Summer News & Notes

Four hoopsters sign in Europe

Four former Princeton basketball players take to the hardwood again this winter after signing with teams in European leagues. Recent graduates Kareem Maddox ’11, Dan Mavraides ’11 and Addie Micir ’11 will join Pawel Buczak ’10 overseas.

Maddox, who was named the Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year last season, signed to play with Landstede Basketball in the Netherlands. The 6-foot-8-inch forward flew to Holland in mid-August to begin his professional career and helped the team win a preseason tournament in Luxembourg last weekend, scoring in double digits in all three games.

Mavraides, who joined Maddox in leading Princeton to an Ivy League championship and an NCAA Tournament appearance last season, signed with Aris Basketball Club, a team in Greece’s top division that was the nation’s best in the 1980s and early ’90s. Mavraides and Aris will play in a preseason tournament in Bulgaria this weekend.

Micir, the unanimous 2011 Ivy League Player of the Year, will play for Residence De Walferdange in Luxembourg this winter. The guard helped the Princeton women’s basketball team turn around from a 7-23 record to an Ivy League championship in just two seasons, leading the Tigers to the NCAA Tournament in her junior and senior years. She will begin professional play in October.

Buczak signed with Slask Wroclaw, a second-division team in Poland, after a year away from organized basketball.

Bradley ’80 terminated as U.S. National Team coach

Bob Bradley ’80 was relieved of his duties as the head coach of the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team on July 28. Bradley held the position for five years and was only one-quarter of the way through a second four-year term at the position when his termination was announced.

Under Bradley, the U.S. team reached the finals in four of the six tournaments in which it competed, winning the 2007 Gold Cup. The U.S. finished first in the group stage of the 2010 World Cup but lost to Ghana in the first round of the knockout stage. The timing of the announcement caught many American soccer insiders off-guard — including Bradley, according to Grant Wahl ’96 of Sports Illustrated via Twitter — though the American side had suffered a disappointing 4-2 defeat to Mexico in the Gold Cup final one month earlier.

Bradley coached the Princeton men’s soccer team from 1984-1995, winning two Ivy League titles and advancing to the NCAA Final Four in 1993, and took over as the head coach of the national side in the winter of 2006. He will be replaced by Jurgen Klinsmann, who had been a strong candidate for the job when Bradley was appointed. Bradley, meanwhile, was announced as Egypt’s new head coach on Sept. 14 and should report to Cairo on Monday.

Flaherty ’11 has short stint with Saints

Though the NFL lockout delayed the start of the season for players under contract, it was perhaps more stressful for rookie free agents, who were forced to wait even longer to find out whether a team would want to employ them in the fall. Fortunately for Harry Flaherty ’11, the New Orleans Saints came calling shortly after the lockout was lifted, and the former Tiger signed with the team on July 27.

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No stranger to the NFL — his father, Harry Flaherty, Sr., played for the Dallas Cowboys, and his uncle, Jason Garrett, is currently the Cowboys’ head coach — Flaherty caught 25 passes for 212 yards as a senior in 2010 and threw for a touchdown on a trick play against Harvard. He became the first Tiger to sign with a NFL team since quarterback Jeff Terrell ’07 before Flaherty was released by the Saints in the first week of August.

Ivy League football limits full-contact practice

The Ivy League has instituted a series of stricter guidelines to reduce the frequency of concussions in football practices. According to the new regulations, Ivy League teams are only able to hold two full-contact practices per week, a reduction from the NCAA maximum of five. Additionally, players can be dressed in full pads for only one of the two sessions during preseason two-a-day practices.

Head coach Bob Surace ’90 said that his team’s practices had already followed most of the new guidelines, and players agreed that it would not represent a major change for the team.

“Whenever there are rule changes to benefit player safety, as coaches, you adjust and adapt,” Surace told ESPN in a July interview. “There will be minimal change for us, and I am kind of happy everybody is doing the same thing. It benefits player safety.”