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Princeton University Athletics
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/ Men's Lacrosse
Twin Spin
March 25, 2008 | Men's Lacrosse
The hallway that separates the visiting football locker room and the media room at Baltimore's M&T Bank Stadium is no more than six or seven feet wide.
Princeton men's lacrosse coach Bill Tierney is now speaking to his team on the locker room side of the hallway. His 47 players sit in front of him, listening for about 10 minutes. As he looks back across the locker room, perhaps he notices the face in the last row of the sprawled players, all the way to the right.
Then it's time to walk across the hall and into the media room. Within seconds, he and a few of the higher-profile Princeton players are at the head of the room. Perhaps, as the 20 or so media members begin their interrogation, Tierney notices the face standing behind the last row of chairs, camera around the neck, questions at the ready.
And perhaps he's struck by the fact that it's the same face he saw on the other side of the hall.
Just not the same person.
On one side of the hallway, Evan Magruder, senior back-up goalie for the Tigers, is now showering with the rest of the team. On the other side, Trent Magruder, senior writer for the Daily Princetonian student newspaper, is going through his own post-game ritual.
The two are identical twins. Oh, are they identical. Even by identical twin standards, these two are nearly impossible to tell apart.
“I have no idea which one is which,” Tierney says. “I got used to that part of it a long time ago. All I see is goodness coming out that whole family. When I look one way, I see one kid who is seeing 300 to 500 shots a week in practice with little or no playing time to show for it. When I look the other way, I see his brother who is doing a thousand things himself, who is giving his time and giving an extra effort for the lacrosse program in his realm, the newspaper.”
The two came to Princeton together, neither as recruited athletes. They will finally go their own ways next year, when Evan heads to law school at Cornell and Trent goes to medical school at Johns Hopkins.
There's no way to tell if their situation is unique. It is probably true, though, that there are not many college teams where the sibling of one of the players covers the team for the school paper. There are even fewer of those where the two are identical twins.
The result is the now-normal but no less amazing sight of the two of them outside of the Princeton team room as they greet each other after a game. Or, more recently, the sight of the entire men's lacrosse team at Baker Rink for the ECAC men's hockey quarterfinals against Yale, with an extra Magruder sprinkled in. As they sat in the front row at Baker, separated by a few of the lacrosse players, the casual observer could not tell Evan from Trent.
“People walk up to me and say hello or say ?hi Trent,' not realizing I'm Evan,” Evan says. “I just go along with it. I'll say ?hey, what's up?' I'll speak in very anonymous terms of reference. Most of the guys on the team can tell us apart. Freshmen get very confused the first time Trent interviews them.”
Evan is not usually among the players requested for interviews. His classmate Alex Hewit was a highly recruited goalie who has twice been an All-America at Princeton, and Hewit is backed up by another highly recruited goalie, Nikhil Ashra. Magruder understands clearly his role on the team.
“Evan is the type of guy that everyone loves to be around because he is fun and always positive,” Hewit says. “Being a goalie, I get to spend a lot of time with him, and he truly loves the sport, the team and Princeton lacrosse. His attitude is contagious and spreads around everyone who he hangs out with. I can tell him and Trent apart. It didn't take me too long once I got to know them, but in the beginning, I couldn't tell them apart easily at all.”
Magruder has watched as Hewit has played almost all of every game since the two have been teammates. The minutes that don't go to Hewit go to Ashra.
“I get to play lacrosse five days a week,” he says. “If I don't get to play for 60 minutes on Saturday, so what? Being on the lacrosse team has been the single most important experience for me at this University. I consider my physical education on the field as important as my academic education. The lessons that physical sports and physical competition teach you are so important and so unique, and they're missing for so many kids who don't play sports.”
Magruder has appeared in one game in his Princeton career, going a little more than four minutes while making one save and not allowing a goal in last year's 17-3 win over Bellarmine. Most of the time, he has the rather unenviable job of seeing hundreds of shots a week in practice.
