The Loneliest Tiger

If you watch the Princeton football team during practice any given afternoon, your attention immediately turns to the quarterback airing out the ball, the receivers running their routes and the coaches chewing on their whistles.

Easy to overlook is the player wearing number 15, the one working out alone, separate from the rest of the players clothed in Orange and Black.

Transition to any Saturday afternoon, and you'll see a wildly different picture. With the game on the line and the clock winding down, it is that same number 15 who steps onto the field and gets ready for the coming play with the hearts and hopes of his team resting on his shoulders.

Such is the dual life of a kicker: a player who is an afterthought 90 percent of the time but becomes the most important man in the stadium for the sliver of time when he steps on the field. On the Princeton football team, that role is filled by senior Derek Javarone.

Javarone didn't always want to be a kicker. In fact, when he began kicking in high school, he just wanted to hang out with his friends. Javarone played many sports growing up, and ,when his friends took up football, he wanted to as well. His father — a chiropractor — was wary of the dangers of football and only allowed Javarone to play as a kicker.

At West Allegheny High School in Imperial, Pa., Javarone twice earned all-state honors and converted 48 of 48 point after touchdown (PAT) attempts during his senior year. Some of that success can be attributed to the kicking coach he had in high school, which very few high school kickers are lucky enough to have.

At Princeton, Javarone doesn't have the luxury of a positional coach, which gives him plenty of downtime in practice while the position players are doing drills or running plays.

"[During our free time in practice], we do whatever we want," Javarone said. "There's no specific coach for our position, so I'm pretty much kind of coaching myself."

Javarone has coached himself well enough throughout the past four years to claim the role of the Tigers' primary kicker. Over the years, he has learned to deal with the on-field pressures, but it wasn't as easy to deal with the demands of his position when he was first thrust into the role as a freshman.

"It was tough at first, but I think I got used to it pretty fast," Javarone said. "I remember the first game I was pacing up and down the sideline before the game, and some guy in the stands yelled at me to calm down."

Three years later, Javarone has lost those rookie nerves, and rather than trying to pace away his anxiety, he focuses on the game and his next kick. As a player who doesn't often get in on the action, it may seem difficult for the kicker to maintain that necessary focus. Yet Javarone says that staying on top of the action, as well as his own duties, while waiting on the sideline is not that tough.

"You know all the guys out there, and you know what's going on," Javarone said. "So you don't really feel all alone out there. You're into it; you're focused. Everything is fine."

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The difficulty arises when Javarone comes off the field after missing a field goal or PAT. Regardless of what went wrong, the kicker is usually the one to receive the brunt of the blame, which can lead to some lonely times on the sideline. Javarone, however, says that brooding is the last thing that he wants to do after a mistake.

"[After a miss] I figure out what I did wrong, what happened, and then you just forget about it," Javarone said. "I just start focusing on the next kick. You're going to make some, and you're going to miss some. It's just the way it is. You can't let it rattle you."

This past week Javarone was anything but rattled. He hit five field goals for the Tigers against Columbia, which tied his own Ivy League record — set against Dartmouth in 2003 — for field goals in an Ivy League game. Add in his four converted extra points, and he put 19 points on the board Saturday, a single-game Ivy record.

Neither of those two days rank as the kicking highlight of Javarone's time at Princeton, though. His favorite kick came in the first weekend of this season against Lafayette, when he converted a 37-yarder to put the Tigers up by 10 late in the fourth quarter. After another Lafayette score, the ield goal ended up being Princeton's margin of victory.

His next field goal will likely be a memorable one as well: it will be the 38th of his career, tying the career record currently held by Taylor Northrop '02.

But whether Javarone ends up the record-setting hero or the goat this Saturday afternoon, come practice on Monday, Javarone will be back to his usual routine: coaching himself on his kicking alone and off to the side, getting ready for the next time he'll be called upon when the game is on the line.