Injuries Plague W. Tennis Start To Finish

Cinderella’s glass slipper must have fallen off somewhere on the way to the trainer’s room.

Immediately following its NCAA Sweet 16 run last year, the potential for the Harvard women’s tennis team must have seemed limitless. Only one regular contributor to the lineup, Sanja Bajin ’03, had been lost to graduation, leaving a core unit two years to aspire for something even greater.

If they could stay healthy, that is.

But the challenge of fielding a full roster each week proved as troublesome as any opponent the Crimson faced all season.

Co-captains Courtney Bergman and Susanna Lingman battled lingering knee, shin and hip injuries throughout the spring and watched from the sideline almost as often as from the baseline. Classmate Alexis Martire fared little better in her struggle to recover from a sprained ankle, missing the final three conference matches, among others.

By year’s end, it seemed as if the only statements that could be made about the lineup with any certainty were that someone was likely to be out with an injury and everyone else was nicked up, just not badly enough to be sitting out that particular match.

Yet, after limping through a mediocre non-conference slate that saw Harvard’s highly-touted squad fall to five lower-ranked opponents en route to a lackluster 7-9 record—punctuated by a four-game losing streak—the season appeared to take a dramatic turn for the better.

Jumpstarted by effortless wins over Columbia and Cornell in the first weekend of league competition, play finally approached the levels anticipated when the team earned its preseason No. 13 ranking.

“It was expected that we’d win,” sophomore Eva Wang said. “We knew we were going to win. It would’ve been a lot more nerve-wracking for us if we’d played a team as good as us, but since we played Cornell and Columbia, and they’re not very good, it takes the pressure off.”

The Ivy dominoes fell swiftly, as even Penn—Harvard’s traditional counterweight at the top of the conference standings—bowed out of the race following a 6-1 defeat at the Crimson’s hands. In dispatching with its league opponents and locking up a second-straight NCAA tournament berth, Harvard surrendered no more than two points—to Cornell and Yale—and in both those instances, at least one regular top-four player was out of commission due to injury.

“In the end,” Wang said, “we were just used to having someone missing from the lineup.”

That talent disparity and ease of victory also allowed the Crimson to consciously devote less than its full arsenal to each match, resting key players for the tournament run.

When the first round and a date with Ohio State rolled around, Harvard was ready and healthy from the top of the ladder to the bottom for only the second time the entire spring season.

“We’re healthy, finally,” Crimson coach Gordon Graham said prior to the match. “We’ve only played one match with our full lineup, and it looks like we’re going into this tournament with our full lineup.”

Given his team’s string of bad luck throughout the year, it was only fitting that Graham was proven wrong almost immediately.

Wang, who had tweaked her quadriceps earlier in the week, aggravated the injury sprinting to fetch a deep lob in her doubles match and was advised by the trainers to retire for the day. Though she toughed out the rest of her 8-4 loss with Martire, she withdrew from singles, again leaving Harvard with a downgraded lineup.

“Mentally I felt everyone was OK but as far as taking someone out of the lineup so suddenly, that’s just a huge deal in itself,” Bergman said. “That was really rough for everyone behind Eva to have to come up like that. Cindy [Chu] had to just come in. Everyone is supposed to be ready, but nonetheless.”

Despite the sudden shake-up, the Crimson rebounded from losing the doubles point courtesy of wins from Bergman and sophomore Melissa Anderson at Nos. 1 and 5. Freshman Cindy Chu split her first two sets after sliding in at No. 6 and staked out a 4-3 lead in the third frame while both Martire and freshman Preethi Mukundan battled through their respective final sets.

But just when it appeared Harvard would sneak past its injury woes, the floor gave way in a matter of minutes. Chu lost three straight games to drop her match, Martire was closed out and Mukundan was swept out of the match, giving Ohio State the first road victory at Beren Tennis Center in more than two years.

“It sucked,” Wang said. “It’s just disappointing for the fans, too. We hyped up the event, and then played like that.”

Despite their disappointment, Bergman and Lingman fared little better at the NCAA Individual Championships, with the former falling in the first round of singles play, the tandem in its opening doubles match. For Bergman, the loss echoed her disappointment with her performance all spring season.

“I’m not totally happy with how I’ve done this year, so it gives me a chance to do well in the biggest tournament of the year,” Bergman said prior to her trip to Athens, Ga. “I’ve had annoying nagging injuries, and in general, with my results over spring break I just didn’t get the results that I wanted.”

But the season was not without small victories, highlighted by Bergman’s performance at the top of the ladder.

With the squad still struggling to find its footing in the first tournament of the fall season, Bergman thrived at the Leary Invitational, rolling to a second-place finish after the last of her teammates was eliminated in the second round.

But even then, hints of the trouble waiting down the road subtly held the Crimson back.

“Most people are coming out of injury,” Anderson said. “We had a pretty long tough season last spring because of how far we went in NCAAs, so over the summer lots of people were trying to recuperate.”

With no seniors, the Crimson returns its entire lineup next season and will likely add freshman Elsa O’Riain, a member of the Irish Fed Cup team, whose brief professional career cost her at least one year of eligibility.

“We might have the best team in Harvard history next year,” Wang said.

If only they can stay healthy.

—Staff writer Timothy J. McGinn can be reached at mcginn@fas.harvard.edu.