“He is unselfish in a selfish day and age,” Tierney says. “The guys love him and think the world of him. This fall, Nikhil was hurt, and we were playing Maryland when Alex got a penalty in the second quarter. Evan had to go in the game, and he made a save. When he did, the bench erupted like it was the fourth quarter of a national championship game.”
Magruder was not a high school All-America. He and his brother grew up in Washington, D.C., near the National Cathedral, a few hundred yards away from where Princeton All-America midfielder Mark Kovler did, though the Magruder twins did not know Kovler as kids. The two are the only children in their family, and they grew up in typical twin fashion.
“We had great matching costumes when we were four year olds,” Evan says. “We were dinosaurs. Stegosauruses. That was great. We didn't necessarily get dressed up the same way, but we dress alike, which makes it harder for people to tell us apart.”
The Magruders attended St. Albans, the same school that produced Princeton's all-time leading scorer, Jesse Hubbard. Both twins ran cross country, and Evan was a goalie in lacrosse on a team that included former Maryland goalie Harry Alford.
“There were two goalies in my grade,” Evan says. “We were both in Alford's shadow. When he graduated, the other goalie and I split time for our senior year. I had some small, small, small recruiting stuff from Division III colleges. Trent and I figured we'd apply to college early, and we visited a bunch of schools. We never explicitly had a goal of going to the same school, but I'm glad we did in hindsight. I almost applied to Columbia instead, but we both applied to Princeton.”
They both were accepted. Trent immediately went to work with the student newspaper, while Evan spent a year playing on the club lacrosse team.
“Coming to Princeton, I had no idea how I would adjust to the academic environment,” Evan says. “I figured I would be ridiculously swamped with work and wouldn't have time for anything else, so I decided not to try to walk on my freshman year. I played a little club in the spring of freshman year. It was a lot of fun, but it didn't have the structure and intensity of daily practices that I wanted. So in May of my freshman year, I met briefly with Coach T and asked him about walking on. He was very welcoming and quite receptive, and told me to work hard over the summer and meet with him again in September. I did those things, came back for fall tryouts and got lucky enough to make the team.”
For Evan, making the team meant mostly being used as a goalie to take some of the practice load off of the others.
“A lot of guys come in and say they'll be happy to do whatever and just be on the team, and then they don't realize what that's really going to be like,” Tierney says. “With him, he's really happy to be part of it. There's not one ounce of jealousy about not playing. He and his family have been so positive about Alex [Hewit].”
It was Trent who actually first broached the subject with Tierney, who then was confused by the two for the first time.
“One day, Trent walked up to me and mentioned that his brother was a goalie who'd love to play, if we were looking for an extra goalie,” Tierney says. “Then, a few days later, Evan came into my office and starts talking to me, and I was like ?didn't we already have this conversation?' ”
Magruder's weekdays have left him bruised at times, though it's never dappened his spirits.
“I see between 100 and 200 shots a day,” Evan says. “Depends on the day. I've gotten hit in thighs pretty badly. And sometimes the shoulders and biceps. I like being the goalie because you have the ultimate control over the game. There's nothing better than being the goalie in a one-goal game. Everything starts with you.”
While Evan is going through the rigors of practice, Trent is working with the staff at the Daily Princetonian, or “Prince” as it is often known.
“I started working there to have something to be involved with,” Trent says. “When I got there, I told them I knew about lacrosse, so that's how I got started covering the team. That's when Evan was on the club team as a freshman.”
For the editors of the Prince, a typical day can be even more overwhelming than that of a varsity athlete. The NCAA may regulate the number of hours athletes can put in in a week, but the newspaper must come out, regardless of how long it takes. It is a Sunday through Thursday operation.
The Daily Princetonian editors came up with a system of two shifts. The first begins at 4:30 and runs until 7 and consists of organization and copy editing. The evening shift would begin at 7 and run until the layout of the paper was done and it had been sent electronically to the offices on Witherspoon Street of the Princeton Packet, where it is ultimately printed. It is often well after midnight when the editors are done.
