NCAAs Next Test for W. Soccer

There was no celebration or rejoicing as the Harvard women’s soccer team watched its name called alongside Hartford’s on the NCAA tournament selection show yesterday afternoon. And when all 64 teams had been announced, the team filed out of the Bright Center and marched stoicly to Ohiri Field to begin another practice.

For the Crimson, which has now made six consecutive NCAA tournaments, the expectation is to go far beyond just making it to the postseason.

The NCAA tournament begins on Thursday at 4:30 p.m. with a mismatch between Sacred Heart (10-9) and No. 13 Connecticut (16-5). The game between No. 23 Harvard (10-5, 4-3 Ivy) and Hartford (15-5) will immediately follow. The winners will play Saturday at noon. UConn, the eighth seed of the 64-team tournament, will host all three games.

“I don’t think there’s anybody in our bracket that we need to be afraid of,” said Harvard Coach Tim Wheaton. “And if you’re going to be a national champion, you got to play the best.”

The NCAA originally had planned to have all tournament games on Friday and Sunday, but UConn was already scheduled to host the Big East men’s soccer tournament on those days, so the women’s games were pushed to Thursday and Saturday.

Harvard was ranked second in the northeast region behind UConn in the most recent NSCAA poll—typically a high enough ranking to host an NCAA regional—but UConn was the northeast’s only team selected as one of the 16 NCAA host sites. The 15 other host sites were divided among the NCAA’s five other regions.

Four other teams from the northeast made NCAAs, but instead of forming a second Northeast Regional, the teams were used to fill out other regional brackets. Boston College will play at Nebraska, Dartmouth will play at Marquette, Syracuse will play at Illinois and Boston University will be bused down to Princeton.

“One of the things about our region is that we’re geographically close to a lot of regions, and even though B.U. goes to Princeton, they don’t have to fly there,” Wheaton said. “One of their objectives was to keep teams from flying and they were very proud that only eight teams [in the 64-team tournament] had to fly this time.”

Hartford is the most familiar of opponents for the Crimson. The two teams have met in the regular season each year since 1996, with Harvard winning the most recent meeting, 1-0, on Oct. 31.

Thursday will also be the teams’ third meeting out of the past four NCAA tournaments. Hartford beat Harvard 3-0 in the second round in 1998, and Harvard beat Hartford 3-0 in the second round in 2000.

“I guess [Harvard vs. Hartford] is becoming a tradition,” Wheaton said.

Harvard finished the season fourth in the Ivies behind No. 22 Princeton (13-2-1, 5-1-1), Dartmouth (9-4-1, 5-1-1) and Penn (13-1-2, 5-1-1), who finished in a three-way tie for first. The Crimson lost to all three teams at Ohiri Field.

Princeton had been in sole possession of first place for most of the season, but Penn’s 3-1 defeat of Harvard at Ohiri Field on Saturday afternoon, coupled with Dartmouth’s victory over Brown and Princeton’s 1-0 loss to Yale on Saturday night, set up the three-way tie.

Because Princeton beat Dartmouth head-to-head and tied Penn, while Dartmouth beat Penn, the Tigers earned the Ivy League’s NCAA automatic berth.

Penn 3, Harvard 1

Going into the 2000 Ivy season, only two teams—Columbia and Penn—had failed to beat Harvard in the history of their programs. But Columbia concluded last year’s season by beating Harvard , and Penn accomplished the same feat on Saturday afternoon.

The era of Harvard’s Ivy dominance from 1994 to 1999, in which the Crimson lost two league games, made Harvard everyone’s biggest rival. Every Ivy team has come to Ohiri Field with a sense of desperation, and unlike past years, the Crimson failed to adequately respond to the challenge.

Princeton set the tone for its season by snapping an eight-year losing streak against the Crimson last month, and Penn ended 12 years of frustration on Saturday.

“I think we didn’t come out to play today,” Wheaton said. “We didn’t do what we needed to do today.”

Freshman Katy Cross, the leading scorer in the Ivies, netted all three goals for the Quakers.On the first goal just 12 minutes into the game, she beat a Harvard defender one-on-one on the right side, then cut across the box and drew Gunther out of the net. Gunther stopped Cross initially, but the ball was ultimately deflected into the open net.

Just 10 minutes later, Cross made the score 2-0—Harvard’s first two-goal deficit all season—when she got behind the Harvard defenders on the left side and finished cleanly.

“We needed to come out aggressive, run through balls, and we didn’t do that in the opening 20 [minutes] and it showed,” said sophomore midfielder Katie Hodel, who scored Harvard’s only goal of the afternoon. “We started to do it at the end of the first half. We knew what we needed to do. We just didn’t get it done today.”

Sophomore Lauren Cozzolino and freshman Liza Barber, mainstays of the Crimson’s backline this year, were both ill for most of the week before the game.

Freshman Falyne Chave subbed in the backfield for much of the second half.

“[Our defenders] hadn’t been at practice all week, so they came in, I think, a little off their game in the beginning,” Hodel said. “It took them a while to adjust to playing again after not practicing.”

Cross put the game away with her third goal in the 73rd minute when she received the ball following a rush to the net by Penn freshman Rachelle Snyder.

Harvard finally got on the scoreboard two minutes later on Hodel’s goal—the first of her career. She touched a pass from junior forward Beth Totman just inside the box, took her time to control the ball, and then powered it across the net into the upper right corner.

“It was nice to score but it definitely would have been a thousand times better to get the win,” Hodel said.

In a scene that had become familiar this year at Ohiri Field, the visiting Ivy team stormed the field in celebration of a victory over its longtime nemesis.

Though Harvard finished behind Penn in the Ivy standings, the scenario won’t necessarily repeat itself in the NCAA tournament. The key indicator is that Harvard played the toughest nonconference schedule in the Ivies, while Penn’s was among the weakest.

Last year the best Ivy showings in NCAAs came from Dartmouth, who split the Ivy title, and Harvard, who placed fourth, as both teams advanced to the Sweet 16. The year before that, Harvard, who won the Ivies, and Dartmouth, who placed fifth in the Ivies, were the only two Ivy teams to reach the second round.

What these teams had in common was that they each played among the toughest nonconference schedules in the Ivies. So the best Ivy representative in NCAAs has not necessarily been the league champion, but rather the team that has been the most willing to challenge itself.