Cornell's Jon Jaques Back with the New York Times

Back for One Last Run With Cornell

By Jon Jaques
New York Times Quad Blog
October 20, 2009

Jon Jaques is a senior on the Cornell basketball team. As he did last season, Jon will be blogging for The Quad throughout this season.

I, along with seven of my teammates, am entering the final season of my Cornell basketball career (yeah, that’s not a typo; we have eight seniors). That means that these past couple of weeks have been filled with a bunch of lasts.

Tuesday, Oct. 6: Last individual basketball workout.

Wednesday, Oct. 7: Last preseason weight lifting session.

Thursday, Oct. 8: Bright and early at 8 in the morning, our last preseason conditioning (I won’t miss those).

And Friday night was be the last season-opening practice of our college basketball careers. There was no flashy celebration. No dunk contest, talent show, dance-off, etc. I can guarantee our head coach, Steve Donahue, won’t be doing anything like that any time soon, either. In fact, our first practice was not even in our own gym. Instead it was at nearby Ithaca College, because our volleyball team has a match that night against Yale. In other words, there was no traditional Midnight Madness for us.

But that less-than-flashy practice marks the beginning of a season that has been three years in the making. I feel as if I said this last year in my season-opening blog, but it is worth repeating: While simply making the N.C.A.A. tournament is not an acceptable goal for our program any longer, winning a third consecutive Ivy League title is going to be our most difficult challenge yet … by far.

Defending our first championship was rough. Three road losses — at Princeton, Yale and Harvard — showed us that winning consecutive titles is no joke. After winning back-to-back championships, do you think teams will be fired up to play us?

As difficult as winning the league will be, the reason I am so, for lack of a better term, pumped up for the season is that I know our squad is poised to break through against some of the best teams in the country. Our preseason schedule provides us with incredible opportunities for signature wins against competition most Ivy League teams don’t face. Heard of any of these teams? Kansas? Alabama? Syracuse? UMass? Davidson? (That one is at Madison Square Garden.) Seton Hall? St. Joe’s?

There are no easy games, which, as a player, is all you can ask for. The experience we will gain from these games, and have gained from our humbling first-round exits in the past two N.C.A.A. tournaments, makes me so excited to see how much damage we can do when March rolls around again. That’s it for now, but you don’t want to miss a recap of our first practices of the year, so stay tuned.