Booters Sneak Past Dartmouth

It took the antics of an unheralded sophomore yesterday in Hanover, N.H. to keep the Harvard women's soccer team from dropping what could have been a costly game.

Despite putting 29 shots on goal, the Crimson could muster only sophomore Wendy Zeeben's score at 29:16 of the first half against a surprisingly tough Dartmouth squad.

But lucky for Harvard, fifth in the latest national poll, the unranked and unheralded Big Green couldn't muster much of an offense, either. So behind Zeeben's first period tally and freshman goalie Tracee Whitley's eight saves, the Cantabs snuck out of Hanover with a precarious 1-0 win.

The triumph, which came just three days after the sixth-ranked University of Connecticut scored a mild 2-0 upset of the Crimson, raised Harvard's record to 9-2-1 overall and tied a club record for most shutouts in one season.

More important, though, the win raised the Crimson's Ivy mark to 2-1, and kept alive the squad's hopes of what would be its first Ivy crown since 1981.

In that race for league laurels, Harvard still trails league-leading Brown (3-0) by a single game. The Crimson has to hope that another Ivy school can knock off the Bruins, who stopped the Crimson, 1-0, earlier this year.

And yesterday in Hanover, the Cantabs almost stopped themselves. Not that the Crimson had any trouble sending shot after shot towards Big Green netminder Estey Ticknor; but the Crimson had lots of trouble converting those 29 shots into scores.

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Only when Harvard's all-time scoring leader, Kelly Landry, found the streaking Zeeben did Harvard get on the board.

Surprisingly, the pass gave Landry, also the all-time Harvard assist leader, first help-out of the year.

Not so surprisingly, though, Whitley turned in another stellar performance in goal for the Crimson. The shutout was her eighth in 12 games.

THE NOTEBOOK: Dartmouth fell to 7-4 overall and 1-2 in the Ivies...The Crimson travels to Amherst, Mass. Monday for a showdown there with the nation's second-ranked University of Massachusetts squad. The booters stunned the Minutemen last year, 3-2, in their best performance of 1983...The Cantabs return home Wednesday for a shootout with Boston University...New national rankings are due out Tuesday.