Levittown's Tommy Davis Puts in Time on the Field and in the Classroom

By Anthony Stoeckert

Here’s how Tommy Davis spent a recent early spring day: Taking classes at Princeton University, attending a practice with the school’s lacrosse team, then squeezing in an interview with a reporter prior to an evening’s worth of studying, which included working on his senior thesis titled “Impact of British Tax Legislation on the Behavior of Colonial Merchants in New York.”

Tommy Davis Davis, a graduate of Division High School in Levittown, is making the most of his senior year, both in class and on the Lacrosse field. With 20 goals and 13 assists and the Tigers sitting on top of the national rankings with two games to play in the regular season, Davis seems primed to achieve his ultimate goal.

“Coach (head coach Bill Tierney) always talks about our goal as being Ivy League champions,” Davis says. He hasn’t gotten there yet; the best Princeton has done in his previous three seasons was reaching the quarterfinals in his freshman season. But there are signs that this could be the year the Tigers reach their ultimate goal.

Davis and the Tigers were soaring (make that roaring) on April 11 when a 10-9 home win over Harvard earned the team the nation’s No. 1 ranking. Davis notched two goals and two assists in that win, which followed a four-goal performance in a 10-9 overtime road win over Penn State (Davis scored the game-winner in overtime). Those performances earned Davis Ivy League Player of the Week honors.

A setback came on April 18 with a 10-7 loss to Cornell (Davis had just one assist in that game). Princeton fell to 3-1 in Ivy League play after the loss, tied with Brown for second place behind 5-0 Cornell. That sets up a potentially big weekend with Princeton playing 1-3 Dartmouth while Cornell and Brown face-off.

Another highlight this season came when the Tigers defeated defending champion Syracuse, 12-8 during the Big City Classic at Giants Stadium. A lifelong Giants fan, Davis finally made it to his first Big Blue game last season, then followed that up by playing on the Giants’ field a few months later.

Tommy Davis Davis grew up in a lacrosse-loving family. His father played and coached the game; he has two cousins who played college lacrosse at Delaware when he was in middle school (“That was a big influence,” he says) and his younger brother Jimmy is his teammate, playing his junior year at Princeton.

“That was nice because we’ve been playing together since we were four or five,” Tommy says of being teammates with his brother. The older brother was also able to make the transition to Princeton relatively easier for Jimmy.

“He came to games when I was a freshman, and he got to know some of the players who would be his teammates the next year,” Tommy says. “By the time he got here, he probably knew about half the team, which was a big advantage.”

Tommy was also able to help Jimmy through (or perhaps warn him about) the workload that comes with being a Princeton student. Davis says that he was assigned 115 pages of reading in his first class, on Latin American History. “That was a rude awakening,” he says.

Davis is a history major and is still thinking about what he’ll do after graduation. Graduate school is a possibility but he wants to be certain he makes the right decision as to which program he joins. For now, he’s enjoying the final stretch of his last season of college lacrosse.

“I’m just going to take advantage of every opportunity right now and cherish every win,” he says. “It makes it easier to go out to practice every day after games and just give it everything you have. You always know your time is limited, but being in your last year, you kind of see it happening a little more.”