to DeNunzio next season are strong, Hasler was left tracking the Ivy championship meet from a hotel room in Philadelphia.
TB has covered swimming for nine years now. Despite the 60 swim lessons his mom paid for during his childhood years, TB knows way more about the swimming culture than, say, the technique of swimming.
The culture of a swim team is as close as any you can find on a college campus, or at least on this campus. If you ever question that, watch the video. If you can't feel it, you missed the point.
(On a side note, it's amazing how easy it is to post hateful words in comments sections when you can hide behind the anonymity of a screen name. Freedom of speech is one of the foundations of this nation, but it was never meant to be freedom without accountability.)
Anyway, you can't call this a unifying event for the team, because a team not unified would never do something like this. But it was a moment out of the water, away from Harvard and Navy and expectations and disappointments. It was something real, something special and something heartfelt.
And something downright hysterical.
A new team, rested and ready, went to Blodgett Pool last weekend and overcame big-time odds to win its third straight Ivy League title. They knew it would be a tight one, maybe even down to the final relay.
But that's usually talk. It never actually comes down to the final relay, right?
Through 20 events, there had been a total of 7,442 points scored between eight teams, and Princeton led Harvard by all of 7.5 points. Winning a relay gives you at least eight more points than anybody in the field, so Harvard was one win away from stealing the team title on its final touch of the wall.
Enter Adam Powell.
Through 300 yards of the 400 free relay, Harvard led Princeton in a meaningless battle for second place. The Crimson needed to win the event, and that meant catching a Columbia team that led by 1.5 seconds.
A week earlier, Princeton's Megan Waters had the same type of deficit and sent the crowd into a roof-raising uproar by catching and surpassing Harvard's final swimmer. Of course, the Tiger women had the title wrapped up by that point, but it was a remarkable moment when both swimmer and crowd combined to make one magic moment.
Harvard freshman Oliver Lee looked to make the same moment. He just picked the wrong opponent. Powell doubled the lead, clinched the battle for Columbia and the war for Princeton, which took the Ivy title by a record low margin of 5.5 points.
It would have been easy, almost understandable, to let regular season disappointments and a teammate's illness provide too great an obstacle to overcome.
But this was real, and the team took a chance. It never looked back.
It created a Teenage Dream, and then a Dream Weekend.
As a result of the latter, he's gotten to hear more Katy Perry songs that he would have otherwise chosen to, and he'll say this about her: She's no Miley, but she's not awful.
Still, there'd be a long jump between saying that and actually referencing her in an edition of TigerBlog, so clearly today's entry comes from a different member of the TigerBlog family:
This is real, so take a chance
And don't ever look back, don't ever look back.
Those lyrics are part of Katy Perry's billboard #1 song “Teenage Dream.” They're also the story of a Princeton men's swimming and diving team that turned a potential nightmare season into one of the most memorable weekends in program history.
Go back a year, and you'll find a Princeton team that led its competition by more than 100 points at the end of every session. It had won two straight Ivy League titles and was led by a sophomore class that seemed destined for a third soon enough.
Go back a month, and you'll find a team with seemingly more questions than answers. After getting stunned by Harvard at H-Y-P, Princeton saw a home win streak of more than 20 years end at the hands of a Navy team that would eventually win the Patriot League Championship by more than 430 points.
All of a sudden, it was fair to ask if Princeton had a realistic shot at winning a third straight Ivy title. Two regular season losses were in the books, and the Tigers were going to need to defeat the Crimson in its own pool to win the title, a feat unaccomplished since 2002.
With three weeks left to prepare for the biggest weekend of the season, Princeton went somewhere outside the pool to find inspiration.
They went to YouTube.
Freshman swimmer Daniel Hasler, one of the key figures in another strong recruiting class for head coach Rob Orr, had been battling in a far tougher place than the water. Illness ended his season far earlier than anybody hoped, and while prospects for a full recovery and a return to DeNunzio next season are strong, Hasler was left tracking the Ivy championship meet from a hotel room in Philadelphia.
TB has covered swimming for nine years now. Despite the 60 swim lessons his mom paid for during his childhood years, TB knows way more about the swimming culture than, say, the technique of swimming.
The culture of a swim team is as close as any you can find on a college campus, or at least on this campus. If you ever question that, watch the video. If you can't feel it, you missed the point.
(On a side note, it's amazing how easy it is to post hateful words in comments sections when you can hide behind the anonymity of a screen name. Freedom of speech is one of the foundations of this nation, but it was never meant to be freedom without accountability.)
Anyway, you can't call this a unifying event for the team, because a team not unified would never do something like this. But it was a moment out of the water, away from Harvard and Navy and expectations and disappointments. It was something real, something special and something heartfelt.
And something downright hysterical.
A new team, rested and ready, went to Blodgett Pool last weekend and overcame big-time odds to win its third straight Ivy League title. They knew it would be a tight one, maybe even down to the final relay.
