Welcome to this year's princetonbasketball.com fundraising message. Practice starts in less than a month and the season tips in less than 60 days. We're gearing up for comprehensively covering another season of Princeton Tigers basketball!
2010-11 was not only the most successful Princeton basketball season in seven years but it was also the most successful, most thorough and most expansive year of coverage in the fourteen year history of princetonbasketball.com. Last year was a championship season full of countless memories and only princetonbasketball.com provided you with the independent eyewitness reporting a season such as this one deserved.
The annual crowing: princetonbasketball.com editor Jon Solomon has covered the Tigers' last ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX CONSECUTIVE IVY LEAGUE GAMES in person. That's every Ivy game since 2000. What other reporter or web site can say that? None. We've also been on-hand for every Princeton postseason game since 1983. With princetonbasketball.com you're reading a source you can count on for consistent, knowledgeable coverage that puts current events in a historical context.
princetonbasketball.com continues to be your best location for keeping track of the Tigers that many of you know as your sons, brothers and grandsons, your friends and your classmates. If you're not subscribing to our site, you're not getting the full Princeton basketball experience.
If you have given to the site in the past, I hope you will renew for another season! Old memberships will expire on October 1st, 2011.
New members can sign up here for immediate access.
Remember, all postgame audio, all archived video and all weekly interviews are available only to princetonbasketball.com donors. You also need to be a donor to comment on articles, read full recaps, read full posts, contribute to Q&As and access daily news links.
For the first time, we're setting a membership goal during this campaign. In 2010-11 the 200 member threshold was passed for the first time. For 2011-12 the hope is to exceed 250 members. A counter will be added on the site in October so you can see how many fellow fans you're interacting and commenting with by being a part of the princetonbasketball.com family.
It is a legitimate concern that times remain tight financially and you may be reluctant to sign up for our subscription content. As the editor of this site, all I can do is promise you, as a fan of Princeton, the Ivy League and/or one or more of the many schools we report on, that I will work tirelessly (and often sleeplessly) to bring you the most comprehensive news and insight available.
I want to assure you I'll cover more Princeton games in person than any other beat reporter. With the Tigers spending two thirds of their 2011-12 schedule away from Jadwin Gym, the site's coverage will be more vital than ever to Princeton fans.
I guarantee you that I'll report on games to which no other area reporters will travel. Sometimes you'll swear I'm in two places at once.
I promise you I'll stay up late crunching numbers and doing research to answer your statistical questions and bring you numerical analysis that isn't available elsewhere.
I will go see recruits in person to provide first-hand observations on their skill sets.
I'll go out of my way to talk to the high school coach of every Princeton recruit (and most of their AAU coaches) for exclusive interviews as soon as verbal commitments are made.
I'll spend hours upon hours cutting audio, scanning images and editing photographs to bring you exclusive multimedia content all year long.
I'll even make restaurant recommendations, provide travel tips and offer hotel suggestions off-site (if asked). We were able to secure a ticket for every single person who was on our "waiting list" for the sold out Ivy League playoff in New Haven. Every one of them got to see Doug Davis' incredible shot in person.
All for less than $1/game, plus you're going to get thorough coverage of the entire Carril Cradle of coaches: Princeton, Georgetown, Richmond, Northwestern, Fairfield, Oregon State, Denver and Mercer County Community College.
Beyond all of this, what does your donation specifically go towards? Well, in 2010-2011 princetonbasketball.com brought you:
Daily News: Each morning a post appeared on the site with links to that day's articles from local and national papers. If it has been published on-line, we've found the article and passed it along to you - and we're not just posting every article that mentions "Princeton" and "Basketball" in it to pad our post count. Since last year and now we penned over 600 posts! March 2011 was our most prolific month ever with a site-record 103 original posts.
Premium Postgame Content: This past season princetonbasketball.com provided you exclusive on-site postgame audio from Coach Sydney Johnson and select players after all thirty-two of last season's games from Durham to Harrisonburg to Princeton to Hanover to Tampa, including all fourteen Ivy contests. For the one non-conference game we could not attend in person, Coach Johnson called us for exclusive audio.
You could also read detailed same-night recaps of all of the season's games, along with full box scores, exclusive HD box scores with greater statistical detail and cumulative team and player statistics. We're planning to cover a minimum of 29 of this season's games in person, with statistical previews for each opponent on game day.
