It should be an exciting encounter this weekend when the dynasty known as women's swimming throws open the doors of its own Forbidden City for the first time this season and dares six defiant opponents to tread within its imperial walls.
Having rested and regrouped for the past two weeks, the Tigers will host the Princeton Invitational at DeNunzio Pool and face off against Rutgers, American University, Boston College, Villanova, Northeastern, St. John's, and University of California in a meet that boasts more contesting parties than the Boxer Rebellion.
"None of these teams are in our league," senior captain Katie Kuga said. "It's a chance to race a large number of totally different and talented competitors."
As far as the competition goes, Princeton should not have a problem dealing with the majority of their opponents. In the University of California, the Tigers will find a formidable foe that may be out of even their own impressive reach.
"California is incredibly talented," Kuga said. "They are a scholarship school and sort of in a different league."
Like Imperial China's first encounter with the British, Princeton will, for the frist time this season, encounter an adversary more powerful than itself. From this meeting, however, the Tigers are not looking to start another set of competitive Opium Wars, but rather gain a personal evaluation of their team and find success at an individual level.
"We're not necessarily going for first place in the meet," Kuga said. "This is a meet to prepare each swimmer individually. It doesn't have to be a team meet."
At this point in the season, the proverbial Great Wall that the Tigers have erected around their territory truly does seem to stretch into the western deserts and drink from the eastern seas, acting as an insurmountable barrier to every different opponent they encounter. California will be the first opponent that will try to scale this wall and apply a pressure with which Princeton has yet to deal.
While this is an opportunity to face many different and competitive teams, however, none of these match-ups count towards Princeton's Ivy League record or even their general record due to the weekend's tournament status. For this reason, the Tigers also look at this event as a way to test their swimmers in all sorts of unusual positions and unearth latent talent.
"Coach Teeter is trying to put people in events that she would like to test," Kuga said. "She wants to see if there's a potential race they can swim later in the year."
This weekend's tournament also provides an important outlet for Princeton to simply continue swimming and competing during the somewhat long break between now and its upcoming Ivy League meet. Having not raced for almost two weeks, the Tigers next meet after this weekend will not arrive until Jan. 5, making the Princeton Invitational an incredibly valuable tool to maintain the Tigers' focus and perhaps save their metaphorical fleet from rotting at the mooring more pathetically than that of the isolationist Ming dynasty.
"This meet is kind of a midseason race to just keep the competition going," Kuga said. "There would be a huge break without this competition. We want to keep racing on our minds."
Clearly this weekend's tournament serves several purposes on Princeton's agenda, from testing out new lineups to simply maintaining a competitive focus, but, in the end, the Tigers always place top priority on one goal: an exceptional performance.
"Most of all, we want to do really well and have people scoring," Kuga said.
Unlike their mythical third-place finish in the zodiac race, these Tigers hope to walk away from their own Invitational with a strong showing behind them, providing a solid finish to this year's meets and giving them a steady foothold to launch into next year's season deciding match-ups.
Success this weekend will only add to the confidence of this already amazing dynasty, proving once again that Princeton's home turf remains a hallowed realm and that heaven truly does smile on the Middle Kingdom.
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