But that's usually talk. It never actually comes down to the final relay, right?
Through 20 events, there had been a total of 7,442 points scored between eight teams, and Princeton led Harvard by all of 7.5 points. Winning a relay gives you at least eight more points than anybody in the field, so Harvard was one win away from stealing the team title on its final touch of the wall.
Enter Adam Powell.
Through 300 yards of the 400 free relay, Harvard led Princeton in a meaningless battle for second place. The Crimson needed to win the event, and that meant catching a Columbia team that led by 1.5 seconds.
A week earlier, Princeton's Megan Waters had the same type of deficit and sent the crowd into a roof-raising uproar by catching and surpassing Harvard's final swimmer. Of course, the Tiger women had the title wrapped up by that point, but it was a remarkable moment when both swimmer and crowd combined to make one magic moment.
Harvard freshman Oliver Lee looked to make the same moment. He just picked the wrong opponent. Powell doubled the lead, clinched the battle for Columbia and the war for Princeton, which took the Ivy title by a record low margin of 5.5 points.
It would have been easy, almost understandable, to let regular season disappointments and a teammate's illness provide too great an obstacle to overcome.
But this was real, and the team took a chance. It never looked back.
It created a Teenage Dream, and then a Dream Weekend.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Showing Up
TigerBlog was driving in this morning when the Pink Floyd song "Comfortably Numb" came on the radio, and TB immediately flashed back to yesterday afternoon, when the same song was playing on his I-tunes.
TB was half-singing when another member of the office came in and remarked that he had no idea what song that was. How, TigerBlog thought, could somebody not know "Comfortably Numb?"
Of course, TB often forgets that he's not quite a kid anymore, and incidents like that serve as harsh reminders. It's like the time a few years ago that TB found out that nobody he worked with realized that there had been a TV show called "Get Smart."
"Comfortably Numb" was a 1979 song on the album "The Wall," and it and the album are among the greatest in the history of rock music. TigerBlog is no huge Pink Floyd fan, but he has known since the first time he heard the song that it was something special.
Once it was determined that, aside from TB, only one other person in the office had even the vaguest knowledge of the song, there was a quick search that revealed that Rolling Stone magazine had ranked the song as the 314th best all-time, a number a bit higher than TB would have guessed.
No. 1, as an aside, was "Like a Rolling Stone," by Bob Dylan. There were only two Bruce Springsteen songs in the top 100, "Born To Run" at No. 21 and "Thunder Road" at No. 86; on the "TigerBlog Top 500," they rank 1-2.
Shortly after the whole "Comfortably Numb" situation drifted away, Director of Athletics Gary Walters walked into the office.
Walters was out sick for most of the week, but he seemed to be in good spirits on his return. TB, who started here at Princeton on the same day that Walters did, couldn't remember a time when the AD had been out sick before, and so he asked him about it.
Walters said that they were indeed his first sick days, which led to the inevitable comment about how Woody Allen said that 80 percent of life is about showing up.
If showing up is indeed 80 percent of it, then Princeton Athletics is 80 percent there of late.
Princeton may be setting some sort of record for the number of teams on the road in a four-day stretch, which for the one that starts today totals 14. The total number of Princeton teams who will be competing is 17, as men's hockey, women's water polo and men's tennis are at home.
To put that in some perspective, former Princeton executive associate athletic director Michael Cross is now the AD at Bradley, which has 13 sports total. Rutgers, in the Big East, has 22 for its entire program, or only five more than Princeton has playing this weekend alone.
Some teams are opening their seasons, like the softball team at UMBC's tournament and the baseball team at LSU.
Speaking of the baseball team, the Tigers waiting for Princeton's Tigers in Louisiana are currently 9-0 and ranked near the Top 10. And Princeton? Well, the weather did break just enough to get some outdoor batting practice in a few times; otherwise, practice has been confined to the pit on E level of Jadwin.
Some other teams are playing huge non-league games in their early season, like the men's lacrosse team at Johns Hopkins and the women's lacrosse team at Duke.
Still others are at the most crucial juncture of their seasons.
The men's and women's squash individual national championships are being held at Dartmouth, where the Princeton men have the No. 1 (Todd Harrity) and No. 2 (David Letourneau) seeds.
The men's swimming and diving championships began yesterday and continue through tomorrow at Harvard, where it figures to be between the home team and the Tigers and also figures to be close the whole way.
The men's hockey team is home in the first round of the ECAC playoffs against St. Lawrence tonight at 7, tomorrow at 4 and then Sunday at 4 if necessary. While it would have been great to get the first-round bye, the up side is the chance to gain some momentum heading into the later rounds - if you can get that far.
And, of course, the men's and women's basketball teams are playing for Ivy League championships of their own this weekend and then possibly Tuesday and even next weekend if a playoff is necessary.
