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Bridgeport, Conn. – Moments before the women’s basketball team’s NCAA Tournament game against Kansas State on Saturday, head coach Courtney Banghart looked much more nervous than usual. Playing not as a long-shot underdog but in the proverbial first-round toss-up game, 9-seed vs. 8-seed, Princeton came in with the highest expectations of Banghart’s seven trips to the Big Dance as a player and coach.

 

And in the opening minutes, the Princeton players seemed tense as well. Showing a lack of poise and patience early on, the Tigers committed sloppy turnovers and gave up open shots, allowing the Wildcats to take a 5-0 lead that could have been twice that. Sitting in nearly the same spot from which I watched Princeton’s previous two tournament games, all I could think was, “Oh no, it’s happening again.”

 

Last March, Princeton brought a team of tournament-tested players to Maryland, where they faced fifth-seeded Georgetown in the first round. After scoring first, the Tigers were blitzed by a 22-3 Hoyas run that virtually ended the game before the second media timeout. Two years ago, in Tallahassee, Fla., Princeton lasted a little bit longer, but a 13-2 run by sixth-seeded St. John’s turned a one-possession game into a comfortable lead midway through the first half.

 

But this year, things were supposed to be different. With the highest seed and first national ranking in Ivy League history, these Tigers were supposed to be tougher to keep down. And, as it turned out, they were: Princeton responded with a 12-2 run on Saturday, taking a five-point lead at the 12-minute mark.

 

“Before the game, Coach Banghart kept reminding us that it doesn’t matter what happens in the first three minutes, we’re going to be out there for the full 40 minutes,” guard Lauren Edwards ’12 said. “It took us a few minutes to get into our rhythm, but when we finally did, we played well and executed our game plan.”

 

After the Tigers loosened up, the contest became, as Banghart said, “a game of alternating currents.” Kansas State scored seven straight points to re-take the lead, Princeton grabbed the advantage back with four points of its own, and so the rest of the game went. The Wildcats held a four-point lead at halftime, but the Tigers flipped it with a 10-2 run, taking the lead when center Devona Allgood ’12 ripped a missed free throw from a defender’s hands and laid it in while being fouled.

This week was filled with milestones for the women’s basketball program. On Monday, Princeton was rated No. 24 in the Associated Press poll, becoming the first Ivy League team ever listed in the national rankings. And that evening, the Tigers earned a No. 9-seed in the NCAA Tournament, the best seeding ever for a team from the Ancient Eight.

 

But those feats will not be well remembered unless the team achieves another milestone on Saturday: the first NCAA Tournament victory in program history. After losing by double digits to St. John’s and Georgetown in 2010 and 2011, respectively, this season marks the best chance yet for Princeton to win in the postseason.

 

Head coach Courtney Banghart summed up her view in the Ivy League postseason media teleconference earlier this week: “If we do what we do well, we’ll be a really good team.”

 

Fans tuning in to the Tigers’ first-round game against No. 8-seed Kansas State (11:20 a.m. Saturday, ESPN2 or ESPN3) who are expecting a flowing, pretty game of basketball likely will be disappointed. Both teams are defense-oriented and will try to make Saturday’s game as ugly as possible. Kansas State enters the game allowing 56.7 points per game; Princeton holds teams to 35 percent shooting and has not given up more than 60 points in a game since the calendar read 2011.

 

The typical profile of an Ivy League team is “soft,” but that does not describe this year’s Tigers, who rebound better than they do anything else. Over the course of the season, Princeton grabbed 59.6 percent of total missed shots, the third-best mark in the nation; Kansas State was near the average at 49.6 percent, though against tougher competition. Princeton already broke the Ivy League mold by putting up even rebounding numbers against Georgetown and St. John’s, but they’ll need a sizable advantage this year.

 

That is largely because Kansas State should be able to overcome the next-biggest strength of Princeton’s defense, a swarming press designed to force turnovers. The Tigers induced 19.4 miscues per game, but the Wildcats gave it away only 14.5 times and have experience facing high-pressure defenses.

When Princeton’s Rhodes scholars headed off to Oxford, they expected to find historic buildings, world-class scholars, and the intellectual tools with which to tackle some of the world’s most complex problems. But they got one thing they hadn’t bargained for: free time.

 

“I just have so much time to use however I want,” Henry Barmeier ’10 said. “My perception of time is radically different [from before].”

 

For Barmeier, one of the greatest luxuries of the Rhodes experience has been an abundance of time for unstructured learning outside of the classroom. He has used the space in his schedule to learn the guitar, visit art museums, and have long conversations with friends.

 

“I feel more at liberty now to pursue interests for no other reason than because they’re interesting,” he explained. “That really is the heart and soul of the Oxford experience for me: a shift in what I think it means to learn.”

