COLUMN: JUSTIN TIME
By: Justin Feil
When Cindy Cohen told players on her Princeton University softball team Friday that she was retiring to move into athletic administration at the University of Rochester, her players were shocked.
But Cohen’s departure comes on the heels of a transition year at Princeton. A lot of athletes have had that same shocked reaction in the last 13 months, but they shouldn’t.
Princeton coaches are in demand. They’re either moving up as they see it, or moving on.
In April 1999, Bill Carmody, Tiger men’s head basketball coach, was a finalist for the Notre Dame job.
Before this school year began, David Benjamin announced that this would be his final year coaching the men’s tennis team.
Don Cahoon left Princeton following the men’s ice hockey team season to accept the head coaching position at Massachusetts-Amherst. Dick Hunt, head men’s golf team coach, stepped down and is now an assistant for the Tigers.
Liz Feeley was one of five finalists this spring for the vacant Monmouth University women’s head basketball coaching job.
Moves aren’t left to head coaches alone.
Angie Taylor left Princeton’s women’s track team to become head at George Mason. Joe Scott left Princeton to become Air Force’s head men’s basketball coach and women’s basketball assistant Daphne Robinson has announced her intentions to move along as well.
Cohen formally announced Monday her plans to re-route her career, though she also revealed that she had declined a great offer to coach a scholarship school a year ago.
“They’re going to go,” said Princeton athletics director Gary Walters. “When you have 38 sports, it’s such a large program you’re going to have turnover. The anomaly is we had gone five years with almost no one leaving. We have the longest average tenure of head coaches of any school in the league. That length of tenure is directly related to level of success our coaches have had.”
Princeton, with a record 14 Ivy League titles this academic year, has once again claimed the unofficial all-sports standings championship.
“I think that change not for change’s sake, change that’s constructive and helps them grow and reach their personal goals is fine,” Walters said. “When I left coaching (in 1981) I went into business. I’m familiar with these kinds of transitions. I can empathize having gone through the same process.”
Walters, who left the business world to come to Princeton in 1994, doesn’t criticize coaches who move on for the chance to utilize scholarship money.
“I don’t think we fight it,” he said. “You have two different paradigms — educational/amateur and commercial/professional. They have their own purposes. I’m not going to say one is better than the other. I’ll only say they’re clearly different.
“Given the fact that we have good coaches, I would expect they’re always in demand. As are the professors here. I view that as being healthy. If our people aren’t attractive, I don’t think we’re doing well.”