If that's not enough, there's men's track and field, women's track and field, women's tennis, men's volleyball and wrestling on the road and men's tennis and women's water polo at home.
That's 17 teams who are 80 percent there. The other 20 percent should be pretty interesting.
TB was half-singing when another member of the office came in and remarked that he had no idea what song that was. How, TigerBlog thought, could somebody not know "Comfortably Numb?"
Of course, TB often forgets that he's not quite a kid anymore, and incidents like that serve as harsh reminders. It's like the time a few years ago that TB found out that nobody he worked with realized that there had been a TV show called "Get Smart."
"Comfortably Numb" was a 1979 song on the album "The Wall," and it and the album are among the greatest in the history of rock music. TigerBlog is no huge Pink Floyd fan, but he has known since the first time he heard the song that it was something special.
Once it was determined that, aside from TB, only one other person in the office had even the vaguest knowledge of the song, there was a quick search that revealed that Rolling Stone magazine had ranked the song as the 314th best all-time, a number a bit higher than TB would have guessed.
No. 1, as an aside, was "Like a Rolling Stone," by Bob Dylan. There were only two Bruce Springsteen songs in the top 100, "Born To Run" at No. 21 and "Thunder Road" at No. 86; on the "TigerBlog Top 500," they rank 1-2.
Shortly after the whole "Comfortably Numb" situation drifted away, Director of Athletics Gary Walters walked into the office.
Walters was out sick for most of the week, but he seemed to be in good spirits on his return. TB, who started here at Princeton on the same day that Walters did, couldn't remember a time when the AD had been out sick before, and so he asked him about it.
Walters said that they were indeed his first sick days, which led to the inevitable comment about how Woody Allen said that 80 percent of life is about showing up.
If showing up is indeed 80 percent of it, then Princeton Athletics is 80 percent there of late.
Princeton may be setting some sort of record for the number of teams on the road in a four-day stretch, which for the one that starts today totals 14. The total number of Princeton teams who will be competing is 17, as men's hockey, women's water polo and men's tennis are at home.
To put that in some perspective, former Princeton executive associate athletic director Michael Cross is now the AD at Bradley, which has 13 sports total. Rutgers, in the Big East, has 22 for its entire program, or only five more than Princeton has playing this weekend alone.
Some teams are opening their seasons, like the softball team at UMBC's tournament and the baseball team at LSU.
Speaking of the baseball team, the Tigers waiting for Princeton's Tigers in Louisiana are currently 9-0 and ranked near the Top 10. And Princeton? Well, the weather did break just enough to get some outdoor batting practice in a few times; otherwise, practice has been confined to the pit on E level of Jadwin.
Some other teams are playing huge non-league games in their early season, like the men's lacrosse team at Johns Hopkins and the women's lacrosse team at Duke.
Still others are at the most crucial juncture of their seasons.
The men's and women's squash individual national championships are being held at Dartmouth, where the Princeton men have the No. 1 (Todd Harrity) and No. 2 (David Letourneau) seeds.
The men's swimming and diving championships began yesterday and continue through tomorrow at Harvard, where it figures to be between the home team and the Tigers and also figures to be close the whole way.
The men's hockey team is home in the first round of the ECAC playoffs against St. Lawrence tonight at 7, tomorrow at 4 and then Sunday at 4 if necessary. While it would have been great to get the first-round bye, the up side is the chance to gain some momentum heading into the later rounds - if you can get that far.
And, of course, the men's and women's basketball teams are playing for Ivy League championships of their own this weekend and then possibly Tuesday and even next weekend if a playoff is necessary.
If that's not enough, there's men's track and field, women's track and field, women's tennis, men's volleyball and wrestling on the road and men's tennis and women's water polo at home.
That's 17 teams who are 80 percent there. The other 20 percent should be pretty interesting.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Adding It Up
TigerBlog looked at a word problem in Little Miss TigerBlog's math work book and couldn't believe what he saw.
Basically, the problem was comparing two geometric objects, one of which was four feet taller than the other, though they were essentially of the same shape. It then asked for a conclusion about area.
The only problem to TB was that the two objects being compared were the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
This appalled TB for two reasons: 1) the book has to be more than 10 years old and 2) the school sits about two miles away from a 9/11 memorial that honors the spirit of 18 local residents who were killed that day.
Perhaps math hasn't changed much in the last 10 years - or the last 40 or 50 for that matter - but still, is there nobody who has noticed the inappropriateness of using a book that references the World Trade Center, even in such a benign way?
For all TigerBlog knows, he had the same question in the same math workbook way back when.
Math was always one of TB's best subjects, especially geometry. For some reason, the logic of it really appealed to young TB.
He also was a big fan of the probability and statistics class he took his sophomore or junior year, even though it was dominated by the genius kids a year older than he was, including Lenny Ganz, who to the best of TB's memory never got less than a 100 on any test ever and is today a cardiologist. Lenny was always destroying any chance for a curve on the tests in that class, but TB still managed to get a good grade.
