W. Soccer Denied Bid To NCAAs

There was only silence as the Harvard women’s soccer team watched 64 other teams’ names appear on the NCAA selection show yesterday, leaving the Crimson without an NCAA berth of its own for the first time since 1995.

Harvard lost out to New England schools Yale and Rhode Island for NCAA at-large berths. Rhode Island was selected over Harvard despite having a far weaker schedule and a worse record against common opponents. But URI (15-5-1) had a far better overall record than Harvard (8-7-1), a better record against teams under NCAA consideration and just as many wins as Harvard against NCAA-bound teams. That was enough for the Rams to earn the at-large berth under the NCAA’s selection criteria.

After the final bracket was displayed, Harvard coach Tim Wheaton made a brief speech praising his team, and all but a handful of players speechlessly filed out of the room.

“I believe we’re one of the top 64 teams in the country, but we put ourselves in the situation where there were enough top teams that had defeated us, and we left it to a committee to decide,” Wheaton said after most of his team had departed. “Certainly we’re disappointed.”

Seniors Beth Totman and Katie Urbanic were the last to leave the room. Their college careers, which had already been cut short by injuries, were cut even shorter upon the surprise announcement.

“[Our senior leadership] has been incredible—just great attitudes, great examples for all of us, working incredibly hard,” Wheaton said. “They deserved a little better than this to end their career, but it doesn’t change the contributions they’ve made to our program.”

“None of us expected it to be over today at all,” said co-captain Caitlin Butler. “We didn’t really expect that we would not get in behind Yale and Rhode Island. But you leave it up to an at-large bid, you never know what will happen.”

Harvard had earned at-large bids each of the last two years as a bubble team, but each of those teams had two more overall wins and more wins over other teams in the NCAA field. This year, Harvard played a tougher schedule and didn’t play as many of the marginal NCAA teams that would have provided easier victories and still helped its NCAA case.

All but one of Harvard’s losses—Washington—came against NCAA-qualifying teams. All but the loss to UConn and Washington were by a single goal. The Crimson needed just slightly better results against the difficult schedule, but couldn’t pull it off.

Harvard coach Tim Wheaton had no regrets about the schedule.

“We enjoy playing the teams we play,” he said. “We feel like we won the games we should have, mostly, and had some opportunities to win some others we didn’t take advantage of.”

Harvard has typically succeeded in scheduling all the Northeast teams that might garner NCAA berths—like Boston College, Boston University, and Hartford, so most NCAA selection decisions can be based more on head-to-head results. URI’s contention for an at-large bid was unprecedented, so Harvard did not play the Rams. So unlike past years, Harvard’s NCAA fate wasn’t as well decided on the field.

Wheaton said despite the NCAA selection result, he was still proud of this year’s team.

“The turnaround that they’ve made in terms of the important things—effort, playing as a team, representing the school well—has been huge,” he said.

Though Harvard’s record was not as strong as past years, Wheaton said he was pleased with this year’s team’s consistency in its effort relative to past seasons.

“It’s not a situation where we’ve gone out and we didn’t show up to play,” Wheaton said. “I don’t think that happened this year.”

A couple of tournament upsets played a key role in keeping Harvard out of the NCAA tournament. Richmond, an unlikely at-large NCAA qualifier, upset Rhode Island in the Atlantic 10 championship. Had Rhode Island won its conference to qualify automatically, it would have freed up an at-large berth that could have gone to Harvard.

Also, Ohio St. came back from a three-goal deficit to stun Penn St. and win the Big Ten conference tournament for an NCAA berth despite an overall losing record. Harvard could have fit nicely into a Midwestern bracket at Notre Dame had Ohio St. not made the tournament.

The tournament snub came as a huge surprise to Harvard because it had been ranked ahead of Rhode Island in both the NSCAA and Soccer Buzz regional polls for the past several weeks, and ahead of Yale in the Soccer Buzz poll.

Harvard also finished a game ahead of Yale in the Ivy standings. But Ivy standings don’t directly matter in NCAA selection. Yale had a head-to-head victory over the Crimson, a better overall record, the same record against common opponents as Harvard and just as many wins over NCAA-qualifying teams, so Yale was an easy pick over Harvard by the NCAA’s criteria.

Harvard’s lack of bad losses compared to Rhode Island’s losses to teams well off the NCAA radar—Brown, St. Bonaventure and New Hampshire—led to a majority of rational human voters ranking Harvard ahead of the Rams in both polls. But the NCAA selection criteria led to a different result than voter opinion.

Both the Rams and the Crimson had the same number of wins over NCAA qualifying teams. Harvard had beaten Princeton and Central Connecticut. Rhode Island had beaten Dayton and Richmond, both teams in its conference.

Harvard would have been helped out significantly had the women’s selection criteria been more like the men’s. Unlike the women’s committee, the men’s committee uses as the main selection criteria an adjusted rating-percentage-index that additionally rewards good wins and penalizes bad losses. Since Harvard had no bad losses and Rhode Island had several, Harvard would have been clearly helped by that format.

Also, unlike the women’s committee, the men’s committee doesn’t use records against teams in the tournament and records against teams under selection consideration as selection criteria. Because of these two criteria, it’s actually possible for a team to be penalized more for a loss against a team above .500 than a loss against a sub-500 team.

The NCAA also happened to save money by selecting Rhode Island over Harvard, too. Had Harvard been selected, it would have had to have been shipped out of region, and another team would have been shipped to the region to avoid an intraconference in the first round.

While history doesn’t matter in NCAA selections, Harvard had won all four of its last NCAA first-round matches in its last four first-round appearances. When given a chance, Harvard has traditionally done well in the NCAA tournament. But there will be no chance this season.

“We had a great team this year, and for one reason or another, we didn’t pull of the wins we should have,” Butler said.

—Staff writer David R. De Remer can be reached at remer@fas.harvard.edu.