His freshman year, the unthinkable happened to Kevin Griffin, a newly recruited collegiate athlete — he got injured.
Before the men's soccer season even started, Griffin injured his ankle at practice — tearing ligaments and sidelining himself for the majority of the season. He practiced and trained with the team as much as he could, but played in only a few games toward the end of the season. Griffin showed a glimmer of things to come in the last game of his freshman year, when he scored his first goal against Penn.
"As a freshman, we saw he had a lot of potential," assistant coach Chris Mayer said. "We just had to get him going."
Griffin got his chance the next year. He started at left-midfielder every game as a sophomore and also helped to solidify last year's midfield, providing four assists to a team that finished first in the Ivy League and went to the NCAA tournament. As a senior captain this season, Griffin will help to fill the leadership void left open by the graduation of last year's captains Chad Adams '00 and Griff Behncke '00.
"[Griffin] emerged last year as someone that the guys all look up to," head coach Jim Barlow said. "He was voted captain by the team for this year along with Graeme Rein."
"My role is to be vocal on the field," Griffin said. "That's part of the reason I was chosen. My job will be keeping guys in line off the field and leading by example on the field, too, and trying to work harder than anybody else."
Working man
Hard work has been an important part of Griffin's style of play while at Princeton, and it is something that he believes in bringing to the rest of the team.
"He's a consistent guy," Barlow said. "He's always given us a real honest work rate. He covers a lot of ground and he's done really well on defending.
"When we looked at a lot of the goals we scored last year, a lot of them started with our defending up the field and he was a big part of that."
The Tigers had a stifling defense last year that allowed only four goals by Ivy League opponents. While Griffin was a big part of that defense — playing at left midfield — he is going to try something new this year. In an attempt to mix things up on the field, Barlow will experiment with starting the senior at forward as well as midfield.
Coach Barlow feels that Griffin's great ball-handling skills can help bring a spark to the Princeton offense, just as his tenacity has helped to make the defense more formidable.
"He has a knack for getting by defenders with the ball," Barlow said. "He's shifty and good with the ball at his feet — he gets defenders leaning one way and then gets by them.
"And that helps a lot when we're trying to get forward and we have a guy who has a little bit of a special dimension with the dribbling. That makes teams have to deal with him and that will help free up some of our other guys on the attack because he's able to beat guys one-on-one."
The best defense
The Tigers are returning eight starters from last year's team, including the entire midfield and both starting forwards. Although the defense will have some new faces, getting that offense to gel and produce goals will be crucial to the team's success.
"We're coming back with a lot of talent, but we need that work ethic, too," Griffin said. "That's been our trademark — working a lot harder than the other teams."
The Tigers have other things to work on as well. Griffin believes that the team can't expect things to happen on their own. The senior captain knows that the players will have to take charge on the field to get things done.
Princeton has already shown that it has this ability. The Tigers won their season opener 3-0 against American University, although Griffin did not have quite the game he wanted to have against the Eagles — he's still getting over a bout of food poisoning. The senior is expected to play more in this weekend's contests against Old Dominion and William and Mary in Norfolk, Virginia.
If Griffin can continue to encourage a strong work ethic within the team and to lead by example, the Tigers should be able to build upon last year's success.
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