Somewhere along the line, TB veered away from the math world and directly into things like literature and history and eventually writing. Still, had it worked out differently, maybe TB could have traded all this for a long, distinguished career as an actuary.
Of course, math comes in handy all the time, especially when it comes to figuring out what is involved as the men's and women's Ivy League basketball races reach the final days of the regular season.
Starting on the women's side, there are three teams mathematically in contention for the championship and NCAA tournament bid: Princeton at 10-1, Yale at 9-3 and Harvard at 8-3.
Princeton hosts Dartmouth tomorrow night and Harvard Saturday and then travels to Penn Tuesday. Between the Princeton game, Harvard is at Penn tomorrow night and at Dartmouth Tuesday. Yale hosts Columbia tomorrow night and Cornell Saturday night.
A win in any of its remaining three games clinches for Princeton at least a share of its second-straight title. Any combination of Princeton wins and losses by the other two totaling two sends Princeton back to the NCAA tournament.
A Princeton win over Harvard alone would eliminate the Crimson. Should Yale win out and get to 11-3, then Princeton would have to win two of its last three to win outright.
The only way for Princeton not to get at least a share of the championship would be to lose all three of its games and have either Harvard or Yale win out as well.
Should there be a three-way tie for first, it could get a bit complicated in terms of who would get the No. 1 seed and avoid the first game in a playoff, but TB will wait until after this weekend to see if that's a bridge that needs to be crossed.
In the meantime, Princeton knows that if it keeps winning, it'll be in the NCAA tournament. Harvard and Yale could both win out and not get a share of the title or get to the tournament.
As an aside, the second-place team in the Ivy League is guaranteed a bid to the WNIT. Should Harvard and Yale tie for second, then Yale would get that bid because of its sweep of Harvard.
The men's race is different than the women's race in two ways: 1) only two teams - Princeton and Harvard - are mathematically still in the running and 2) both know that they would get to the NCAA tournament simply by winning out.
In fact, if Harvard defeats Penn tomorrow night, then Princeton cannot get to the NCAA tournament without beating Harvard a second time, though it might have two chances to do so.
Princeton is currently 10-1, while Harvard is 10-2. Unlike the Harvard women, the men have already completed their two games with travel-partner Dartmouth, so all that's left for the men in the regular season are the home games this weekend against Penn and Princeton.
The Tigers, of course, go to Dartmouth tomorrow, Harvard Saturday and Penn Tuesday.
If Princeton wins all three, it'll be 13-1 and the Ivy League champion. If Harvard wins both of its games, then it'll be 12-2 and guaranteed of no worse than a tie for the title and playoff for the NCAA spot.
If Harvard loses to Penn and Princeton defeats Dartmouth, then Princeton will have clinched a tie for the title and would only need to defeat either the Crimson or Penn to win it outright.
On the other hand, should Princeton go 1-2 in its final three, then Harvard would win the outright title by going 2-0, which means one of the two would have been over Princeton.
There have been many times where Princeton has gotten to its regular-season finale against Penn where the winner would either clinch outright or force a rematch in a playoff game a few days later. This time, the game Tuesday night could be a situation that TB doesn't recall, where Penn could be playing simply to knock off Princeton and give the title to a third team.
Regardless, by as early as tomorrow night for the women and Saturday night for the men or as late as a week from Saturday in a playoff, there will be an NCAA bid for the two Ivy League representatives.
Of the 16 teams who play on both sides, only five are still in the running for those two bids, and two of them are from Princeton.
Should be a fun weekend.
Basically, the problem was comparing two geometric objects, one of which was four feet taller than the other, though they were essentially of the same shape. It then asked for a conclusion about area.
The only problem to TB was that the two objects being compared were the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
This appalled TB for two reasons: 1) the book has to be more than 10 years old and 2) the school sits about two miles away from a 9/11 memorial that honors the spirit of 18 local residents who were killed that day.
Perhaps math hasn't changed much in the last 10 years - or the last 40 or 50 for that matter - but still, is there nobody who has noticed the inappropriateness of using a book that references the World Trade Center, even in such a benign way?
For all TigerBlog knows, he had the same question in the same math workbook way back when.
Math was always one of TB's best subjects, especially geometry. For some reason, the logic of it really appealed to young TB.
He also was a big fan of the probability and statistics class he took his sophomore or junior year, even though it was dominated by the genius kids a year older than he was, including Lenny Ganz, who to the best of TB's memory never got less than a 100 on any test ever and is today a cardiologist. Lenny was always destroying any chance for a curve on the tests in that class, but TB still managed to get a good grade.
Somewhere along the line, TB veered away from the math world and directly into things like literature and history and eventually writing. Still, had it worked out differently, maybe TB could have traded all this for a long, distinguished career as an actuary.
Of course, math comes in handy all the time, especially when it comes to figuring out what is involved as the men's and women's Ivy League basketball races reach the final days of the regular season.