Weekly Interviews: princetonbasketball.com produced a weekly interview program that featured a new in-depth discussion with Coach Johnson sixteen times over the course of the season, looking back at the previous week's games, previewing upcoming contests and talking about the state of Princeton basketball. This show also offered you a forum to ask Coach Johnson your questions. We hope to tape similar interviews with Mitch Henderson this season.
Exclusive Audio: In addition to postgame interviews and our weekly interviews with Coach Johnson, princetonbasketball.com also had bonus streams of Coach Johnson's portion of the Ivy League's preseason, midseason and postseason media teleconferences plus sideline-to-sideline coverage of Princeton's annual Media Day available only for our donors. We recorded a lengthy, exclusive interview with Sydney Johnson after his departure to Fairfield that asked the difficult questions you had about this situation. Two months after he was introduced we sat down one-on-one with new Princeton head coach Mitch Henderson for a long, wide-ranging discussion.
Recruiting News: Here at princetonbasketball.com we tracked the incoming Tigers on a daily basis, including all four 2011 recruits. We provided pictures and video of players you had only heard about, provided quotes from their high school coaches and were able to confirm rumors of commitments long before this news reached print media. We shared a workout video for Tiger recruit Bobby Garbade that couldn't be seen elsewhere. It was princetonbasketball.com who broke the story in May that Clay Wilson was not "decommitting" and was still headed to Princeton.
Articles and Analysis: In addition to the daily news, there were numerous exclusive interviews and features written for the site that only donors had access to. Mason Rocca, Kareem Maddox, Pawel Buczak, Dan Mavraides, Judson Wallace (twice!), Kyle Koncz (twice!), Nick Lake and Noah Savage were all the subjects of Q&As on the site. Marcus Schroeder shared the story of his trip to China.
Those are just the interviews. There were also pieces on going to see Will Barrett and Doug Davis play at the DelCo Pro-Am, Princeton's efficiency the previous 15 seasons, predictions for the Ivy League playoff from many Princeton, Harvard and Ivy writers under the title Who Wins & Why?, honoring the far-too-short life of Christian "Crunch" Regulski, sharing the many small moments of the championship season, a frame-by-frame review of how Princeton used deception to their advantage at Tulsa, a preseason wish list, Five Games, Five Concerns following the tournament at James Madison, trying to answer the existential question Who is Princeton?, recognizing the significance of Kareem Maddox scoring 30 points twice in a season, reviewing the prior time Princeton played Kentucky in 1977 with Frank Sowinski, an expanded version of the Douglas Davis profile for Princeton Alumni Weekly that added quotes and content cut for space from the print edition and the night Sydney Johnson left for Fairfield, trying to make sense of it all.
We also let you know dates and opponents for 14 of Princeton's non-conference games this season before the official press release came out.
The Epic Works: These were long retrospectives on a specific theme. A multimedia piece with text, audio, video and still photography about Princeton's endless close games at Harvard entitled Lavietes Pavilion: Where anything could happen, will happen and probably already has happened, looking in detail at the last four times Princeton played Duke, Rutgers in the 2000s: A Decade of Dismay and Eleven years of season openers. Can't wait to get started on a similar work about the Tigers and NC State!
Alumni Updates: You'll always be kept up-to-date on the professional basketball (and baseball) careers of former Tigers through princetonbasketball.com, even those players playing in foreign ports of call. This summer princetonbasketball.com tracked Judson Wallace and Mason Rocca in Italy, Konrad Wysocki in Germany, Sean Gregory's work for Time Magazine, Chris Young and Will Venable's respective careers with the New York Mets and San Diego Padres and David Blatt's coaching successes on the international level. There's already been coverage on the site of Kareem Maddox, Dan Mavraides and Pawel Buczak's nascent professional careers. Our new Field Guide to Tigers in Europe makes it easier for you to know how each player is performing overseas and where they're playing.
Gameday Photographs: Thanks to your donations, we were able to bring photographer Stephen Goldsmith into the fold five years ago, providing readers with exclusive photographs of the Tigers in action that helped further enhance the Princeton basketball experience for those who were unable to see the games in person. Because of donor support, we were able to increase Stephen's workload exponentially in 2010-11. He and Robert Solomon shot 30+ events for this site, including exclusive essays from Media Day, Senior Night, the Ivy League playoff, Selection Sunday, all over Tampa during the NCAA Tournament and Mitch Henderson's introduction as the new head coach of Princeton. This Photos of the Year collection is just a taste of the amazing work they produced.
