THE WEEKLY BLOG

Five Princeton athletes to watch

Peter Capkovic ’09 | Men’s tennis
Capkovic, a native of Slovakia, won six of seven matches in Ivy League play as Princeton’s top singles player last spring. His lone loss, to Harvard’s Chris Clayton, came in a third-set tiebreaker.

Katie Lewis-Lamonica ’08 | Women’s lacrosse
Lewis-Lamonica ranked second among Ivy players with 51 goals in 2007. Her 117 career scores have put her on pace to reach the top five on Princeton’s all-time list.

Dan DeGeorge ’09 | Baseball
DeGeorge, the Tigers’ starting shortstop for two seasons, posted a .936 fielding percentage last year and batted .328 in Ivy games to earn second-team All-Ivy honors.

Susannah Aboff ’09 | Women’s golf
Aboff shot even-par or better in four of her 11 competitive rounds during the fall season, leading the Tigers to team wins at the Princeton Invitational and the Nittany Lion Invitational.

Natalie Kim ’08 | Women’s water polo
Kim, an All-Eastern goalie last in 2007, has been a three-year stalwart in the cage for Princeton, which ranked 15th in the CWPA national preseason poll. The Tigers open the season at home Feb. 16 and 17 with four matches in the Princeton Invitational.

Tales of a traveling flag

For the last two years, Denali Barron ’09 has been carrying an orange-and-black checkered flag, “liberated” from a nearby golf course, with an extraordinary goal in mind: take the flag to all seven continents before graduation. With the help of friends and family, she has completed that goal with time to spare, as she explains excerpts from her travel journal, below. A quick guide to the abbreviations: “DB” refers to the author, “TAB” is Tom Barron ’74, and “LH” is Lyra Haas ’09.

July 13, 2006. Uttaranchal, India. Flag crests a new pass, halfway across the world from Colorado. Though swift clouds obscure what are surely spectacular views of the Indian Himalaya, DB anchors Flag among a string of its pious cousins and snaps a picture. Tiny bells, left at 16,000 feet for purposes of luck or prayer, are piled on the ground. Descent from the ridge top follows quickly, for after two weeks of backpacking in the Milam and Ralam Valleys, DB cannot resist the idea of another thatched-roof chai house down the trail.
Dec. 27, 2006. South Georgia Island, South Atlantic Ocean. Flag makes landfall among 300,000 King penguins on Gold Harbour, a mile-long bay on South Georgia Island. The smell of guano and grunts of elephant seals announced this land from several kilometers away. Flag stays very still as a curious bird investigates. Strong sun continues to diminish hanging glaciers that Ernest Shackleton crossed nearly 100 years ago. DB travels in style, returning after a few short hours to the USS Explorer II for tea.
Jan. 12, 2008. Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda, Africa. Two 400-pound silverback gorillas tussle in a bamboo thicket. It’s behavior that one might expect from three- or four-year-olds, but never from these majestic kings of the jungle. Rwanda is full of surprises. Though dozens of birds caw, sing, and warble within earshot, DB and TAB are spellbound: We hear nothing but gorillas breathing, vegetation rustling, one of the silverback’s - playful?! - smacking chest-beats. Other members of our trekking group pale, gape, and giggle in succession. A female with infant looks up, alert, when DB carefully draws Flag from her pocket. Less than a mile from this dense and wild forest, furrowed fields cover every square meter of Rwanda’s thousand hills. In the face of a burgeoning population, resource pressure and extraction, and international instability, can this tiny country save its remarkable National Parkland? Its efforts have been exemplary so far.
Jan. 19, 2008. Princeton, N.J., USA. Six continents accomplished. One to go. Today I, DB, bestow the Flag upon LH ‘09 as she embarks for a semester studying politics in Australia. The condition shall be met, but Flag has many places left to go. Iceland? Turkey? The Galapagos Islands? Even an auspicious Princeton graduation?
William of Orange only knows what will be next.
To read Barron’s complete account, visit PAW Online.

Names in the news

“Time Release,” a percussion concerto by Princeton music professor Steven Mackey, made its New York debut at Carnegie Hall Feb. 9. The piece features the marimba, a resonant type of xylophone, and draws inspiration from Mozart’s piano concertos. … Visiting professor Daoud Kuttab discussed secularism in Turkey and the debate over headscarves in a brief Washington Post online piece posted Feb, 11. … In men’s basketball, six of the Ivy League’s eight head coaches are African-American, The Philadelphia Inquirer noted Feb. 9, including Princeton’s Sydney Johnson ’97 and Brown’s Craig Robinson ’83. “I thought about it on Martin Luther King Day,” Yale coach James Jones told the Inquirer. “I had a meeting with the guys, and I told them I don’t know if I’d be here if not for him.”