Sports have been bringing people together for generations. Whether it’s to cheer for the same team or back each other up on the field, Cornell athletics has introduced future friends and even future family.
Ahead of Valentine’s Day, The Sun spoke to two Cornellian couples that have found lifelong partners through their sport.
Jon Jaques & Jasmine Marcus
Jon Jaques ’10 may be known to most as the new men’s basketball head coach — or as the star player of the historic 2009-2010 men’s basketball team — but his most important score at Cornell wasn’t on the court.
In the spring of 2009, Jaques was balancing his third year of Division I basketball, writing for The New York Times’ college sports blog The Quad and working on his biology and society degree. To add to his already impressive roster of activities, he accepted a friend’s invitation to join The Sun's editorial board and headed to the newspaper’s office by the Ithaca Commons.
That was where he met Jasmine Marcus ’10, who was also a junior and The Sun's Assistant Managing Editor.
“Jasmine was the first person to introduce herself to me,” Jaques said. “She was very friendly and welcoming, and I probably looked lost and confused like the athlete who didn’t know what he was doing.”
After returning for their senior fall, Jaques and Marcus met for the second time on Halloween. Though Jaques was captivated by the woman dressed as Princess Jasmine, he couldn’t remember her name until he looked through the masthead in a print issue of The Sun.
“She made an impression,” Jaques said. “We reconnected, and the rest is history.”
Jaques went on to a stellar senior season, elevated to a starter after his clutch performance in the Legends Classic tournament on Nov. 29, 2009, propelled the Red to a narrow victory over Drexel. As tri-captain, he spearheaded a historic NCAA run that featured the Red’s first-ever tournament win and ended in the Sweet 16.
After graduating from Cornell, Jaques accepted a contract to play professional basketball with Ironi Ashkelon in the Israeli Premier League. Luckily, Marcus’ family connections in the country made it possible for the pair to move overseas together.
Though experienced on the court, Jaques found his calling from the sidelines, coaching at both Stevens Institute of Technology and Columbia University for a year before returning to his alma mater as an assistant coach from 2013-2022.
Meanwhile, Marcus earned her doctor of physical therapy degree from Columbia and entered practice in the Ithaca area.
“Our jobs are way more similar than people would realize,” Jaques said. “With coaching and being a physical therapist, so much of it is psychology, motivation and how you’re trying to reach people. We always bounce ideas off each other.”
For the 2024-2025 season, Jaques assumed the helm from former head coach Brian Earl, and his first season has yielded promising results. The team (13-7, 5-2 Ivy) is shooting for its ninth Ivy League title.
Though Jaques’ job takes him across the country, he knows he can trust his family as a rock during the hectic season.
“Coaching is a hard life for families of coaches,” Jaques said. “Jasmine has been awesome and so supportive. A huge part of it is that I’m working at a place that she feels strongly about too. She knows how much my experience meant to me and my teammates; she knows the reason I’m trying to pay it forward.”
Karen Chen & Len van Deurzen
Karen Chen ’25 has accomplished a lot since enrolling in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology in 2019. She took two gap years to travel to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, where she earned a team gold medal. She serves as co-captain of the Cornell Figure Skating Club and is just months away from graduation. Last fall, she checked off another item on the bucket list: getting engaged.
When Chen invited Len van Deurzen Ph.D. ’24 to the Cornell Figure Skating Club’s spring-semester ice show in her sophomore year, the two were barely acquainted as friends-of-friends.
“He came to the show, and we started talking after that,” Chen said. “I’m an introvert, and so is he, so in the beginning it was a little hard to get his vibe. But he was really passionate about his work for his Ph.D. in physics, and at the time I was also taking physics, so he helped me through that.”
After their initial connection, the pair hit it off. Their different interests — Chen’s in figure skating and the pre-med track, van Deurzen’s in his doctorate — gave them plenty to learn from one another.
“During [my] junior year, he was finishing up his last year of his Ph.D.,” Chen said. “If we would have met earlier, when he was in the thick of it, maybe we wouldn’t have had the time. But we’ve always found time for each other and communicated with each other.”
Chen had plenty on her own plate as well; despite putting her intense training regimen aside to focus on school, she found out in 2024 — two years after her Olympic appearance in Beijing — that the team had been awarded a gold medal due to Russian skater Kamila Valieva’s positive drug test.
“[In Beijing], we were in our gear to go to the awards ceremony when it was canceled, and we didn’t really know why,” Chen said. “It was tough waiting to get our medals, but getting the ceremony in Paris was really exciting. I was surprised by how heavy it was.”
At Cornell, Chen hasn’t left the ice behind. As co-president of the Figure Skating Club since 2023, she’s had the opportunity to watch the club grow in membership and prestige.
“My freshman year, the club was only 10-15 people, and now we have over 50,” Chen said. “Because we’ve had more people join our club, we got more competitive. Two years ago, we made nationals for the first time in many years. It’s rewarding to know that everyone’s hard work paid off.”
After her graduation, Chen plans to head back to school to obtain a doctor in physical therapy. She’s also planning for her wedding, which the couple hopes to hold in the Netherlands to be close to van Deurzen’s family.
“I have some family in the United States, but my grandparents and other relatives are in Taiwan,” Chen said. “We’re going to do a smaller, intimate wedding in the Netherlands, and maybe go to Taiwan to do a celebration there.”
The pair is excited for many more years of support and growth as they look forward to their professional careers.
“At the end of the day, I always feel like we’re one team,” Chen said. “We’re getting through it together.”
Alexis Rogers is the sports editor on the 143rd editorial board. She is in the Class of 2028 in the College of Arts & Sciences, and she can be reached at arogers@cornellsun.com.