“It's a grind,” says Trent, who also found time to volunteer as an EMT in West Windsor. “Premed classes can start to pile up. There are a lot of science classes with labs. It starts to pile up. But the more you do, the more focused you get. I found it manageable, but not easy, to get everything done. I like to think of myself as effective and efficient. Putting out the paper is definitely like being on a team. There's definitely the fostering of a team mentality.”
From their opposite vantage points, the twins can often hear different words coming from Tierney. It can put them in a difficult situation when it comes to journalistic integrity, being a good teammate and normal brotherly communication.
“He'll ask me what the reporters asked and what T said,” Trent says. “Sometimes I have to use a little discretion. My brother is on the team, so needless to say everything I hear can't get into the paper. I'll ask him what was said in the locker room. I like to hear the difference between what the players hear and what I hear. Evan can give me details about what to look for during a game, that sort of thing. He's not really guarded, though he does say ?don't put that in the paper' to me a lot. It's not like I'm going to anyway.”
The Daily Princetonian sports department has spawned any number of graduates who have gone on to careers in journalism, including in recent years Grant Wahl of Sports Illustrated and Shirley Wang of the Wall Street Journal. Trent's postgraduate plans will take him to, of all places, Hopkins.
“I'd like to be a surgeon,” he says. “I like to be on my feet. I like to work with my hands. It seems interesting. They say you always change your mind when you get to med school, so we'll see. To be able to get into Princeton first and then medical school makes me feel blessed. I try to work hard, and I feel like I've been very lucky as well. Now I have to work hard to make the most of it.”
There is still the matter of the rest of this men's lacrosse season. Evan continues in his role with the Tigers, while Trent continues to settle in either in the press box or on the sideline with a camera.
They see it all, between them, everything that happens with the Princeton men's lacrosse team. Some of it can be read in the Prince; much of it probably stays between the two.
Have they ever tried to trade places? No. Evan says he wanted to, but Trent would never go for it. Maybe it's because he likes his own view better than he would if he was the brother who had the lacrosse balls flying at him a few hundred times a week.
Either way, it's worked out for both of them, and for Princeton lacrosse.
Two brothers. Two success stories.
One face.
- By Jerry Price
Princeton men's lacrosse coach Bill Tierney is now speaking to his team on the locker room side of the hallway. His 47 players sit in front of him, listening for about 10 minutes. As he looks back across the locker room, perhaps he notices the face in the last row of the sprawled players, all the way to the right.
Then it's time to walk across the hall and into the media room. Within seconds, he and a few of the higher-profile Princeton players are at the head of the room. Perhaps, as the 20 or so media members begin their interrogation, Tierney notices the face standing behind the last row of chairs, camera around the neck, questions at the ready.
And perhaps he's struck by the fact that it's the same face he saw on the other side of the hall.
Just not the same person.
On one side of the hallway, Evan Magruder, senior back-up goalie for the Tigers, is now showering with the rest of the team. On the other side, Trent Magruder, senior writer for the Daily Princetonian student newspaper, is going through his own post-game ritual.
The two are identical twins. Oh, are they identical. Even by identical twin standards, these two are nearly impossible to tell apart.
“I have no idea which one is which,” Tierney says. “I got used to that part of it a long time ago. All I see is goodness coming out that whole family. When I look one way, I see one kid who is seeing 300 to 500 shots a week in practice with little or no playing time to show for it. When I look the other way, I see his brother who is doing a thousand things himself, who is giving his time and giving an extra effort for the lacrosse program in his realm, the newspaper.”
The two came to Princeton together, neither as recruited athletes. They will finally go their own ways next year, when Evan heads to law school at Cornell and Trent goes to medical school at Johns Hopkins.
There's no way to tell if their situation is unique. It is probably true, though, that there are not many college teams where the sibling of one of the players covers the team for the school paper. There are even fewer of those where the two are identical twins.
The result is the now-normal but no less amazing sight of the two of them outside of the Princeton team room as they greet each other after a game. Or, more recently, the sight of the entire men's lacrosse team at Baker Rink for the ECAC men's hockey quarterfinals against Yale, with an extra Magruder sprinkled in. As they sat in the front row at Baker, separated by a few of the lacrosse players, the casual observer could not tell Evan from Trent.
