Sports Wrap

Men's Volleyball

The Harvard men's volleyball team returned home Saturday night from a busy weekend of mixed results. The spikers won an exciting, see-saw battle against Yale, and then finished ninth in a field of 20 at the Eastern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association (EIVA) Open at West Point.

The weekend's efforts left the squad with a 5-5 record in the EIVA, and a 7-10 record overall.

Friday night's league match was the spikers' second victory over the Elis in the past two weeks.

The teams split the first four games of the best-of-five match. Harvard won the first and third games, 15-12 and 15-9, while Yale won the second and fourth, 15-12 and 15-10.

In the fifth and deciding contest, Harvard jumped out to a quick 11-3 lead. "We were playing the best volleyball of the weekend," said co-captain Bruce Cadenhead," but then we just shut off. We figured we had it won."

When the score reached 14-9, Harvard had five match points. It lost them all, however, and the game was tied at 14.

However, the Crimson spikers players won the match, 16-14, when a Yale player shanked a Harvard serve off to the side.

On Saturday, the Crimson opened the EIVA tournament with a controversial victory over Villanova.

It appeared that Harvard had won the best-of-three match, 16-14, 15-0. But the Villanova coach complained that not all of Harvard's players had been wearing the proper uniforms.

The Crimson had arrived at the tournament only 15 minutes before it was scheduled to play, and one of the players was wearing the wrong color shorts for the first match. Harvard had to forfeit that game, but it won the third match, 15-9.

After the first match debacle, the Crimson overwhelmed Army, 15-0, 15-10. But Harvard didn't fare so well in the third match, losing 15-11, 15-8 to a strong Rutgers squad.

Their 2-1 record in the preliminary round robin was enough to propel the spikers into the next round of action against Brown, which hadn't defeated Harvard in five years.

But on Saturday, the Bruins eliminated Harvard from the tournament in a disappointing three game match, 15-8, 11-15, 15-9.

However, the spikers will have at least two chances to exact revenge from Brown later in the season.

Women's Squash

One member of the women's squash team reached the finals of the Women's Intercollegiate Squash Championships over the weekend and other members of the team did better than expected in the N.J. tournament.

"Everybody showed tremendous improvement this year," Crimson Coach Priscilla Choate said. "The performance in the nationals show how hard they worked all year."

Diana Edge, Harvard's number one player and the tournament's top seed, lost in the final to Princeton's Demer Holleran by the scores of 15-7, 15-4, and 15-11. During the season Edge split her two matches against Holleran, the Tiger's top player.

Harvard's Co--Captain Marty Winnick won her first two matches but lost to Trinity's number one player Sophie Porter in round three.

The loss dropped Winnick into the consolation tournament, and she was defeated in her first match there by Wellesley's number one player Anne Smith.

Another bright spot for the Crimson was number four player Lucy Miller. Although she lost her first round match. Miller came back and won five consecutive contests to capture the consolation tournament title over Dartmouth's number two player Cathleen Holland, winning by a score of three games to one.

Number five player Sheila Morrisey also participated for the Crimson and beat teammate, Liz Reynolds, a late entrant into the tournament, (3-1). In the following round of 16, Morrisey lost to Holleran, (0-3), but came back to beat Clair Slaughter of Trinity in the consolation. She then lost in the third round quaterfinals in a close match (2-3).

Reynolds lost in the second consolation round (1-3) to Brown's number two player Eva Simpson.

Fencing

Harvard's men's and women's fencing teams traveled to New Haven, Conn. last Wednesday for their regular season finales--their 10th varsity meet in 25 days--and returned home disappointed. The men (now 14-2) lost only their second meet of the year, 17-10, while the women (now 10-6) dropped their contest, 12-4.

The losses placed the men in a respectable second place in the Ivies, and left the women fifth in the league.

Three graduating seniors--Luca Cicchetti, Jeff Levy, and Thor Wilbanks--pulled out wins in their last regular season bouts.

On the women's side, next year's captain, Penelope Papailias, qualified for the NCAAs with a victory on Saturday.

With the end of the season approaching, both the coaches and players are looking at the future.