Starting on the women's side, there are three teams mathematically in contention for the championship and NCAA tournament bid: Princeton at 10-1, Yale at 9-3 and Harvard at 8-3.
Princeton hosts Dartmouth tomorrow night and Harvard Saturday and then travels to Penn Tuesday. Between the Princeton game, Harvard is at Penn tomorrow night and at Dartmouth Tuesday. Yale hosts Columbia tomorrow night and Cornell Saturday night.
A win in any of its remaining three games clinches for Princeton at least a share of its second-straight title. Any combination of Princeton wins and losses by the other two totaling two sends Princeton back to the NCAA tournament.
A Princeton win over Harvard alone would eliminate the Crimson. Should Yale win out and get to 11-3, then Princeton would have to win two of its last three to win outright.
The only way for Princeton not to get at least a share of the championship would be to lose all three of its games and have either Harvard or Yale win out as well.
Should there be a three-way tie for first, it could get a bit complicated in terms of who would get the No. 1 seed and avoid the first game in a playoff, but TB will wait until after this weekend to see if that's a bridge that needs to be crossed.
In the meantime, Princeton knows that if it keeps winning, it'll be in the NCAA tournament. Harvard and Yale could both win out and not get a share of the title or get to the tournament.
As an aside, the second-place team in the Ivy League is guaranteed a bid to the WNIT. Should Harvard and Yale tie for second, then Yale would get that bid because of its sweep of Harvard.
The men's race is different than the women's race in two ways: 1) only two teams - Princeton and Harvard - are mathematically still in the running and 2) both know that they would get to the NCAA tournament simply by winning out.
In fact, if Harvard defeats Penn tomorrow night, then Princeton cannot get to the NCAA tournament without beating Harvard a second time, though it might have two chances to do so.
Princeton is currently 10-1, while Harvard is 10-2. Unlike the Harvard women, the men have already completed their two games with travel-partner Dartmouth, so all that's left for the men in the regular season are the home games this weekend against Penn and Princeton.
The Tigers, of course, go to Dartmouth tomorrow, Harvard Saturday and Penn Tuesday.
If Princeton wins all three, it'll be 13-1 and the Ivy League champion. If Harvard wins both of its games, then it'll be 12-2 and guaranteed of no worse than a tie for the title and playoff for the NCAA spot.
If Harvard loses to Penn and Princeton defeats Dartmouth, then Princeton will have clinched a tie for the title and would only need to defeat either the Crimson or Penn to win it outright.
On the other hand, should Princeton go 1-2 in its final three, then Harvard would win the outright title by going 2-0, which means one of the two would have been over Princeton.
There have been many times where Princeton has gotten to its regular-season finale against Penn where the winner would either clinch outright or force a rematch in a playoff game a few days later. This time, the game Tuesday night could be a situation that TB doesn't recall, where Penn could be playing simply to knock off Princeton and give the title to a third team.
Regardless, by as early as tomorrow night for the women and Saturday night for the men or as late as a week from Saturday in a playoff, there will be an NCAA bid for the two Ivy League representatives.
Of the 16 teams who play on both sides, only five are still in the running for those two bids, and two of them are from Princeton.
Should be a fun weekend.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Happy Silver Anniversary
Well, the season ended in the first round of the playoffs for Little Miss TigerBlog and the rest of her basketball team, which was coached by TigerBlog.
The quest to successfully teach the team of 5/6 grade girls how to run chin was somewhat successful, though it never actually resulted in a basket in a game. Center-forward became the team's staple, signature play, and it was something that resulted in a ton of open layups, some of which actually went in.
The other concept of screening off the ball to free up someone to curl when the ball was tied up on the other side of the court never came close to materializing.
The team started off 1-6 before winning two of its last three in the regular-season. Sadly, any hope of a nice run through the playoffs ended quickly, with a loss to a team that TB's team had beaten during the regular season.
The highlights of the year included back-to-back wins late in the year, the times in practice when things began to click, the time Grace made cookies for everyone for good luck and the time when Paige brought in cupcakes for her birthday.
LMTB actually played on two basketball teams, the in-house team that TB coached and the travel team, which also lost in the first round of its playoffs. There were times during the season when LMTB would have a travel game on a Monday, travel practice on a Wednesday, in-house practice on Thursday and then an in-house game and one or two travel games on the weekend.
Honestly, it was a lot of basketball for the nine girls who played travel and in-house. Of course, TB knows of some of TigerBlog Jr.'s friends who play on three and even four basketball teams in the winter.
Still, TB is pretty sure that his in-house team accomplished most of its goals: get better, have fun, want to play again next year and then, if possible, win. It's the same goal for any 5/6 grade level team, for boys or girls.
With basketball over, LMTB has a few weeks off until her lacrosse season starts.
