Princeton University Athletics
100 Years of Princeton Basketball
September 13, 2001 | General
The lineage begins with Butch van Breda Kolff, a basketball and soccer player at Princeton who would leave to coach at Lafayette, where one his best players would be a Little All-America from Bethlehem named Pete Carril.
Van Breda Kolff would leave Lafay-ette for Princeton, where he and the son of a banker from Missouri named Bill Bradley would take Princeton basketball to unprecedented heights.
Carril, meanwhile, would conclude a successful high school coaching career in Reading, Pa., where one his players would be a guard named Gary Walters, who would go from Carril's tutelage to join van Breda Kolff and Bradley at Princeton and then embark on a coaching career that saw him mentor at Union College a young guard from the Jersey Shore named Bill Carmody.
When van Breda Kolff left for the NBA, he was replaced at Princeton by Carril, and the first of coach Carril's 29 teams included a dynamic scorer named Geoff Petrie, who would go on to a career in the NBA that saw him first be named Rookie of the Year and, when his playing career was over, became one of the league's top executives.
Shortly after Petrie left, Carril coached John Berger, who remains with the program today as the president of the Friends of Princeton Basketball. Carril's coaching staff would eventually include first Walters and later Carmody, and among the players to play for Carril would be a slender passing forward from Washington, D.C., named John Thompson.
Walters would eventually become director of athletics at Princeton, and upon Carril's retirement, he would hire first Carmody and then Thompson as head coach. Carril, of course, would leave Princeton for the NBA, where he would become an assistant coach under Petrie. As for Bradley, well, he never followed the Princeton basketball genealogy, choosing instead to try his luck in the far less stable field of politics.
Bradley, without question the greatest player ever to wear a Princeton uniform, represented all of the players to play at Princeton for van Breda Kolff and presented to his coach a ball remembering his record of 103-31 and four Ivy titles in five seasons.
Petrie, representing all of Carril's players at Princeton, presented his coach a basketball featuring an inscription remembering his 514-261 record, his 13 Ivy League championships and his 11 NCAA tournament appearances.