Two Wins Will Give Women's Volleyball Ivy Title

There’s another Ivy title-clinching showdown with Penn this weekend, and there’s no need to catch a 5 a.m. bus to Philadelphia to watch this one.

The Harvard women’s volleyball team hosts the Quakers and Princeton this weekend in its final two matches of the season, and two victories will guarantee the Crimson (14-8, 9-3 Ivy) at least a share of the Ivy League crown. The title would be the first in Harvard volleyball history.

“It’s been a dream since the day I got here, and this is our best team ever,” said senior outside hitter Nilly Schweitzer. “We know that the Ivy title is on the line and we’re ready for it.”

The hypothetical conclusion sounds great for a Crimson squad that has just three league losses on the season, but both the Tigers (16-7, 7-4) and Penn (14-9, 6-5) remain in contention as well. Harvard and Cornell are tied for first, although two losses by both teams could potentially put five Ivy teams—including the Quakers, Princeton and Yale—in the hunt for the title.

If two or more teams have the same record at the end of the season, there will be a playoff to decide who will take home the league’s automatic NCAA bid. The event would be held at a neutral site and would have an opening round of games, if necessary, on Nov. 19 and a championship game on Nov. 20.

The Tigers already knocked off the Crimson 3-2 in an October match, though Harvard fought back from a 2-0 deficit and won the third and fourth games before falling in the fifth. In the match’s deciding frame, the Crimson struggled to a .045 hitting percentage, while the Tigers blistered Harvard with 11 kills and just three attack errors for a .421 hitting percentage. The defeat at Princeton was the Crimson’s first Ivy loss on the season.

“When we played Princeton last time, we definitely didn’t show up as well as we can,” said freshman outside hitter Laura Mahon. “But I think we’re a superior team, and it should make a difference being home and being better prepared.”

Harvard has changed up its defense to challenge the high-caliber Tiger offense, which posted a .255 hitting percentage in October’s contest. The Crimson will look to stop the Princeton’s outside hitting attack, which accounted for 51 of the Tigers’ 77 kills against the Crimson. Princeton took advantage of a block-focused Harvard defense to punish the Crimson on the line in the teams’ last meeting.

“Their outside hitters are very short but crafty players and they burned us on the line a lot,” Schweitzer said. “We’re going to block line instead of block angle.”

While the outside hitting arsenal from the Tigers will pose problems for Harvard on tonight, Penn brings a lethal middle attack to the match tomorrow afternoon. In the Crimson’s 3-2 victory over the Quakers at The Palestra, Penn’s middle hitter Michelle Kauffman blitzed Harvard with 20 kills and a .485 hitting percentage on the match. Fellow middle hitter Lynzy Caton turned in 14 kills as well.

The Crimson countered the Quakers’ offensive attack behind captain and outside hitter Kaego Ogbechie’s 29 kills, and Harvard rolled past the Quakers 15-8 in the match’s deciding game.

But this weekend Penn arrives in Cambridge with an outside shot at the Ivy League crown, and it must defeat the Crimson to have any chance at the title. Since falling to Harvard on Oct. 15, Penn has gone 7-2, and last weekend, the surging Quakers stunned Ivy League co-leader Cornell 3-0.

To defeat Penn again, the Crimson must find a way to control the middle at the net. The Quakers’ offense often relies upon the middle hitter’s slide—when the middle hitter runs behind the setter to catch the defense off guard—to open up both the middle and the outside for the front row.

“We’ve been working on defending their right side attack and stopping their slide from the middle,” Mahon said. “We’re planning to force them to make hits they’re not necessarily comfortable with.”

Forcing early attack errors should provide momentum for a Harvard offense that needs little to get it going. Ogbechie dominated both the Quakers and Tigers earlier this season, rounding out her 29-kill performance at Penn with 15 kills against Princeton. Sophomore outside hitter Katie Turley-Molony turned in her best back-to-back performance on the same road trip with 20 kills against the Tigers and 10 against the Quakers. The Crimson had four players tally 10 or more kills in the teams’ first meetings, and Harvard will look for similar balanced offense today and tomorrow with the Ivy title on the line.

“Our team plays the best when everyone plays together,” Turley-Molony said. “Our best win has not necessarily come when certain people play out of their minds. We need to find communal energy on the court.”

Energy won’t be lacking on either side of the court this weekend as Harvard looks to tack on an NCAA berth to a successful regular season. Fellow first-place team Cornell is in action at home this weekend, taking on Yale and Brown in its final regular season contests. A Big Red loss and a perfect weekend for the Crimson would make Harvard undisputed Ivy champions, while a loss by each team would lead to a multi-team playoff.

But the Crimson hopes its performance this weekend will make the hypothetical title talk disappear.

“It has nothing to do with other people’s play—it’s completely up to us,” Turley-Molony said. “If we win these next two games, we’re the champions."