SEASON RECAP: Women's Lacrosse

Snow surrounded Jordan Field when the Harvard women’s lacrosse team opened its season with promising wins. After finishing the 2004 season with a 6-9 record, the team sought redemption, and early victories hinted that this could be the year to turn things around.

The Crimson’s chances chilled when the weather in Cambridge warmed, however, as Harvard embarked on the longest losing streak in the program’s history, only finding vindication for early hopes in the team’s final game.

“We had higher expectations than what ended up happening,” co-captain attack Catherine Sproul said. “I think the team was capable of a lot more, and I don’t know what fell apart.”

The team had season-long difficulty settling into a groove—the continuing fallout from the transition at head coach before the 2004 season from 25-year veteran Carole Kleinfelder to Sarah Nelson ’94.

“We haven’t really established a Harvard style of play. We have a lot of talent but we’re not really stringing it together,” Sproul said.

Although the Crimson finished the season tied with Brown for last in the Ivy League, it coalesced late in the season. Sproul led an unanswered second-half offensive charge to pull the team within two against No. 17 Cornell, although the Crimson eventually lost 7-5. If the light of hope peeped through the clouds of a losing season then, it beamed in the team’s final game, a 13-9 victory over Brown in which the team’s rookies shone.

“I think this game, for our team, was a complete 180,” freshman attack Tara Schoen said.

Schoen scored six against Brown and lead the team in goals with 23, while freshman midfielder Natalie Curtis led the team in scoring with 22 goals and four assists and also picked up 29 ground balls.

“They have great skill and great potential, and in the next three years we’re probably going to see Harvard at the top of the Ivy League rather than at the bottom,” co-captain Kelly Noon said.

Senior midfielder Elaine Belitsos scored six goals to lead the team to a 12-7 win in its opener against UMass. Harvard stretched its streak on the subsequent Sunday against Quinnipiac but revealed an unresolved weakness from the previous season—the failure to close consistently—as Quinnipiac fought back from a 12-4 deficit to lose 13-11. A loss to No. 13 Syracuse in the third game was expected, but subsequent defeats were more demoralizing. The Crimson fell 15-6 to Connecticut before losing games it could—and, the players say, should—have won.

“Our mental toughness wasn’t as strong as it needed to be,” Noon said. “We came out slow in a couple games and had to play catch-up.”

It didn’t help that the rearguard was unstable, as sophomore goalie Kathryn Tylander suffered a season-ending ankle injury against Syracuse. Junior Kristen Demorest and the hockey team’s junior defensewoman, Caitlin Cahow, split the remaining time in the net.

The Crimson consistently stuck with league opponents into halftime before succumbing to end-game meltdowns. Harvard’s tough Ivy season began with a 16-9 loss to Yale. The Crimson was nearly redeemed when it pulled back from a 9-5 deficit in the second half to take No. 15 Penn into overtime, but a Quaker goal dampened hopes of an upset.

Blowout losses to then-No. 4’s Princeton and Dartmouth showed the team lacked the feistiness it displayed against Penn, and the defeats sent the team spiraling into a home loss to Columbia, when the Crimson gave the Lions their first Ivy win in history by a 11-9 margin.

“We really wanted to come back, and we really wanted to get it in,” sophomore attack Liz Gamble said. “Sometimes it just doesn’t happen.”

Seeing that it happens next year will be the charge of 2005-06 co-captains Tylander and Bridgett Driscoll.

—Staff writer Samuel C. Scott can be reached at sscott@fas.harvard.edu.