“People walk up to me and say hello or say ?hi Trent,' not realizing I'm Evan,” Evan says. “I just go along with it. I'll say ?hey, what's up?' I'll speak in very anonymous terms of reference. Most of the guys on the team can tell us apart. Freshmen get very confused the first time Trent interviews them.”
Evan is not usually among the players requested for interviews. His classmate Alex Hewit was a highly recruited goalie who has twice been an All-America at Princeton, and Hewit is backed up by another highly recruited goalie, Nikhil Ashra. Magruder understands clearly his role on the team.
“Evan is the type of guy that everyone loves to be around because he is fun and always positive,” Hewit says. “Being a goalie, I get to spend a lot of time with him, and he truly loves the sport, the team and Princeton lacrosse. His attitude is contagious and spreads around everyone who he hangs out with. I can tell him and Trent apart. It didn't take me too long once I got to know them, but in the beginning, I couldn't tell them apart easily at all.”
Magruder has watched as Hewit has played almost all of every game since the two have been teammates. The minutes that don't go to Hewit go to Ashra.
“I get to play lacrosse five days a week,” he says. “If I don't get to play for 60 minutes on Saturday, so what? Being on the lacrosse team has been the single most important experience for me at this University. I consider my physical education on the field as important as my academic education. The lessons that physical sports and physical competition teach you are so important and so unique, and they're missing for so many kids who don't play sports.”
Magruder has appeared in one game in his Princeton career, going a little more than four minutes while making one save and not allowing a goal in last year's 17-3 win over Bellarmine. Most of the time, he has the rather unenviable job of seeing hundreds of shots a week in practice.
“He is unselfish in a selfish day and age,” Tierney says. “The guys love him and think the world of him. This fall, Nikhil was hurt, and we were playing Maryland when Alex got a penalty in the second quarter. Evan had to go in the game, and he made a save. When he did, the bench erupted like it was the fourth quarter of a national championship game.”
Magruder was not a high school All-America. He and his brother grew up in Washington, D.C., near the National Cathedral, a few hundred yards away from where Princeton All-America midfielder Mark Kovler did, though the Magruder twins did not know Kovler as kids. The two are the only children in their family, and they grew up in typical twin fashion.
“We had great matching costumes when we were four year olds,” Evan says. “We were dinosaurs. Stegosauruses. That was great. We didn't necessarily get dressed up the same way, but we dress alike, which makes it harder for people to tell us apart.”
The Magruders attended St. Albans, the same school that produced Princeton's all-time leading scorer, Jesse Hubbard. Both twins ran cross country, and Evan was a goalie in lacrosse on a team that included former Maryland goalie Harry Alford.
“There were two goalies in my grade,” Evan says. “We were both in Alford's shadow. When he graduated, the other goalie and I split time for our senior year. I had some small, small, small recruiting stuff from Division III colleges. Trent and I figured we'd apply to college early, and we visited a bunch of schools. We never explicitly had a goal of going to the same school, but I'm glad we did in hindsight. I almost applied to Columbia instead, but we both applied to Princeton.”
They both were accepted. Trent immediately went to work with the student newspaper, while Evan spent a year playing on the club lacrosse team.
“Coming to Princeton, I had no idea how I would adjust to the academic environment,” Evan says. “I figured I would be ridiculously swamped with work and wouldn't have time for anything else, so I decided not to try to walk on my freshman year. I played a little club in the spring of freshman year. It was a lot of fun, but it didn't have the structure and intensity of daily practices that I wanted. So in May of my freshman year, I met briefly with Coach T and asked him about walking on. He was very welcoming and quite receptive, and told me to work hard over the summer and meet with him again in September. I did those things, came back for fall tryouts and got lucky enough to make the team.”
For Evan, making the team meant mostly being used as a goalie to take some of the practice load off of the others.
