Athlete of the Week

The men's basketball team could very easily have come away from its last three games a broken team. After dropping a heartbreaker by one point to Dartmouth, the Tigers found themselves looking at a nearly identical situation the next day at Harvard. Down one with 7.1 seconds to play, sophomore guard Kyle Wente was pinned 25 feet from the basket by two Harvard defenders, and Princeton seemed headed towards its first two-loss Ivy League weekend in years.

Wente leaned right to gain the smallest separation from his Crimson defenders and released the unlikeliest of shots from near his hip. The curious second-cousin to a hook shoot seemed like a futile, desperate measure.

Unbelievably, Wente's prayer passed through the hoop, giving Princeton a 69-67 victory. With the win, the Tigers maintained their tie with Penn for first place.

The tie would be challenged three nights later, when Princeton travelled to Penn for the first of the teams' bi-annual struggles. The Tigers led comfortably for most of the game, but with three and a half minutes to play, the Quakers had cut the lead to single digits. The crowd, once silenced, had again risen to its feet, finding hope in the seven-point differential that seemed to be dwindling quickly.

Wente again stepped up for Princeton at the crucial moment. With coaches and players alike pleading for the Tigers to let the shot clock run to almost zero on every possession, Wente had other ideas. Left wide open on the wing, the sophomore stepped behind the three-point arc and buried the shot.

Princeton's lead was again ten; Penn then could not recover. In a weekend that could have seen the Tigers lose hope, Kyle Wente buried any fears.