No. 4 Crimson Dominates Big Green

Another Ivy League opponent, another test passed with flying colors.

Despite the absence of its No. 3 player to illness, the No. 4 Harvard women’s squash team crushed No. 6 Dartmouth 8-1 last night at the Barnaby Squash Courts in its last home match for nearly two months.

The Crimson (3-0, 2-0 Ivy) had only two matches go to four games, even with the majority of its members playing up a slot with freshman intercollegiate No. 14 Supriya Balsekar out sick. Though the Big Green (3-1, 0-1) played Harvard close, especially at the bottom of the ladder, it was only able to come away with a single win at No. 9 over freshman Elizabeth Berylson.

“We expected a tougher match in the lower order,” said Crimson coach Satinder Bajwa, adding that it provided a good simulation of upcoming matches against more challenging opponents like defending league and national champion and No. 1 Yale and No. 2 Trinity.

Although the Crimson has traditionally dominated Dartmouth, the shifting up in opponents added a noticeable level of competition for the players affected. Both co-captain Hilary Thorndike and senior Stephanie Hendricks lost their first games but managed to battle back for the next three wins.

“The good thing about those two matches was that Stephanie’s only just getting back into it, and she thought that she didn’t play well,” Bajwa said. “But even though she thought that she didn’t play well, she was able to pull the match out. And that is a promising sign for playing against higher competition.”

Hendricks, who had reconstructive ankle surgery last spring and missed this fall’s Ivy scrimmages when she twisted the same ankle, had to fight back from multiple deficits at No. 8.

“I was very nervous, I was shaking,” Hendricks said. “I just needed to get those butterflies out of my stomach and start playing my game—my coach just focused me back to where I needed to be.”

Hendricks rallied from being down 5-8 in the third game and down 0-5 in the fourth to outlast her opponent on the strength of several long points and win 3-1.

Thorndike faced a similar tight match at No. 5, but recovered from a slow start to close out the final three games in dominating fashion.

‘Hilary tends to play a real power game,” Bajwa said, “so we try to change things, hit a drop then hit a drive. She did that in the second game more, and you could see the difference.”

Last night’s match was the third of four for the Crimson before the long break for winter holidays, reading period and finals.

In previous seasons, Harvard has typically only had one match before the break, which Bajwa said was inadequate preparation for the freshman when the new players were confronted with a heavy three-week slate of tougher opponents. The more balanced schedule should provide the team with better grounding for the grueling February stretch.

“When you have only one match against Brown, [the freshmen] wonder what we’re training for and why we’re so gung-ho and why we’re getting so serious,” Bajwa said. “So having these matches—and you never know how Dartmouth and Cornell and Brown are going to develop, they way squash has grown—by having these matches it gives them a direction.”

And the college rookies had little trouble with the early challenge, with sophomore transfer and intercollegiate No. 6 Kyla Grigg blowing out her opponent at No. 1 and freshman intercollegiate No. 10 Jen Blumberg easily winning her match at No. 3 in three games.

Saturday, the Crimson travels to Cornell for its last competition until February.

— Staff writer Lisa J. Kennelly can be reached at kennell@fas.harvard.edu.