When I talked with recent Princeton graduate Marcus Schroeder in late August about his NBA-DL tryout for the Reno Bighorns, he surprised me when he revealed that he was headed in the morning on a two week basketball barnstorm through China.
Now Schroeder is back stateside. He was nice enough to share some pictures and recollections in his own words from his experience after the jump. - JS
The gold medal game was much more closely contested as I had first thought, as after three minutes of play, the score was still tied. However, over the next 37 minutes, we went on an 85-40 run which really put the game out of reach. For everyone who thinks I might have gotten rusty after taking a month off after the season, I had fifteen in the first quarter on five of six from downtown, and then I don’t think I took any shots the rest of the game, so immediately quiet those thoughts. Regardless, the game was a lot of fun, and even though the result was inevitable and the stakes low, it still felt great standing on the middle podium while the American Anthem played.
July 5th:
I am going to apologize in advance for the writing style of the following diary entry. It will be all over the place and will not be covering things in any type of chronological order. Because I’ve haven’t written in a while, I’m going to try to cover a decent amount of things in this entry, however, it may be difficult to follow. Sorry again.
Once again, I apologize for the long delay, but I wanted to wait until we had played a few games to relay the update to everyone. We are currently 4-0 and have absolutely crushed our competition to date. We won the first game against Canada by forty and the second game against Australia by nearly sixty. We then beat the other USA team by about thirty. And we play in the Gold Medal game on Sunday night against Canada. So, barring some sort of basketball-related disaster, we should be in good shape. The other United States team was pretty good, as everyone either plays or did play in college. But we had a huge run in the second quarter and they could not come back from that. Australia had two players on their team that would be considered division-1 players (one of whom is playing professionally in Australia). However, our depth and height completely overpowered them and the game was basically over by halftime. So, unfortunately, I don’t have any great stories about the games in which we’ve been participating.
A few weeks ago I emailed a just-graduated Scott Greenman to see if he would be interested in keeping a diary of his upcoming trip to Australia for the Maccabi Games. Here's the first installment. Thanks so much, Scott. Your free membership is in the mail. - JS
June 26:
Hello to everyone in the Princeton Basketball family who is dedicated enough to subscribe to Jon Solomon’s excellent basketball service that is extremely devoted to Princeton Basketball and covering the program in a fair and impartial way (I swear I was not paid to say that, though now that I am no longer an NCAA athlete, it would be legal for me to accept such generosity). Of course, I am still not yet an official part of this website because I have not paid any money and am not considered a “donor”. You would think that there would be some sort of ex-player benefits for this website, but I guess not. I suppose four years of pouring out one's heart and soul to Princeton basketball and being named a first-team unanimous All-Ivy League selection is not good enough to get a free subscription to princetonbasketball.com. But seriously, Jon and I have developed a great relationship over the past few years and he recently asked me to write a diary/summary of the next few weeks of my life, in which I will be participating in a Jewish International basketball tournament in Sydney, Australia, and I willingly accepted.