What's remarkable to TB about LMTB's sports schedule is that it's completely unremarkable. There are millions of girls in this country who play sports, and it's not something anyone really thinks much about anymore.
According to a 2008 report by the Women's Sports Foundation, nearly 70 percent of girls in 3rd to 12th grade play some sort of organized sport, a figure slightly below that of boys (75 percent).
TigerBlog can't remember what youth sports were like for girls when he was a kid, but he can't imagine that the opportunities existed then that exist now. If anything, girls were pushed into being cheerleaders as much as anything else.
Of course, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, not that there's anything wrong with cheerleading, but it's more of a societal statement that girls now have way more opportunities to compete in a variety of sports today than they did a quarter-century or more ago.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of National Girls and Women in Sports Day, which, according to its website: "has been celebrated annually in all 50 states with events ranging from sports clinics to awards ceremonies to triathlons to recognize the achievements, and encourage participation, of girls and women in sports."
Billie Jean King, whom those in TB's age group remember most for beating Bobby Riggs in the Astrodome in a huge moment for the women's movement, was the founder of the Women's Sports Foundation. Also from the website:
“As we celebrate the 25th annual National Girls and Women in Sports Day, we are struck not only by the incredible advancements in girls' participation in sports over the past quarter century, but by the opportunities athletics have offered women in the United States and around the world,” said Women’s Sports Foundation Founder Billie Jean King. “Now, more than ever, sports, health and education programs are needed to lay the foundation to empower active, healthy and confident young women for generations to come.”
As an aside, King may have beaten Riggs in the real tennis match, but she was no competition for him as an actress on the episode of "The Odd Couple" on which they both appeared.
Meanwhile, back at National Girls and Women In Sports Day, the annual celebration of the event here at Princeton will be held Saturday prior to Princeton's women's basketball game against Harvard.
As always, one hour before game time, fans will be invited onto the indoor track area of Jadwin's main floor for an interactive sports fair featuring many of Princeton's women's teams. Girls - and boys - can play games and learn the basics of the sports while meeting the players and coaches.
For TB's money, Princeton's celebration of National Girls and Women In Sports Day is up there with any other event that is done here each year. It's a great opportunity for girls to see first-hand the value and fun of athletic participation, and it's just as important for the boys to see that the girls have the same right to play as they do.
The resulting sight is a panorama of kids, college athletes, parents and coaches, all of whom are having a great time.
And after that, there's the Princeton-Harvard women's basketball game, which will probably have huge Ivy title implications (unless Princeton beats Dartmouth and Penn beats Harvard Friday, but more about that later in the week).
Today isn't about Ivy title scenarios.
It's about girls and sports and how important the two are to each other.
The quest to successfully teach the team of 5/6 grade girls how to run chin was somewhat successful, though it never actually resulted in a basket in a game. Center-forward became the team's staple, signature play, and it was something that resulted in a ton of open layups, some of which actually went in.
The other concept of screening off the ball to free up someone to curl when the ball was tied up on the other side of the court never came close to materializing.
The team started off 1-6 before winning two of its last three in the regular-season. Sadly, any hope of a nice run through the playoffs ended quickly, with a loss to a team that TB's team had beaten during the regular season.
The highlights of the year included back-to-back wins late in the year, the times in practice when things began to click, the time Grace made cookies for everyone for good luck and the time when Paige brought in cupcakes for her birthday.
LMTB actually played on two basketball teams, the in-house team that TB coached and the travel team, which also lost in the first round of its playoffs. There were times during the season when LMTB would have a travel game on a Monday, travel practice on a Wednesday, in-house practice on Thursday and then an in-house game and one or two travel games on the weekend.
Honestly, it was a lot of basketball for the nine girls who played travel and in-house. Of course, TB knows of some of TigerBlog Jr.'s friends who play on three and even four basketball teams in the winter.
Still, TB is pretty sure that his in-house team accomplished most of its goals: get better, have fun, want to play again next year and then, if possible, win. It's the same goal for any 5/6 grade level team, for boys or girls.
With basketball over, LMTB has a few weeks off until her lacrosse season starts.
What's remarkable to TB about LMTB's sports schedule is that it's completely unremarkable. There are millions of girls in this country who play sports, and it's not something anyone really thinks much about anymore.
According to a 2008 report by the Women's Sports Foundation, nearly 70 percent of girls in 3rd to 12th grade play some sort of organized sport, a figure slightly below that of boys (75 percent).
TigerBlog can't remember what youth sports were like for girls when he was a kid, but he can't imagine that the opportunities existed then that exist now. If anything, girls were pushed into being cheerleaders as much as anything else.
Of course, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, not that there's anything wrong with cheerleading, but it's more of a societal statement that girls now have way more opportunities to compete in a variety of sports today than they did a quarter-century or more ago.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of National Girls and Women in Sports Day, which, according to its website: "has been celebrated annually in all 50 states with events ranging from sports clinics to awards ceremonies to triathlons to recognize the achievements, and encourage participation, of girls and women in sports."