 

Scott Moore ’08, a D.Phil. candidate in politics, said he felt his Oxford lifestyle was a good departure from the pressurized, harried culture at Princeton.

 

“Compare Firestone’s opening hours with those of the Oriental Studies Institute at Oxford, where I did much of my research: 9 a.m. until 6:45 p.m.” he said in an email. “That’s right, you can’t do any work after 6:45 p.m. even if you wanted to. How healthy!”

After finishing 3-19 last season, the men’s volleyball team has been right around .500 all season, remaining at 6-7 overall and 5-5 in EIVA play even after losing two games last weekend. A few factors have led to the Tigers’ resurgence, but none has been larger than the arrival of Cody Kessel ’15.

 

The standout freshman has been Princeton’s go-to hitter from day one, leading the team in kills in 10 of its 13 matches and ranking third in the EIVA with 3.67 kills per set. Though he grew up in Colorado – where boys’ volleyball is not a sanctioned high school varsity sport – Kessel grew up with the game through his father John, who works for USA Volleyball and often was Cody’s teammate in the summers, playing two-on-two volleyball on grass or sand courts.

 

“I really got good when I started playing doubles in the summer …  that was the biggest influence on my game,” Kessel said. “You get a lot of touches playing the two-man game – you come back indoors, and your skills are better.”

 

Like most top players, Kessel hit mostly from the strong (left) side when he was younger – it’s an easier target for young setters to aim for, so good hitters get the most opportunities there – but with the Tigers, he has been swinging from all over the court, performing particularly well from the opposite side.

 

“Without him, our offense would be pretty much nothing. It would be very stagnant,” setter Scott Liljestrom ’12 said. “He can hit literally every set on the court, so that gives us a whole lot of versatility, and it really balances out our offense.”

If the wrestling team had any home-mat advantage at this weekend’s EIWA Championships, it came in a strange form. Accustomed to competing in Dillon Gymnasium, the team instead joined 13 other schools in cavernous Jadwin, where no current Tigers had ever competed in a college meet. The thousands of fans were split well between the 14 squads, with a large Lehigh contingent the most vocal group in attendance.

 

But for head coach Chris Ayres and the rest of the Princeton wrestling family, those details were secondary. In bringing the EIWA meet back to Jadwin – which was once a regular host of the championships but had not held it since 1987 – the Tigers made a statement that their program, once nearly left for dead, is committed to being a real threat again.

 

“It’s more than what I expected. It took everybody in the department to pull this off effectively, and to get that support is amazing,” Ayres said. “I feel really privileged to be a part of the athletic department and the University. They really didn’t have to do this – we haven’t done it in 25 years, it’s not a thought on their minds – but they’re people who do the right thing, and it was time.”

 

The Tigers represented their program ably on the mats as well, led by Garrett Frey ’13 and Dan Kolodzik ’12, each of whom performed well enough to qualify for the NCAA tournament. This year will mark the first time Princeton has sent multiple wrestlers to nationals since 2001.

 

Frey, seeded second at 125 pounds, lived up to his ranking this weekend. None of his first three matches lasted the full time, as the junior earned a technical fall in his first bout and pinned his next two opponents to reach Sunday’s championship, where he dropped a close decision to top-seeded Frank Perrelli.

 

Kolodzik also had punched a ticket to the NCAAs by Saturday afternoon, solidifying his bid with an 11-3 victory over Navy’s Bobby Barnhisel in the quarterfinals. Though he lost to two-time national champion Kyle Dake (Cornell) in the semis, he went on to take a career-best fourth-place finish.

 

But not all of the Tigers ended the meet as happily. Chris Perez ’15 and Adam Krop ’14 competed in large braces after badly injuring their right knees in February. Krop, clearly not at full strength, managed to win his first match, but re-injured his knee when he was taken down hard by eventual champion Matthew Mariacher (American University) late in his quarterfinal bout and hobbled off of the mat.

 

Perez also defeated his first opponent, but not long after Krop’s injury, Perez aggravated his own knee on the same mat and had to be carried off of the surface. Both young wrestlers conceded medical forfeits in their final matches, casting a disappointing shadow over what had been very successful seasons.

 

“This day’s been really hard, watching them sitting in the corner and wondering what’s going to happen next,” Ayres said. “We pulled the plug on both of them – they both wanted to continue, but it just wasn’t the right thing. They just have so much pride, they want to represent the University and themselves, and they don’t want to quit.”

Princeton doesn’t often pit members of different class years against one another, and when it does, the contest usually involves a grassy tumble for a cane on Poe Field.

 

The Whig Senate Chamber hosted a more civilized alternative to Cane Spree Feb. 25: the Class of 1876 Prize Debate. Four students, James Hao ’12, Evan Larson ’13, Anthony Paranzino ’14, and Aaron Hauptman ’15, competed for the historic prize, established in 1886.

