MIAMI ? It was three o'clock in the morning on the Sunday before Labor Day, and I was somewhere in the Miami metropolitan area, shirtless, wet and soapy, covered in grass, three sheets to the wind, and starting to get close with a girl from Trinidad.
As the field hockey team walked off the field Saturday at Class of 1952 Stadium after its first Ivy League game of the year, nearly every member of the Princeton roster sported a giant smile.The grins were easy to understand: the Tigers (1-3 overall, 1-0 Ivy League) had played by far their best game of the season, dismantling Yale (1-2, 0-1) by a 5-1 score.Saturday's result was starkly different from that of their first two games, losses to non-conference foes American and Penn State.
WASHINGTON, D.C. ? After a neck-and-neck first half, men's soccer needed some kind of spark to edge past the small but aggressive American team.
MIAMI ? With the graduation of the most talented class of women's soccer players ever at Princeton, no one could be sure how the Tigers would fare this year in trying to repeat last year's 19-3 season.
In their opening meet of the season on Sept. 10, the Princeton men's and women's cross country teams outran their competition to finish in first place at the Fordham Cross Country Invitational.In the women's meet, the Tigers stayed together to finish five athletes in the top 10, outpacing stiff competitor Providence, ranked No.
Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of postcards that Daily Princetonian sports staff writers wrote about their experiences in the wide world of sports this summer.
Princeton 42nd in Director's CupFor the eighth consecutive year, Princeton was the top non-scholarship athletic program, according to the 2004-05 Director's Cup Standings released in June.The Orange and Black finished 42nd overall in the national rankings, edging 43rd-place Harvard by two points."It is gratifying for everyone in our department," Director of Athletics Gary Walters '67 wrote in an email, "to know that we've been able to sustain an almost unprecedented level of athletic performance for a significant period of time."Disappointing seasons by several of Princeton's signature programs, however, dropped the University to its lowest finish in the overall rankings since 1997, when it placed 60th.
If the women's basketball team walked away from the 2004-05 season muttering "wait 'til next year," it's hard to blame them.In head coach Richard Barron's fourth season at the helm, the Tigers (13-14 overall, 5-9 Ivy League) were still undeniably in the midst of an oft-painful rebuilding process.
Seven times at the 2004 Ivy League women's swimming championship meet, senior captain Stephanie Hsiao dove into the water.
By the mid-March day when junior Cack Ferrell stepped onto a track in Fayetteville, Ark., to run in the 3,000-meter race at the NCAA indoor track and field championships, the phrase "All-American" had already become automatically attached to any mention of her name.
Good teams win all the games they should, but great teams win ones they should not. This saying held true all season for the women's hockey team which ended its season sooner than it hoped to when the Tigers were swept out of the East Coast Athletic Conference Hockey League (ECACHL) quarterfinals by Yale.
For 89 seconds, it appeared the men's soccer team would need more than 90 minutes to decide its season opener Friday night at Lourie-Love field.After giving up a goal just before halftime, Princeton had spent the entire second relentlessly attacking the Loyola goal.
Just 500 meters into the Eastern Sprints men's heavyweight grand final on Lake Quinsigamond in Worcester, Mass., on May 15, it was clear the race would come down to two boats: Princeton and Harvard.Both crews had gone out extremely fast, and by the 1,000-meter mark, the Tigers trailed the Crimson by half a boat length with the rest of the field well behind.
On Nov. 14, in Lewisburg, Pa., senior goaltender Peter Sabbatini refused to let the men's water polo team lose.
Johns Hopkins, Virginia, Syracuse ? three of the best teams in all of college men's lacrosse.
In a league stacked with talent, Princeton's tennis teams found themselves earning narrow victories and facing tough competition from their Ivy opponents.
The fencing team finished eighth at the 2005 NCAA fencing championships. The men's and women's squads combined to total 77 points, 60 points behind Ivy League rival Columbia, which finished in fifth, and 96 points behind national champion Notre Dame.The Tigers earned the bulk of their points in the epee.
On the cold and windy evening of Nov. 26, the women's soccer team did the unthinkable on Lourie-Love Field.
The men's soccer team went through its season like a sputtering rollercoaster, earning a breathtaking win one day only to stagnate offensively the next, resulting in a steep nosedive.When it was all over, the Tigers (8-5-4 overall, 3-2-2 Ivy League) were far from the worst team in the league, yet the Ivy crown would elude their grasp.
By the end of his junior season, calling Yasser El-Halaby the Michael Jordan of college squash might be excessively complimentary ? to Michael Jordan.For a third consecutive year, the soft-spoken Cairo, Egypt native dominated his competition with remarkable ease, destroying Yale's Julian Illingworth, 9-6, 9-2, 9-1 in early March to become the first male to ever win three individual national titles in his first three seasons.