Billie Jean King, whom those in TB's age group remember most for beating Bobby Riggs in the Astrodome in a huge moment for the women's movement, was the founder of the Women's Sports Foundation. Also from the website:
“As we celebrate the 25th annual National Girls and Women in Sports Day, we are struck not only by the incredible advancements in girls' participation in sports over the past quarter century, but by the opportunities athletics have offered women in the United States and around the world,” said Women’s Sports Foundation Founder Billie Jean King. “Now, more than ever, sports, health and education programs are needed to lay the foundation to empower active, healthy and confident young women for generations to come.”
As an aside, King may have beaten Riggs in the real tennis match, but she was no competition for him as an actress on the episode of "The Odd Couple" on which they both appeared.
Meanwhile, back at National Girls and Women In Sports Day, the annual celebration of the event here at Princeton will be held Saturday prior to Princeton's women's basketball game against Harvard.
As always, one hour before game time, fans will be invited onto the indoor track area of Jadwin's main floor for an interactive sports fair featuring many of Princeton's women's teams. Girls - and boys - can play games and learn the basics of the sports while meeting the players and coaches.
For TB's money, Princeton's celebration of National Girls and Women In Sports Day is up there with any other event that is done here each year. It's a great opportunity for girls to see first-hand the value and fun of athletic participation, and it's just as important for the boys to see that the girls have the same right to play as they do.
The resulting sight is a panorama of kids, college athletes, parents and coaches, all of whom are having a great time.
And after that, there's the Princeton-Harvard women's basketball game, which will probably have huge Ivy title implications (unless Princeton beats Dartmouth and Penn beats Harvard Friday, but more about that later in the week).
Today isn't about Ivy title scenarios.
It's about girls and sports and how important the two are to each other.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Raising Real Awareness
There are certain words and phrases that didn't exist in their current connotations back when TigerBlog was a kid.
Nobody ever used to say "signage," for instance, when "signs" worked fine.
Above them all, though, TigerBlog can't stand the term "raising awareness" as it's normally applied; that is, to calling attention to diseases or conditions that everybody already is aware are awful.
Too often to TigerBlog, events that are designed to "raise awareness" of those diseases end up being more a way for the people who are involved to give the very public impression that they are doing something critical to help the cause. In reality, quite often those people are in position to do much more in a meaningful - and private - way.
Yes, it's nice that the NFL has everyone wear pink, but couldn't the money spent on all of that (times 1,000, for that matter) go directly to the people who are trying to find a cure?
Still, it's hard to go out and raise real money, the kind that makes a real difference. It's easy to get the public credit for "raising awareness."
This isn't meant as a criticism of everyone and every event. Many of the smaller events that college athletic teams and local community organizations undertake simply don't have the ability to raise those kinds of sums of money for donations.
And in many of those cases, there is legitimate value in the relationships created and the sense of service. But raising awareness for cancer or autism or heart disease? Everyone already knows all about them.
Then there is the whole concept of the rare disease, which is an entirely different situation.
Rare diseases are defined as those that affect 200,000 or fewer people, and there are 7,000 of these diseases, most of which very few people know about.
TigerBlog, for instance, has learned in the last few years about two of those rare diseases.
Ataxia Telangiectasia is a disease that affects about three out of every one million children in this country, which fortunately makes it very rare indeed. The disease, which TB doesn't quite understand, attacks the muscular development of young children, often being mistaken for diseases like cerebral palsey, and then ultimately breaks down the immune system. The mortality rate is nearly 100%, and life expectancy beyond 20 is rare.
Unfortunately, one of the three in a million kids lives about four miles from Jadwin Gym. Derek DiGregorio, whose father Steve was an assistant football coach here and was the freshman coach when current head coach Bob Surace played, is a 13-year-old who has the disease.
Derek's family has been joined by some others who aren't quite ready to give in to Ataxia Telangiectasia without a fight, including former Princeton basketball player and coach and current Mercer County Community College coach Howard Levy, football associate head coach Steve Verbit and Jess Deutsch, who works in the Office of the Dean of the College here at Princeton.
Together, and with others, these people have created Derek's Dreams, an organization that is designed to raise awareness - real awareness - to a disease that almost nobody has ever heard of.
Last year, this group had a fundraiser for the cause, and the event couldn't have been more successful, with some big names in attendance and big memorabilia/sports packages auctioned off.
This year's event will be held April 6 in North Jersey. Much more information is available at dereksdreams.com.
Another rare disease that is now permanently familiar to TB and to the Princeton football and athletic family is Aplastic Anemia, the disease that afflicted Jordan Culbreath nearly two years ago.
Culbreath, coming of a 1,200-yard junior year for the Tigers, struggled through training camp in 2009 with fatigue and other health issues. It wasn't until he had an ankle injury early in the season, though, that the real cause of his problems was discovered - a disease called Aplastic Anemia.
