According to swimming blog theswimmerscircle.com, the “video produced by the Princeton men’s swim team ... demonstrates exactly what happens to swimmers during taper time, when they all of a sudden have much more free time, and tons of pent up energy.” While that is an admirable attempt to explain the reasoning behind the film’s production, it is not the main explanation.
The actual purpose of the video is not hard to discover and can be found in the title of the video. Freshman Daniel Hasler was stricken with MRSA, a difficult-to-treat staph infection, and is currently being treated in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His treatment is expected to last for up to six weeks, forcing him to take the rest of the season off.
“[Hasler] was supposed to be on the Ivy Championship team,” freshman swimmer O’Neill Bergeron explained. “He’s a great guy. We all love him. And now he’s in the hospital hooked up to several IVs every day.”
“We did the video to cheer [him] up,” junior swimmer Charley Wang elaborated.
And it worked. After Hasler watched the video, he told the team that “[the video] was the funniest thing [he had] ever seen,” and that it made him feel “100 times better.”
Wang coordinated the entire project with the support of all his teammates and filmed it using only his iPhone. Scenes were improvised all over campus, from the showers in Dillon Gymnasium to the tiger statues in front of Nassau Hall. Production took only four days, including both shooting and editing.
Apparently, most team members did not know the words to the song beforehand, with the exception of seniors Pat Biggs and Brett Lullo, who were responsible for the song choice of “Teenage Dream.”
“They’ve both been huge fans of Katy Perry from the start, and I wasn’t surprised when neither of them needed to look at the lyrics before filming,” Wang added.
“The hardest part,” Wang remembered, “was not [cracking up] when I was filming the video. I think it took us 3 or 4 extra takes to do the scene with [junior] Colin Cordes, because I was laughing too hard to film.”
According to teammates, Cordes had the most difficulty simply remembering his lines: “We drove to Cali and got drunk on the beach.”
Despite listening to the song so many times, few on the team got tired of it.
“The song has definitely grown on me, as well as most of the team,” freshman Nick Beaulieu said. “What it represents for us this season is something extraordinary of how we bonded together for one of our own ... I could never get tired of it.”
Coincidentally, Harvard played “Teenage Dream” during the Ivy League Championship.
“It was almost like Hasler was able to be at the Ivy Championship vicariously through that song,” freshman Nick Beaulieu said.
After producing a video with such a positive response, do the Tigers have another project in their sights?
“Not really,” Bergeron said. “Just our fourth Ivy League title next year.”
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