 

The debate, held annually on Alumni Day, pairs a senior and a freshman to debate against a junior and sophomore team. The four were selected as the top debaters in their respective class years from a pool of 25 students who competed in preliminary rounds. Based on the strength of the preliminary competition, Chelsea Ayres ’12, chairwoman of the Woodrow Wilson Honorary Debate Panel, introduced the four as “the best their class has to offer.”

 

With notes in hand, the two teams faced off across an intricately carved table in the center of the Senate Chamber. Students, alumni, and parents were seated around the debaters, with the judges, Ayres, Benjamin Weisman ’11, and Jason Anton ’10, poised at the chamber’s main podium.

 

Scholar and international affairs expert Joseph S. Nye Jr. ’58 spoke to packed audiences in Robertson Hall Feb. 21 and 22, discussing American presidential leadership in foreign policy as part of the 2012 Richard Ullman Lecture Series.

 

Nye, a former dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, worked with collaborator (and current Princeton professor) Robert Keohane to develop the theory of neoliberalism in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence. He also has held posts that included chairman of the National Intelligence Council in 1993-94 and assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in the Clinton administration.

 

Nye's first lecture focused on the efficacy of seven presidents who presided over what Nye called the “American era.” He separated the definition of leadership into two categories — style and objectives — with two subtypes each. Leaders, he said, can have inspirational or transactional styles and transformational or incremental objectives.

 

According to Nye, the differences between broadly transformational and transactional leadership can also be described in terms of “soft power” and “hard power,” with the ideal mix of the two being “smart power,” which uses “contextual IQ” to combine resources and understand the situation.

With blowout victories over Harvard and Dartmouth this weekend, the women’s basketball team clinched a third straight conference championship and became the nation’s first team — men’s or women’s — to officially secure a trip to the NCAA Tournament. That Princeton won the league title is not much of a surprise, but how it has happened should raise eyebrows.

 

The Tigers are 38-1 in conference play over the past three seasons, and their dominance has reached new heights this year. All but one of Princeton’s Ivy League triumphs have come by at least 25 points (see graph), and its average margin of victory in conference play is a whopping 32.9 points per game, far and away the most dominant performance this league has ever seen. The current point differential record for a 14-game season is held by 1996-97 Harvard, at +22.1. (The 2010-11 and ‘09-10 Tigers rank second and third.)

 

“It’s crazy,” head coach Courtney Banghart said. “I told them, don’t take that for granted — this is because of how you practice. It’s pretty special.”

 

Even with the conference crown in hand, Princeton still has something to play for. The difference between 14-0 and 13-1 would likely mean at least one seed line, maybe two, when the NCAA Tournament brackets are released in two weeks, which will be very important for a program looking for its first March Madness victory. But if recent results are any indication, closing strong will not be a challenge for the Tigers, even with two of their toughest games of the season coming next week at Yale and Brown.

 

Don’t be fooled by the gaudy scoring numbers: Princeton’s true strength lies at the defensive end. With a pressure-oriented defense and players who take advantage of opportunities in transition, the Tigers play fast-paced games, which lead to more scoring chances for each team. Their 78 points per game have come on an average of 72.4 possessions — still impressive, but hardly other-worldly. The offense revolves around a crazy ability to rebound; the Tigers have grabbed an unheard-of 49 percent of their own misses in league play (a normal rate is in the low 30s).

Answering a reporter’s questions in the White House Rose Garden last year, Michelle Shearer ’95 spoke of the need to “elevate the teaching profession.” Teachers, she said, are not adequately recognized for their service, and the teaching profession is looked down on as a lesser calling, for smart people who just didn’t have what it take in areas like medicine or business.

 

Shearer has been rising above those preconceived notions since she first set out to become a teacher. A pre-medical student early in her Princeton career, Shearer volunteered at Trenton’s Marie Katzenbach School for the Deaf and eventually decided that teaching — not medicine — was her life’s passion. Since then her biography has included stops at the Maryland School for the Deaf, where she taught advanced placement chemistry, and at a Maryland public high school, where she taught chemistry in the international baccalaureate program.

 

Last May, Shearer was honored at the White House as the National Teacher of the Year, and since then, she has traveled throughout the United States and to China and Japan, speaking about how to improve the standard of education around the world. On Feb. 21, she spoke to a group of students, alumni, and faculty from Princeton’s Program in Teacher Preparation on what it meant for her to pursue K-12 teaching at a time when her classmates at Princeton were preparing for law school, medical school, or business.

When I arrived at the Jadwin squash courts on Sunday, about 45 minutes before the national championship match began, I knew that my only chance to actually see any squash being played would be to grab a seat right away and stay there no matter what. I settled for a spot near the left side of Court 3, which also offered a view of the neighboring court’s scoreboard. As it turned out, I picked the perfect place.

