Feature: Limitless Luis
We’ve all seen it: Cases of kids groomed to be serious athletes from the age of five. Luis Ramos is decidedly not one of those kids, but at the rate he’s progressing, he may as well be.
We’ve all seen it: Cases of kids groomed to be serious athletes from the age of five. Luis Ramos is decidedly not one of those kids, but at the rate he’s progressing, he may as well be.
Since arriving at princeton, senior outside hitter Carl Hamming has been a vital member of the men’s volleyball program. The tallest member of the team — at 6 feet, 7 inches — Hamming possesses enormous strength and power on the court. He has hit his stride recently, achieving double-digit kills in every contest since the team returned from Intersession.
Too often in this day and age we find ourselves looking for the negative while watching sports. For example, former University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow devotes hours of his time to charity and has tremendous faith in God, yet he gets criticized for his annoyingly pompous persona.
PHILADELPHIA — With just over five minutes to go, sophomore guard Doug Davis sent up a stray shot. It missed the basket, but freshman forward Ian Hummer was there with the rebound and the put-back, giving the men’s basketball team a 45-40 lead over Penn and renewed momentum for the final stretch.
An old rivalry will be renewed when the men’s basketball team travels to the Palestra to face Penn tonight. While the rivalry has been dormant in the past few years as both teams have gone through a rare period of struggle, Princeton’s recent successes this year appear to have infused it once again. Despite the Quakers’ poor record, it may not be as easy to bounce back from Saturday’s tough loss to Ivy-League-leading Cornell as the Tigers would like.
Eleven straight national titles, a 221-match win streak and the top national ranking: The Trinity Bantams are nothing short of dominant in men’s college squash. The men’s squash team has played second fiddle to the Bantams recently, losing the national title match to Trinity each of the last five years. Last year, Princeton was within points of beating them both during the season and in the national championship but came up short both times. The result was the same last weekend.
For a one-hour span on Saturday night, I was unsure how I would write this column. The Princeton men’s basketball team had just suffered a painful 48-45 loss to Cornell. The previous night, your Penn Quakers handed the Big Red a 79-64 loss — its first in the Ivy League. Hard to talk trash in that situation.
According to senior tennis captain Charlie Brosens, the Eastern College Athletic Conference is the place to make a statement.
If the Tigers win tonight, we’re blaming it on the snow. After all, when Penn beats Cornell and the Tigers are sitting in second place in the Ivy League, Hell must be freezing over.
The men’s volleyball team (3-4 overall, 0-1 Eastern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association) proved its resilience on the road this weekend, coming back with a vengeance after a 3-0 loss to Springfield (5-4, 1-2) on Friday night to down Harvard (0-5) 3-0.
For the men’s and women’s fencing teams, the games in Vancouver, Canada, weren’t the only type of Olympic competition occurring this weekend. Seven fencers traveled to Memphis, Tenn., to participate in a four-day competition in the Junior Olympics.
With seven seconds remaining in the game and with the men’s basketball team trailing by three points, sophomore guard Doug Davis shook his defender and brought the ball up the court, looking for a clean shot that could force overtime. He passed the ball off to senior center Pawel Buczak, who dropped it back off to Davis. The shot went up as time expired, but it was long.
The wrestling team guaranteed its first Ivy League winning season in the past 23 years with a 28-13 victory over Columbia on Saturday. Despite a tough 46-3 loss to No. 6 Cornell later in the day, Princeton (9-9-0 overall, 3-1-0 Ivy League) is still looking like one of the best the University has seen this decade.
The women’s basketball team made its annual trip to the Empire State last weekend, taking on Ivy League foes Columbia and Cornell on back-to-back days. Though it was their first full weekend on the road, the Tigers (19-2 overall, 7-0 Ivy League) suffered no ill effects from the travel, cruising to a pair of 20-point victories. At the halfway point of league play, Princeton has now defeated every opponent by a double-digit margin and is the clear favorite to win the conference championship.
Since DeNunzio Pool's construction over 20 years ago, the men’s swimming and diving team has never lost one of its 107 home dual meets. And with “the streak” on the line for the last time this season, the stakes were high. But the stakes were also invisible. Princeton surmounted the pressure to win 15 of 16 events, crushing Columbia 174-117.
The women’s hockey team approached the close of its season with two consecutive shutout victories, raising the team’s conference rank as the postseason draws near.
Despite the fierce rivalry between Harvard, Yale and Princeton, both the men’s and women’s track and field teams walked away from Jadwin Gymnasium on Saturday with another victory on their records. The Princeton men totaled 105 points, easily outpacing Harvard’s 48 and Yale’s 27, while the women topped their meet with 90.5 points, followed by Harvard’s 47.5 and Yale’s 21.
The men’s hockey team returned from this weekend’s road trip to upstate New York with little to show after falling to Clarkson 4-3 on Friday night and drawing with St. Lawrence 2-2 on Saturday afternoon. Princeton (10-12-3 overall, 6-10-2 ECAC Hockey) entered the weekend having won four of its past five games — including victories over Harvard, Dartmouth and No. 8 Cornell — but was unable to continue this strong form against its New York opponents.
In last year’s national championship, with the overall score tied at 4-4 and his match tied at two games, the men’s squash team’s Mauricio Sanchez ’09 took a 5-0 lead in the deciding game against Trinity’s Baset Chaudhry. The home crowd at Jadwin Gymnasium could hardly contain its excitement. The two highest-ranked players in college squash were competing in the deciding match, and Sanchez needed just four more points to clinch Princeton’s first national championship since 1982 and end Trinity’s streak of 10 national titles and 201 wins.
The men’s hockey team’s three-game hot streak was brought to an end last Friday evening when Colgate defeated Princeton 3-1 at Baker Rink. But hopefully for the Tigers, the momentum they regained the following afternoon from a 5-3 win over fifth-ranked Cornell won’t cool off before they make the trek to frigid North Country this weekend to play the first two matches of a four-game road stretch. Princeton (10-11-2 overall, 6-9-1 ECAC Hockey) will face Clarkson (5-20-3, 1-13-2) tonight and St. Lawrence (14-10-5, 8-5-3) on Saturday afternoon.