Like those in Derek DiGregorio's camp, Culbreath and his family didn't give in to his disease either. Instead, he fought it head on as well, and the results have been spectacular.
Against all odds, Culbreath was able to regain his health to the point of being able to play college football again this past fall, and he led the team in rushing again.
Beyond that, his teammates and the Princeton Department of Athletics organized several outreach efforts, including a bone marrow drive.
Most recently, Culbreath won an award that he would never have wanted to, the Uplifting Athletes Rare Disease Champion award.
It's a tribute to the man himself that he was able to return to Princeton and the field after coming so perilously close to losing his life in the first place.
Jordan Culbreath and Derek DiGregorio are quite different people in different situations, but they are front and center in the fight against two horrible diseases.
These diseases aren't mainstream ones, and it's going to take a lot more than pink shoelaces to cure them.
Still, these two young people inspire everyone who hears their stories and comes in contact to them.
That's a great place to start.
Nobody ever used to say "signage," for instance, when "signs" worked fine.
Above them all, though, TigerBlog can't stand the term "raising awareness" as it's normally applied; that is, to calling attention to diseases or conditions that everybody already is aware are awful.
Too often to TigerBlog, events that are designed to "raise awareness" of those diseases end up being more a way for the people who are involved to give the very public impression that they are doing something critical to help the cause. In reality, quite often those people are in position to do much more in a meaningful - and private - way.
Yes, it's nice that the NFL has everyone wear pink, but couldn't the money spent on all of that (times 1,000, for that matter) go directly to the people who are trying to find a cure?
Still, it's hard to go out and raise real money, the kind that makes a real difference. It's easy to get the public credit for "raising awareness."
This isn't meant as a criticism of everyone and every event. Many of the smaller events that college athletic teams and local community organizations undertake simply don't have the ability to raise those kinds of sums of money for donations.
And in many of those cases, there is legitimate value in the relationships created and the sense of service. But raising awareness for cancer or autism or heart disease? Everyone already knows all about them.
Then there is the whole concept of the rare disease, which is an entirely different situation.
Rare diseases are defined as those that affect 200,000 or fewer people, and there are 7,000 of these diseases, most of which very few people know about.
TigerBlog, for instance, has learned in the last few years about two of those rare diseases.
Ataxia Telangiectasia is a disease that affects about three out of every one million children in this country, which fortunately makes it very rare indeed. The disease, which TB doesn't quite understand, attacks the muscular development of young children, often being mistaken for diseases like cerebral palsey, and then ultimately breaks down the immune system. The mortality rate is nearly 100%, and life expectancy beyond 20 is rare.
Unfortunately, one of the three in a million kids lives about four miles from Jadwin Gym. Derek DiGregorio, whose father Steve was an assistant football coach here and was the freshman coach when current head coach Bob Surace played, is a 13-year-old who has the disease.
Derek's family has been joined by some others who aren't quite ready to give in to Ataxia Telangiectasia without a fight, including former Princeton basketball player and coach and current Mercer County Community College coach Howard Levy, football associate head coach Steve Verbit and Jess Deutsch, who works in the Office of the Dean of the College here at Princeton.
Together, and with others, these people have created Derek's Dreams, an organization that is designed to raise awareness - real awareness - to a disease that almost nobody has ever heard of.
Last year, this group had a fundraiser for the cause, and the event couldn't have been more successful, with some big names in attendance and big memorabilia/sports packages auctioned off.
This year's event will be held April 6 in North Jersey. Much more information is available at dereksdreams.com.
Another rare disease that is now permanently familiar to TB and to the Princeton football and athletic family is Aplastic Anemia, the disease that afflicted Jordan Culbreath nearly two years ago.
Culbreath, coming of a 1,200-yard junior year for the Tigers, struggled through training camp in 2009 with fatigue and other health issues. It wasn't until he had an ankle injury early in the season, though, that the real cause of his problems was discovered - a disease called Aplastic Anemia.
Like those in Derek DiGregorio's camp, Culbreath and his family didn't give in to his disease either. Instead, he fought it head on as well, and the results have been spectacular.
Against all odds, Culbreath was able to regain his health to the point of being able to play college football again this past fall, and he led the team in rushing again.
Beyond that, his teammates and the Princeton Department of Athletics organized several outreach efforts, including a bone marrow drive.
Most recently, Culbreath won an award that he would never have wanted to, the Uplifting Athletes Rare Disease Champion award.
It's a tribute to the man himself that he was able to return to Princeton and the field after coming so perilously close to losing his life in the first place.
Jordan Culbreath and Derek DiGregorio are quite different people in different situations, but they are front and center in the fight against two horrible diseases.
These diseases aren't mainstream ones, and it's going to take a lot more than pink shoelaces to cure them.
Still, these two young people inspire everyone who hears their stories and comes in contact to them.
That's a great place to start.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
