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Seven Princetonians to compete in Tokyo Olympics
By Ben Burns
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Keep an eye out for Tigers when watching this summer’s Olympic Games in Tokyo.
So far, five Princeton alumni and two current students have qualified to represent their home countries in the games. This includes four members of Team USA, one athlete representing Egypt, one athlete representing New Zealand, and one athlete representing Norway.
Eliza Stone ’13, who was a political theory concentrator at Princeton, qualified for the Olympics in saber fencing thanks to her performance at the Sabre World Cup in Budapest, Hungary this March. She reached the podium at the NCAA Championships three times from 2011–2013, winning the gold medal in 2013 for individual sabre. Princeton also won the team gold that year.
Stone is joined by Kat Holmes ’17, a neuroscience concentrator who qualified in epee fencing after delivering a standout performance at the Epee World Cup in Kazan, Russia, just one week after Stone qualified. Holmes represented the USA at the Rio Olympics in 2016, coming in 25th overall in the epee event. Team USA finished 5th overall.
At the same event in Kazan, Holmes’ classmate Anna Van Brummen ’17, who concentrated in geoscience, qualified as a replacement athlete in epee fencing. Van Brummen defeated Holmes in the 2017 NCAA Championship to win the gold medal in epee. She also won bronze in epee at the NCAA Championships in 2015.
The Tigers have qualified a male fencer, too; Mohamed Hamza ’23, who is concentrating in mechanical and aerospace engineering, will represent Egypt this summer in foil fencing. Hamza was an All-American in the 2018–19 season and finished sixth at the NCAA Championships. He also competed for Egypt at Rio 2016. Hamza is excited to return to the Olympics, noting that his experience in Rio will serve him well.
“It’s nice to have already experienced the Olympic atmosphere and the unique pressures that come along with it,” he said. “I feel very much ready and have been working hard to hopefully achieve something great and prove that us young athletes are just as great as our older opponents, of which there are plenty in fencing.”
So far, three non-fencing athletes from Princeton have also secured their spots in Tokyo. Gevvie Stone ’07 (no relation to Eliza), who also has an M.D. from Tufts University School of Medicine, will compete for Team USA in double sculls rowing. Stone, who is the daughter of two former Team USA rowers, represented the United States at London 2012 and Rio 2016, where she finished 7th and 2nd, respectively.
Julia Ratcliffe ’17 became the third member of her class to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics when she made Team New Zealand on March 26 in the hammer throw. Ratcliffe’s qualifying throw of 73.55 meters set the Oceania record in the event. She was also the NCAA Champion in the hammer throw in 2014, and was an All-American all four years at Princeton.
Finally, Sondre Guttormsen ‘23 has reached the Olympic Games entry standard in the pole vault with his personal-best jump of 5.80 meters, achieved in 2019. Guttormsen transferred to Princeton in the fall from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and set an Ivy League record earlier in the year with his jump of 5.66 meters. As of April 27, he is ranked 26th in the world in the pole vault, according to World Athletics. Guttormsen will be representing his home country, Norway.
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Julia Ratcliffe ’17 will represent New Zealand in the hammer throw at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.
With an impressive list of athletes already qualified, the Tigers could still see more current and former athletes representing their home countries this summer. In an email to The Daily Princetonian, a representative for Princeton Athletics said that the full list of Princetonian participants in the games should be available by the end of May, when the United States Olympic Committee will have the teams named.
MARCH 2021
Athletic Director Mollie Marcoux Samaan ’91 on recruiting during a pandemic
By Wilson Conn
Sports Staff Writer
Although the Ivy League has not held any athletic competitions this school year, recruitment — one of the most important processes in collegiate athletics — has chugged along at the University, despite the obvious challenges the pandemic has presented.
“Like everything during COVID, the recruiting process has required a lot of creativity and flexibility and sort of rethinking how you do your work,” said Mollie Marcoux Samaan ’91, Princeton’s Director of Athletics. “Coaches have had to sort of step back and say, ‘How do we get to know prospective student athletes?’”
The cancellation of high school sports seasons nationwide has been one of the challenges causing coaches to restructure their evaluation processes, especially for fall and winter sports, as many states had to either delay or cancel the season last year. Because of cancellations in their home states, many athletes were unable to produce game film or statistics for coaches.
In a typical recruitment cycle, coaches would not rely solely on game film to get a sense of their most preferred recruits. Instead, they would be watching recruits at games and showcases nationwide. However, many of these events have been canceled due to COVID-19. Even in places where they are being held, the NCAA recruiting dead period — which prevents coaches from conducting in-person visits with recruits — has made attending these events impossible. The dead period has been in place since the start of the pandemic and was recently extended through May 31, 2021.