“A lot of guys come in and say they'll be happy to do whatever and just be on the team, and then they don't realize what that's really going to be like,” Tierney says. “With him, he's really happy to be part of it. There's not one ounce of jealousy about not playing. He and his family have been so positive about Alex [Hewit].”
It was Trent who actually first broached the subject with Tierney, who then was confused by the two for the first time.
“One day, Trent walked up to me and mentioned that his brother was a goalie who'd love to play, if we were looking for an extra goalie,” Tierney says. “Then, a few days later, Evan came into my office and starts talking to me, and I was like ?didn't we already have this conversation?' ”
Magruder's weekdays have left him bruised at times, though it's never dappened his spirits.
“I see between 100 and 200 shots a day,” Evan says. “Depends on the day. I've gotten hit in thighs pretty badly. And sometimes the shoulders and biceps. I like being the goalie because you have the ultimate control over the game. There's nothing better than being the goalie in a one-goal game. Everything starts with you.”
While Evan is going through the rigors of practice, Trent is working with the staff at the Daily Princetonian, or “Prince” as it is often known.
“I started working there to have something to be involved with,” Trent says. “When I got there, I told them I knew about lacrosse, so that's how I got started covering the team. That's when Evan was on the club team as a freshman.”
For the editors of the Prince, a typical day can be even more overwhelming than that of a varsity athlete. The NCAA may regulate the number of hours athletes can put in in a week, but the newspaper must come out, regardless of how long it takes. It is a Sunday through Thursday operation.
The Daily Princetonian editors came up with a system of two shifts. The first begins at 4:30 and runs until 7 and consists of organization and copy editing. The evening shift would begin at 7 and run until the layout of the paper was done and it had been sent electronically to the offices on Witherspoon Street of the Princeton Packet, where it is ultimately printed. It is often well after midnight when the editors are done.
“It's a grind,” says Trent, who also found time to volunteer as an EMT in West Windsor. “Premed classes can start to pile up. There are a lot of science classes with labs. It starts to pile up. But the more you do, the more focused you get. I found it manageable, but not easy, to get everything done. I like to think of myself as effective and efficient. Putting out the paper is definitely like being on a team. There's definitely the fostering of a team mentality.”
From their opposite vantage points, the twins can often hear different words coming from Tierney. It can put them in a difficult situation when it comes to journalistic integrity, being a good teammate and normal brotherly communication.
“He'll ask me what the reporters asked and what T said,” Trent says. “Sometimes I have to use a little discretion. My brother is on the team, so needless to say everything I hear can't get into the paper. I'll ask him what was said in the locker room. I like to hear the difference between what the players hear and what I hear. Evan can give me details about what to look for during a game, that sort of thing. He's not really guarded, though he does say ?don't put that in the paper' to me a lot. It's not like I'm going to anyway.”
The Daily Princetonian sports department has spawned any number of graduates who have gone on to careers in journalism, including in recent years Grant Wahl of Sports Illustrated and Shirley Wang of the Wall Street Journal. Trent's postgraduate plans will take him to, of all places, Hopkins.
“I'd like to be a surgeon,” he says. “I like to be on my feet. I like to work with my hands. It seems interesting. They say you always change your mind when you get to med school, so we'll see. To be able to get into Princeton first and then medical school makes me feel blessed. I try to work hard, and I feel like I've been very lucky as well. Now I have to work hard to make the most of it.”
There is still the matter of the rest of this men's lacrosse season. Evan continues in his role with the Tigers, while Trent continues to settle in either in the press box or on the sideline with a camera.
They see it all, between them, everything that happens with the Princeton men's lacrosse team. Some of it can be read in the Prince; much of it probably stays between the two.
Have they ever tried to trade places? No. Evan says he wanted to, but Trent would never go for it. Maybe it's because he likes his own view better than he would if he was the brother who had the lacrosse balls flying at him a few hundred times a week.
Either way, it's worked out for both of them, and for Princeton lacrosse.
Two brothers. Two success stories.
One face.
- By Jerry Price
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