Princeton Becomes The First
Analysis
PRINCETON, N.J. — Seven wins.
If you’re looking for a feel-good story for the 2016 season, look no further than the ugly frog that turned into the handsome Princeton Tigers.
On May 15th of last year, that’s what Princeton had on the left side of the ledger for the entire 2015 season. Seven freaking wins.
Fast forward to around 6:15pm on Sunday and you see a team with two touchdowns and a field goal more in the win column. You also see a team so bent on being resilient that their coach went out and bought a book by the same name for every player to read last summer.
“Resilience” a book by Eric Greitens.
The 2016 Princeton Tiger baseball team will be synonymous with that term forever. And it certainly showed this weekend, especially in their two wins today, which gave them the Ivy League Championship over a gutty, young Yale team.
From seven wins to 24 wins, an Ivy League title and a bid to the NCAAs. Not a bad bounce-back, right?
“Our guys care so much for each other, they deserve this,” Princeton head coach Steve Bradley said after the game. “We’re talking seven wins last year. Only one other team in the country had fewer wins than we did, somebody had four wins. We were at the bottom of every statistical category, but we worked hard.”
“I tried telling people that just because you have a losing season doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad season,” coach said. “We took our lumps in those seven wins, but our kids went to work every day in the off-season. I’ve never given our guys a book to read until I gave them ‘Resilience’ last summer. And there is so much that came out of that.”
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