“Coaches have had recruits go on virtual tours sponsored by the admissions office,” Marcoux Samaan said, in reference to work-arounds that coaches have relied upon during the dead period. “Coaches have been watching a lot of videos high school athletes have been sending in,” she added. Some athletes are able to send in film from their 2020–21 school season, while others may have footage from club showcases or previous seasons.
Furthermore, the status of Princeton’s summer athletic camps, which many coaches use to evaluate recruits, remains unknown. “We’re very hopeful that we can run some camps this summer … [but] we want to make sure that our community is healthy and safe,” Marcoux Samaan said. The University has not yet made a final decision on whether or not it will allow for any camps to be held this summer.
In a November interview with the ‘Prince,’ men’s soccer head coach Jim Barlow referenced the challenges of handling this level of film, saying that his staff is “inundated.” Marcoux Samaan commented that although coaches have been handling a lot of film, the sheer number of recruits contacting teams has given coaches insight into recruiting from different areas that they hadn’t previously looked into.
“They have a little more time on their hands, so they can scour the country more aggressively,” she said. “We have had coach calls every week, and they share ideas on finding recruits in different pockets, not just going back to the same places,” she added.
Marcoux Samaan also applauded coaches for being flexible and resilient in the past year.
“Coaches work seven days a week until late hours, and they are still working really hard to support their student-athletes,” she remarked. Instead of planning for competitions, coaches have instead directed that energy towards recruiting, as well as virtual team activities.
The recruiting challenges that coaches have faced during the pandemic have varied from sport to sport. “We have 37 sports, and each one is slightly different … in the way they recruit,” Marcoux Samaan explained. “For some sports, [recruiting] is a little bit easier because you have a finite metric of what their times are … or what their golf scores are. For those types of sports … the measures are just a bit more objective,” she added.
Despite differences in obstacles between sports, there are principles that have uniformly shaped recruiting across the entire University coaching community. “We’re looking for how
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a student-athlete would grow,” Marcoux Samaan said. “It’s just about finding the student, the athlete, and the person … These [principles] are really constant throughout the recruiting process.”
Challenges in domestic recruitment presented themselves in international recruitment, too. Coaches have had to deal with changing travel restrictions and uncertainty with respect to when prospective students may be able to come to campus. “There are still some unknowns on what international travel will look like in the future,” she explained. “I think the numbers of [international recruits] are down slightly compared to what they’ve been.”
Aside from dealing with the dead period and international recruitment, another common problem is trying to calculate the number of recruits coaches would like to admit. “Each coach has a number of student-athletes they can support through the process,” Marcoux Samaan shared. “Admissions makes the decisions, and so the number of athletes fluctuates [for each sport] from year to year.” In a normal year, this process would be fairly simple; coaches would simply replace graduating seniors and other players planning on leaving the team with incoming first-years and transfers. However, this process has been greatly complicated across all sports by the number of athletes who have decided to take leaves of absence. In the fall, approximately 13 percent of the University’s student body took a leave of absence.
“The percentage of studentathletes that have taken a leave of absence is slightly higher than the percentage of non-athletes,” Marcoux Samaan said. “We didn’t put the athletes under any pressure to not take a gap year or to take a gap year. We said, ‘Do what makes the most sense for you as a student, as an athlete, and as a person.’”
Marcoux Samaan clarified that for many athletes, the decision to take a leave was not solely influenced by a desire to avoid season cancellations. “A lot of people made decisions based on academics … based on their personal situations,” she remarked.
Nonetheless, leaves of absence have caused varying levels of recruiting complications among the coaching ranks. Some coaches, like Barlow, have been lucky; the team’s leave numbers have been even across classes. Other coaches have seen a large disparity in leave numbers across classes. “We want to make sure that when [athletes on leave] return next year, that we don’t have huge roster sizes,” Marcoux Samaan said. “When prospective student athletes come in, [we want to ensure] they're walking into a situation where they have the opportunity to thrive and reach their peak performance.”
Though the department is working with coaches to ensure balanced class sizes on their teams, that flexibility is limited. “It’s not a coach’s choice to say ‘I’m going to do it this way,’ but we worked with them really specifically … to make sure they had what they needed,” she clarified. She cited constraints on the number of athletes the department can support at once, as well as the fact that the admissions department is ultimately in charge of which athletes can be admitted.
Aside from these restrictions on recruitment, another concern recruits may have when looking at the University is the Ivy League’s regulations on athletic activity during the pandemic, compared to other Division I schools. However, Marcoux Samaan said that the Ivy League’s caution in the athletic arena has not affected recruitment in any noticeable way. “I think coaches will tell you they’re having really good recruiting years … They have been impressed with the students they have found who are interested in Princeton,” she said. “We're very hopeful that [COVID-19] is a finite short-term challenge for the whole country,” she added. “We’ll be back in action, hopefully sooner rather than later.”
