Princeton University Athletics
Players Mentioned
Into the Sea of Orange: A Look at Princeton Women's Basketball's Trip to Tennessee
December 31, 2005 | Women's Basketball
Dec. 31, 2005
This feature appeared in the game program for Dec. 30 against Fairleigh Dickinson and Jan. 3 against Lafayette.
By Andrew Borders
Princeton Office of Athletic Communications
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Next stop was the home of Eleanor and Bill Barron, the parents of head coach Richard Barron, for a Southern barbecue lunch. It was complete with green beans, cole slaw and all the pulled pork anyone inside the beautiful brick home on a quiet Knoxville street could put down. Gathered around tables in three different rooms, players talked about the next day's opponent, laughed over inside jokes, watched one of the many SportsCenter morning replays and cooed over the twin girls watched by Maureen Barron, Princeton's softball coach and wife of Richard. Once every visitor had his or her fill, it was back on the purple bus to the hotel and a much-needed nap to make up for the early alarm clocks buzzing that morning across Old Nassau.
The aforementioned sweet tea, which appeared in the hotel in an unmarked gallon container, was passed among rooms like an illicit substance. As afternoon turned into evening, players awoke from their slumber to enter Thompson-Boling Arena for the first time on the trip. Passing through an opaque curtain, the players' mental pictures of what the arena of the nation's top team must look like turned into eye-popping reality. Bright orange seats rose several stories from the court. Those swirling to look at all the banners risked an immediate case of vertigo while taking in six women's national title banners, more conference championship flags than the rafters on one side of the arena could hold, and men's orange conference title and NCAA and NIT appearance announcements trying to keep up with their women's white counterparts across the floor. While it was several times the size of any other arena on the schedule, the two-hour practice went like any other, outside of the letters S-E-C staring back at practicing free-throw shooters at the end of the key and the practice-ending speech from Barron trying to put the next day's game into perspective. All the while, Prichard tried to hurry the breaking-in process of her unexpectedly new basketball shoes, loaned by Tennessee with her regular sneakers still somewhere in airport purgatory. The team dined at a riverside restaurant with portions challenging for a group with an appetite more geared for hoops than hosses, try as they might. With a stomach full of food compounding the short sleep from the night before, Barron's request that the players get right to bed rather than stay up late was met with no protest. The day anticipated since the 2005-06 schedule formed was just ahead.
After a team breakfast at the hotel's buffet, the bus waited outside once again, headed back to Thompson-Boling Arena for one last practice before that evening's game. But before the Tigers could run through any of their plays one last time in advance of their toughest test of the season, a woman tugging 891 victories and a half-dozen NCAA Championship trophies appeared from one of the four corner tunnels. Pat Summitt's interruption was more than welcome. The winningest coach in college basketball history, men's or women's, led the Tiger party first into a film room, where chairs straight out of the deck of the Starship Enterprise sat perched in front of a screen. A concrete pole a few feet thick, scrawled dozens of times over with names of Lady Vols gone by, stood to the side. And with 24 pairs of ears fixed on her words, Summitt spoke of the "graduation pole" ritual in which players who earn their Tennessee degrees eagerly autograph the white mass of masonry, encouraging Tiger players, by nature among the most academically inclined college students in the country, to achieve their degrees and prepare for life after basketball.
From there, Summitt led her visitors into Tennessee's locker room where current players are reminded every time they enter of the greats that held their lockers before them with names like Holdsclaw and Catchings labeled on the partitions. On the other side of the shower area and around a corner was a pool table, where Summitt's son Tyler shot some billiards with a buddy and Tiger players filed past into an adjacent room with a big-screen television and the six NCAA trophies displayed in a glass cabinet. In their orange and black practice jerseys, the Princeton players piled onto a sectional as Summitt turned a cushy ottoman into a sage's lectern, reflecting on more than three decades in women's basketball. She took questions from players, and Becky Brown, meeting Summitt for the second time after a visit by the coach to her school in Nashville years earlier, asked about Summitt's proudest basketball moment, presenting the coach with the impossible task of picking just one. Shelly Slemp discovered that both she and Summitt grew up on dairy farms, and that Slemp's cows are milked three times a day to twice for the Summitt family bovines. Prichard, her mind temporarily off her missing basketball gear, told Summitt she'd read both of the coach's books and asked if a third was on the way. Yes, the coach said, but only after she retires. Inspired from the meeting, Princeton players completed their practice and stood just five hours from their tangle with the nation's top team.
Fireworks, a spotlight and a rollerblading dog greeted Princeton as part of the pre-game introduction circus at Thompson-Boling Arena. Following the relatively muted and perfunctory introduction of Princeton players, the lights were dimmed and Lady Vol starters charged through a makeshift door to their announced name. Pyrotechnics shot off from behind the basket and the Tennessee canine mascot Smoky zoomed around the court on inline skates, impressively so considering the weight of Smoky's head sitting on the fellow's shoulders. The lights came up and basketball became basketball again, pre-game spectacle and the 10,000-plus people through the turnstiles aside. The largest crowd ever to see the Princeton women play witnessed a game that was never really in question as the closest the Tigers got was 7-5 just over two minutes into the contest. With Prichard's No. 13 uniform still either in Newark or some baggage holding area elsewhere, the 5-11 forward squeezed into the No. 5 jersey of 5-7 Lillie Romeiser, who became part of an interesting temporary solution to the unexpected uniform problem. In the second half, senior Katy O'Brien handed her jersey to Romeiser, who appeared in the game with one of the numeral twos on each side blackened out with electric tape. Thanks to the adventure of airline travel, the Princeton roster now had a No. 2 where none had appeared before.
Afterward, coaches discussed the monumental task ahead of them, answering the multitude of questions raised by the Tennessee game. The next morning, all the Tigers who weren't claimed by parents who traveled to Knoxville for the game boarded another early-morning bus for the local airport, ticketed for flights ending up in destinations ranging from Honolulu for Elyse Umeda to Newark for Julia Berger and staff. And like her teammates, Ali Prichard was headed home for the holiday eager to see family but carrying an additional request. She hopes her familiar sneakers and jersey are among the items under the tree this Christmas.