Women Booters Stomp on Big Red, 5-0

"Slow ride ... take it easy ..." --Foghat

NEW HAVEN, Conn.--The second-seeded Harvard women's soccer team took its time, played cool and often brilliant soccer, and burst into the semi-finals of the Ivy League tournament with a 5-0 pasting of seventh-seeded Cornell yesterday afternoon.

This contest was no contest. Freshman striker Joan Elliott took a Laurie Gregg pass, put some moves on the Cornell fullbacks and blasted the ball into the net to give the Crimson a 1-0 lead only a minute into the game.

In the first half, the Crimson booters outshot the Big Red 19-1. At least four Harvard drives hit the crossbar in the game's first twenty minutes. And when the Crimson regulars took seats on the bench at about the 30-minute mark of each half, the subs played like seasoned veterans, continuing Harvard's domination.

"No matter who we played today," Crimson coach Bob Scalise said after the game," we would have played well. Today was our day."

Back From the Dead

Along with the big win, you can throw in the fact that Cat Ferrante and Ellen Jakovic returned to the Crimson ranks from the injury list and Laura Mayer, who hurt her back severely enough in Tuesday's loss to UMass to have to spend the evening at UHS, scored one of Harvard's goals.

Scalise has said all season that his goal was to peak for the tournaments, and it seems that the team goes into this morning's semi-final game with Brown right on schedule. The third-seeded Bruins knocked off sixth-ranked Penn, 4-0, yesterday, to earn another shot at Harvard, who beat them, 2-1, in Cambridge earlier this season.

The Harvard scoring column looks like a Laurie Gregg press release. The goals went like this: Elliott from Gregg at 1:08; Gregg from Sue St. Louis at 16:58; Gregg from St. Louis at 48:22; Mayer from Gregg at 53:05; and Cecile Scoon from Beth Carillo at 60:15.

All five goals resulted from Crimson setups rather than Cornell mistakes. All came on good, hard shots. And on all of them, the Harvard offense took its time, looked for an opening and put the ball in the net, no questions asked. It was that easy.

So the team goes into the Brown game riding high. Number one seed Princeton sees its first action of the tournament this morning against Yale, who defeated Dartmouth, 2-1, yesterday. The Crimson is just itching to get another crack at the Tigers, who knocked them off in a monsoon, 4-1, last Saturday in New Jersey. The tournament finals are this afternoon. THE NOTEBOOK: The band Foghat, which appeared at the New Haven Coliseum last night, checked into the hotel right before the team... Wendy Sonnabend and Janet Judge sustained minor injuries but should be fine for today's games... Deja-Vu Department: Harvard gained the fifth seed in the Eastern Regional tournament and will meet Brown, seeded fourth, in Providence on Wednesday. The teams also met three times last year, once in the regular season, once in the Ivies, and once in the Easterns... ...The team and coaches attended the Ivy league tournament banquet last night at Kline Towers in full Halloween regalia.