Princeton University Athletics
Thursday TigerBlog - Logistically Speaking
April 16, 2026 | Tiger Blog
TigerBlog walked in from the parking garage yesterday with Kimberly Keenan-Kirkpatrick, the Director of Operations for the men's and women's track and field programs.
Keenan-Kirkpatrick has had quite the accomplished career, in both coaching and administration. She set several school records as a runner at Kent State before going to Seton Hall Law School, and she then spent 25 years working in administrative roles, lastly at Syracuse.
She then jumped back into coaching, at Colgate, before coming to Princeton in her current role in 2023.
If you think it's easy to be the Director of Operations for track and field, consider that this weekend alone Princeton has athletes who are competing at five different events in four different states: California, North Carolina, Virginia and New Jersey. That's a lot of logistics to sort out.
To expand on TB wrote yesterday about his experience with the tennis teams, each sport has its own culture and own way of doing things. What is unheard of for one team is commonplace for another. Princeton would never send teams to multiple locations in most sports. In track and field, it happens all the time.
This weekend is another example of that. For the record, you'll have Tigers at the Wake Forest Invitational, the Virginia Challenge (in Charlottesville), the Mt. Sac Relays (in Walnut, Calif), the Bryan Clay Invitational at Azusa Pacific, and the IC4A championships at Rutgers.
That's a lot of logistics to have to coordinate. Flights. Ground transportation. Hotels. Meals. Training times. Athletic medicine. That's not easy.
Oh, and the Bryan Clay Invitational? From its website, it advertises itself as:
"the fastest and largest collegiate meet in the US! Set next to the stunning Azusa foothills in Southern California, we promise as electric atmosphere, fantastic weather and incredible competition."
What more can you ask for than that?
The Penn Relays will be next weekend.
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It's Cup season — and not just the Stanley Cup, whose playoffs will be starting soon.
No, this is Cup season for intercollegiate rowing. For someone who loves history the way TigerBlog does, the genesis of pretty much all of the Cup for which the various crews race is fascinating.
In all there are 17 Cups between Princeton's lightweight and heavyweight men and lightweight and open women. Some date back to the 1800s. Others are more recent and bear the names of some of Princeton's greatest coaches.
You can read more about Princeton's Cup history HERE.
This weekend will have the heavyweight men at Harvard for the Compton Cup, a race that dates to 1933. The lightweight men are home with Penn and Georgetown for the Wood-Hammond Cup, which goes back to 1941.
As for the women, the open team is home against Yale, Virginia and Tennessee for the Eisenberg Cup, the oldest one the women race for, going back to 1975. The lightweight women are off this weekend.
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The baseball team is home for three this weekend against Penn, with two Saturday beginning at 11:30 and then a third game Sunday at noon.
The top four teams in the league will reach the Ivy League tournament and play for the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. With nine games to be played (or 10 for Harvard and Brown), the Tigers are two games back of fourth place.
Penn will come to Clarke Field in third place at 8-4, one game out of first. After this weekend, Princeton will be at Dartmouth for three and home against Harvard for three. Harvard is in fourth.
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The women's lacrosse team is at Brown Saturday, with the opening draw at noon. With two regular season league games left for all eight teams, there are essentially five teams who are competing for four Ivy tournament spots — and Princeton and Brown are two of them.
Yale is in first place at 5-0, followed by 4-1 Penn. Princeton, Brown and Cornell are all 3-2.
Princeton and Brown have already beaten Cornell, which means that both teams would hold the tiebreaker over the Big Red. Making it tougher for Cornell is its schedule, which has Penn this weekend and Yale next weekend.
Princeton will host Dartmouth next weekend, while Brown will be at Penn.
Should Cornell lose twice, then Princeton and Brown would be in the Ivy tournament no matter what. Should Cornell win twice, it would be putting itself in position to host the tournament with some help (i.e, a Harvard win over Yale Saturday). That's how many different permutations there are.
Here's a simple one: The Princeton-Brown winner clinches an ILT spot.
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The full weekend schedule is HERE.
