Showing posts with label Princeton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Princeton. Show all posts

16 November 2025

“You were ON today”: Closing out soccer season with a bang

Obviously, I've been derelict in posting, to say the least. But I want to celebrate the culmination of my college soccer season today.

My spouse often asks how my broadcast went, and after one of many "OK" responses, or perhaps it was an "it could have been better" night, she said, "You never say 'Good' or 'great' when I ask."

I had to admit it was true. I'm hard on myself and tend to focus more on the things I think I should have done better than the things that went right.

But today, my last game of the season, the Ivy League men's championship game, called in person on the Princeton campus, felt right. It was an exciting game, with an early goal, a dramatic penalty kick save, and a late goal. It looked great, on a crisp, sunny afternoon with just enough fall foliage still lingering. And in addition to my knowledge of the teams, player identification, storyline development, interviews, chemistry with my partner, and on-camera hit, all of which felt good today, I also felt like I nailed the big moments.

I haven't listened back to any of it, to be honest, but all of the big spots felt good as they happened. My partner liked the goal calls, and I spoke long enough to punctuate it but quickly enough to lay out and let the pictures and sounds of player and fan reactions carry the mail.

A colleague texted me later, "You were on today!" and it took me a second to figure out what he meant. But I'll gladly take it. What a fun morning and afternoon, a great way to close my portion of the college soccer schedule!



28 February 2016

Quick calls from my first college hockey broadcast

I haven't even watched this whole game through yet, but I know I had a lot of fun calling the Princeton-Brown men's hockey game on Saturday night, I know it was even harder than I expected, and I know I'm proud to have accomplished the goal of calling even one college hockey game. Although I certainly hope there are more in store!

Via the teams' respective Twitter accounts, here are most of the key plays from Saturday night:




31 January 2012

A Pilgrimage to The Palestra

The Palestra
I made my first visit to The Palestra Monday night to see Penn play Princeton in one of college basketball’s oldest rivalries. I arrived at both the venue and the rivalry as a distinct outsider: I did not attend either school, nor do I have a geographic affiliation with either (I was raised in North Jersey, far away from Princeton, and I am only living in Philadelphia now for about nine months). So if I don’t understand the complete backstory to a tradition or quirk, please forgive me.

Opened on Jan. 1, 1927, The Palestra is Ivy League library on the outside and modified airplane hangar on the inside. Everything about the place is old, but I mean it in a good way. It is fabled, it is history. Walking the three blocks from my apartment on this cold winter night, I felt I was gravitating toward the arena with hundreds, maybe thousands of others wearing winter coats with the collars turned up. I felt a little bit as if I had stepped into one of John Tunis’s unforgettable books that described a 1930s Ivy League education, Iron Duke and The Duke Decides, except I was at Penn to watch basketball rather than at Harvard to watch track.