 

Sure enough, the crowd was standing-room-only well before the match began, as bystanders piled three rows deep behind the seats (and shorter fans were left to suffer). Each time I thought people couldn’t be packed any tighter, more came. Princeton had the home support, but the Trinity dynasty travels quite well, and plenty of fans were wearing blue and gold and cheering at inconvenient times.

 

Since nobody alone could see more than a small piece of the story as it was being written, text messages flew through the C-floor of Jadwin, relaying news of a 3-0 victory by Tyler Osborne ’15 to the outer courts and a 3-2 squeaker by Clay Blackiston ’12 back inside as Princeton took an early 2-1 lead. But in the second shift, the tone shifted. Fans on the outer courts said No. 2 Chris Callis ’12 had to win; inside, he lost in five. When Samuel Kang ’15 fell in four excruciatingly long games, Trinity was up 4-2 and needed only one more win to retain its crown.

 

New players brought a new wave of energy. Dylan Ward ’14 continued a stellar season, winning games two, three, and four easily at No. 7, while No. 1 Todd Harrity ’13 took care of business in three. That left only Kelly Shannon ’12 and Reinhold Hergeth, as hundreds and hundreds of people converged on my Court 3 for a glimpse of the action.

 

Shannon, who missed the early part of the season with a shoulder injury, has an appearance that is more “baseball catcher” than “squash player.” But his incredible hands make up for any shortcoming in agility, and after falling behind 8-4, the senior blitzed back to win the first game 13-11. He dominated the second game as well, including a behind-the-back volley to win a late point that seemed an omen of good fortune.

 

But Princeton’s seniors, including Shannon, knew better than to assume anything. In 2009, the last time the Tigers reached the championship — and the last time it was held at Jadwin — Mauricio Sanchez ’09 was ahead 2-0 in the deciding match before Trinity’s Baset Chaudhry pulled off a shocking comeback. Seven times in the last 13 years, the Tigers faced Trinity in the finals; seven times, they came up short.

The final project for VIS 261 comes with only one guideline: a five-minute time limit. This fall, eight students in Introductory Video and Film Production wrote and directed their own short films, under the guidance of professor Keith Sanborn. A screening of the students' work was held at the Lewis Center for the Arts on Tuesday night.

According to Sanborn, the class is not so much about technical skills as it is about “learning how to see.” “I want students to get in touch with their own imaginations,” he said. They practice the nuts and bolts of the filmmaking process, including lighting, camerawork, and sound editing, but they are encouraged to “take what they need” and “find their way.”

Judging by the diverse showing, Sanborn's students took that message to heart. Their short films encompassed a wide range of styles, from photo montage to documentary to point-of-view cinematography.

Rivka Cohen '12 offered a heartfelt paean to home and friendship with her film, “This Is NOT a House,” set in her West Virginia backyard. Agisae Kim '15 tackled everyday “insincerity” in “This Is You,” which featured subtitles revealing the inner thoughts of characters as they spoke.

For one night, the men’s basketball team was back in the spotlight.

 

While 2011 was Princeton’s year — the 8-0 start to Ivy League play, the buzzer-beater in the Ivy playoff, and the last-second finish against Kentucky — 2012 had belonged to Harvard. The Crimson won its first eight games and brought a 21-2 record into Jadwin Gymnasium on Saturday, dreaming of a perfect Ivy League season after sweeping the first half of conference play.

 

Most eyes were on the nationally ranked visitors, who could have avenged their playoff loss and taken a nearly insurmountable lead in the Ivy League by completing a road sweep of the league’s traditional powers, Penn and Princeton. But in front of the ESPNU cameras, the Tigers — sitting at just 3-3 in league play — stole the show. After trailing by five points at halftime, Princeton evened the game early in the second period, setting the stage for a back-and-forth slugfest that had 5,266 fans — the largest crowd at Jadwin in almost exactly two years — constantly on their feet. After 10 minutes of tense action, the Tigers smacked Harvard with a 13-3 run late in the game and held on for a 70-62 victory.

 

Whether or not Princeton is the second-best team in the Ivy League will be determined in the next four weeks; Penn and Yale have better records and head-to-head victories, though Princeton will be at home for both rematches. But after handing Harvard four of its first last five Ivy League losses — and winning 23 consecutive meetings at Jadwin Gymnasium — it seems clear that the Tigers are the Crimson’s toughest matchup.

 

Princeton has gone through its share of struggles offensively this season, and against a Harvard defense that came in allowing just 53.6 points per game — third-fewest in the nation — it seemed likely that the Tigers would struggle. Instead, they dropped 70 points on 61 possessions, one of their best performances this year. The method was familiar to any Jadwin veteran: Cut to the hoop.

 

“Harvard likes to get up into the passing lanes, and that’s when our backdoor offense is huge for us,” point guard T.J. Bray ’14 said. “A lot of stuff was open backdoor tonight.”