Brown Crushes Men, 16-6; #1 Princeton Up Next

The dark side of the Harvard men's lacrosse team's janus face showed up against Brown Wednesday afternoon, and the results weren't pretty.

In what was only its second league game, the squad (3-3 overall, 1-1 Ivy) was dominated by the much-heralded Bears, 16-6.

"It wasn't really close," junior Ravi Singh said. "Although the score may not indicate it, Matt Camp (the Crimson freshman goalie) played an outstanding game. If it hadn't been for him it would have been ridiculous."

All season, the Crimson has gone into games wondering which team it would be--the impressive, confident squad that defeated the likes of Penn (14-13) and Army (11-7) this season, or the comparatively-weak, unassertive team that fell to Boston College (11-12) and Duke (6-13).

"This whole season has been a little weird," Singh said. "We've played really inconsistent--we've had some very good performances and some pretty bad ones. It's hard to tell how we are going to play on any given day."

Going into Wednesday's game, the Crimson might have had some idea, though--the Bears had beaten number-one ranked Princeton, 7-6, on Saturday and are considered to be one of the best teams in the league. Still, Harvard was confident.

"We knew that they were going to be good, and they were," junior Spencer Rice said. "But we were confident--you always think that you can beat any team in the league if you play up to your potential."

In Wednesday's game, the Crimson certainly didn't play up to its potential, but it also didn't get any help from the Bears.

Brown got off to a quick start in the game and never looked back. The team's offense found creases like a good dry cleaner, scoring a number of easy goals early in the contest. At the end of the first period, the Bears were up, 8-2.

"We were a little lackadaisical in the first period," Singh said. "We let them get that transition game going, and it was over."

"We came out flat, got burned early a couple of times and then hung our heads for a little while," Rice said. "That killed us."

Indeed, things scarcely got better for Harvard in the second and third periods. While the Brown offensive production leveled off, the Bears continued to keep the Crimson on the defensive.

At halftime, Brown had expanded its lead to seven, 10-3 and by the end of the third period, the lead reached double digits, 13-3.

"The big thing that was so frustrating was that we had wanted to control the ball going into the game, but their aggressiveness put us completely out of sync," Rice said. "We just couldn't get it from them to score."

Harvard's offense managed a few opportunities in the final period, tallying three goals, but when the final whistle blew, the Bears were celebrating a blow-out, and the Crimson was searching for answers.

"We all got together after it was over, and tried to put it in perspective," Rice said. "We hadn't played that badly, but we knew that we could do a lot better. We had a good talk."

"We're not going to let this loss get us down," he added. "These kinds of games are going to happen--or at least have happened. We've just got to focus on turning them around, and I think we will."

Harvard Notes

The loss puts the Crimson in the middle of the league pack with a 1-1 record. Currently, Brown is on top with an undefeated league mark, and Princeton is number two with one loss.

Sophomore Mike Eckert leads the team in scoring at this point in the season.

Prior to Wednesday's game, he had amassed 25 points on 18 assists and seven goals. He has hit 24.1 percent of his shots this season.

Behind Eckert in the scoring department are captain Mike Porter and Rice, respectively. Porter has garnered 16 points overall (three assists, 13 goals--27.7 percent), while Rice has accumulated 12 points (four assists, eight goals--27.6 percent).

Freshman Rob Lying is pacing the Crimson in goal. He has 58 saves on the year and a 45.5 save percentage.

Camp has 10 saves and a 45.5 save percentage.

Harvard's next game will be on Saturday when it hosts Princeton, a team considered by many to be the best college lacrosse team in the country. The game will be played at Ohiri Field.