Schedule Sync: We're the only web site to offer an iCal schedule you can sync with your computer's calendar that has details on every Princeton, Georgetown, Northwestern, Richmond, Fairfield, Oregon State, MCCC and Denver game. Select which teams you want to follow or subscribe to them all!
Social Networking and New Media: We've fully embraced new forms of communication. This season we used Facebook and Twitter as ways to enhance site content and alert you to updates on the site before, during and after games. We offer the most comprehensive list of future, current and former Princeton players on Twitter. We listened to your requests, improving the ability to get email updates when people respond to your comments on the site and utilizing an email alert system that informs you when a new post goes live on the site.
From the Vaults: As princetonbasketball.com covers the present and looks to the future, we made sure that the past was not forgotten. We continued to scan stacks of old schedule cards, trading cards, programs and media guides.
Videos: With a modicum of embarrassment, I shared my POV of the final 2.8 seconds during the Ivy playoff. With less hesitation, exclusive footage of Princeton cutting down the nets was posted. Hundreds of other videos (including every conceivable angle of Doug Davis' shot to send Princeton to the NCAA Tournament) are always available to donors by clicking on the site's Video category.
Seniors On A Stick: We continued this Jadwin Gym tradition for the final home game of the season, honoring last year's seniors. Did you wave a poster saluting Bobby Foley, Kareem Maddox or Dan Mavraides? Another princetonbasketball.com production. We also scanned as many old Seniors On A Stick as we could find in our collection from the past two decades. Still looking for a Jimmy Lane and a George Leftwich!
Going the Extra Mile: Subscribers in the Boston area were offered discounted admission to the reception Bob Ruxin puts on after the Harvard game. Several of you were able to get into sold out Cameron Indoor and Lavietes Pavilion by checking with us on tickets. We answered your questions at games and responded in great detail to subscriber observations and comments off-site.
The Uncategorizable: You wanted to know why Princeton did not regain possession after the technical foul in OT versus Penn? We asked the Ivy League's Coordinator of Officials on your behalf. Late in the season we broke down the odds for both Princeton and Harvard to make the NCAA Tournament in every possible scenario. A princetonbasketball.com member went to Italy to visit Mason Rocca and sent back a full compliment of photographs. We gave you a chance to say goodbye to the Class of 2011. Live courtside chats were held on-line twice during the season, once before Princeton hosted Harvard and once moments before the Ivy League playoff. As if all of this wasn't enough, we expanded a series called Know! Your! Foe! where we talked with reporters and bloggers who covered Princeton opponents - including Kentucky, Harvard, Cornell, Penn, Brown, Monmouth and James Madison for insight on each team. We added +/- statistical analysis of Princeton at several junctures during the season.
Fourteen years in, princetonbasketball.com's basic level of access continues to remain free, but it costs money for us to operate and manage this web site on a daily basis. Covering the Tigers has gone from a hobby to close to a full-time job between October and May. To make all of this possible, princetonbasketball.com relies on your donations to cover our expenses of web hosting and reporting on the games we all care about so deeply.
Anyone making a contribution of $30.00 or more this season is entitled to a season-long password for individual access to donor-only content. Those of you who have donated since August 1st, 2011 have already had your accounts extended through next September 30, 2012.
Current high school, college and graduate students can gain individual access to princetonbasketball.com's donor-only content at the reduced rate of $15.00 for the season. Contact us directly for a discount code. Renewing now will assure a smooth transition for last year's donors. You don't want to miss out on any of the coming season's premium offerings.
To sign up on-line and become a new donor using our secure payment portal, click here.
If you are already logged in and want to renew a subscription using your old login/password combination, click here.
Please email us if you have any difficulties whatsoever signing up or are more comfortable paying by check.
I welcome your comments, suggestions and ideas about what you would like to see on princetonbasketball.com in the future. If you haven't subscribed in the past but are a frequent visitor to the site, I'd love to hear from you and see what I can do to make you a member that can take full advantage of all princetonbasketball.com has to offer.
Being part of this community and the extended Princeton basketball family remains my genuine pleasure and I can't wait to bring you coverage of all this season's games.
Warmly,
Jon Solomon
princetonbasketball.com
