W. Tennis Goes 2-1

The Harvard women's tennis team beat the snow this past weekend and two of three foes in the process.

The Crimson (2-1, 0-0 Ivy) traveled down to balmy Oklahoma over the President's Day weekend while the rest of Cambridge was blanketed with half a foot of snow.

In fact, Harvard had the pleasure of playing outdoors on Monday when it closed out its trip with a 9-0 pasting of Tulsa.

Harvard split its other two matches. On Saturday, Harvard defeated Oklahoma State by a 4-3 count, but it then fell to the University of Oklahoma the next day, 5-2.

"We had already played the first match and gotten our win [Saturday], and [the Oklahoma match] was maybe a bit of a letdown," sophomore Julia Kim said. "We weren't able to stay focused and competitive for that match. It was a wake-up call."

The team woke up, and Harvard lost only three sets against Tulsa en route to its shutout victory. The Crimson also swept two unscored matches--one doubles and one singles.

The trip to Oklahoma served as the start to the spring season, which heats up when the weather does--in April. Next up for the Crimson is the Princeton Invitational this weekend in New Jersey.

"[This past weekend] definitely showed a lot of what we need to work on," Kim said. "It was a learning experience and showed us some of our weaknesses."

Up to the Challenge

It seems that they don't call it the Crimson Challenge for nothing.

Two of the three championship matches in this men's tennis tournament held at the Palmer Dixon Courts resulted in Crimson players facing each other. And in the other division, a Harvard player also lived up to the challenge.

On the singles side, co-captains Todd Meringoff and Josh Hausman captured their respective titles. Meringoff, competing in the Crimson singles division, knocked off top seed Mitch Sprengelmeyer of Clemson in straight sets, 6-3, 7-5. Hausman, on the other hand, needed three sets to defeat his own doubles partner, freshman Kunji Majmudar, 6-1, 1-6, 6-3, in the Black singles flight.

An all-Crimson challenge arose for the doubles championship as well, with Meringoff and junior Mitty Arnold pitted against sophomores Philip Tseng and Tom Blake. The match, however, was postponed to a later date.

Harvard is next in action this weekend at the National Indoor Championships.