Welcome to a new year at the 'Prince'

I'd like to begin with an important announcement: the Boston Red Sox are no longer the official baseball team of this sports section.

With this issue, a new set of editors takes the reins at The Daily Princetonian. Which means that, instead of reading Anuj Basil's rants about the Sox in this space, you'll be reading my rants about the Cubs. I can only hope things work out as well for me as they did for him.

But the Sox and Cubs are only a small part of what we do around here, our chance to express ourselves as fans and lighten things up a bit.

Our main goal is simple: providing the best coverage of Princeton sports. We want you to turn to us first for news, profiles and features — anything and everything in the world of the Orange and Black.

That means running the most in-depth and best-written coverage of sports like basketball and football. Princeton is the premiere lacrosse school in the country; our coverage should — and will — be up to par.

Just as importantly, lower-profile sports like squash and water polo deserve high-caliber coverage as well. After all, as this past year has shown, those teams are among the University's best.

But we want to do more than just report on the games. During the past year, we've increased the number of feature stories we print, a trend that we'll continue.

In the next few weeks, look for subjects ranging from the ball boys at Jadwin Gym to the best places to jog on campus. We'll also be catching up with some of the most accomplished former Tigers, from an NBA general manager to the director of the FBI.

Meanwhile, we'll try to give you an even better sense of what the athletes are thinking and feeling, through Sofia Mata-Leclerc's weekly Q-and-A s and through Plimptonian first-person accounts of what happens when our writers step onto the field with Princeton's best.

On a more serious note, we also hope to improve our investigative reporting efforts, with plans to examine topics like how athletics are financed at Princeton and how the recruiting process really works. Just as front page investigations and editorial page ruminations help challenge Princeton's status quo, we hope the sports section will do so too.

Ultimately, though, we're here because we love Princeton sports. We're the type of people who take study breaks at Baker Rink and went to basketball games before the Jadwin Jungle. One of our editors has never missed a sprint football game in three years at Princeton, another is the squash team's biggest fan.

We hope that love shows in our writing. We know our columns won't compare to Rick Reilly's, but we'll keep writing them anyway. We can only hope you'll have as much fun reading them as we have writing them.

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Which brings me to my final point: we want to hear from you, the reader. Whether you're a student or alum, a younger brother or a grandmother, an athlete or a fan, we encourage you to write to us.

Why, you ask? Every week, we'd like to run letters to the sports editor, as part of an effort to make our section more interactive. So whether you love us or you hate us, let us know about it. Just don't insult our mothers, because they're our most reliable readers.

On behalf of Anna Lineback, Daniel Satterfield, Stirling Fiss and all our writers, welcome to a new year of Daily Princetonian sports. We thank you for reading.

And, oh yeah, go Cubs.