SEASON RECAP: Women's Tennis

For the Harvard women’s tennis team, the suspense doesn’t begin until the postseason.

Extending its stretch of dominance in the Ivy League, the Crimson won its third straight Ancient Eight title and polished off its third consecutive undefeated league season, finishing the year 7-0 in Ivy play.

Earning the automatic berth to the NCAA tournament, Harvard advanced to the Sweet 16 for the second time in three years but couldn’t get past the Stanford juggernaut, falling to the eventual national champions in Athens, Ga.

Harvard breezed through the Ivy schedule, outscoring its league foes by a combined total of 38-4 to capture its 16th title since the Ivy championship was established in 1982-83. The Crimson has won 25 straight matches, a run that began in 2002.

“I wouldn’t really say we’re close to any of the other Ivy League schools—they’re kind of jealous of us,” said next year’s co-captain, sophomore Elsa O’Riain. “None of us has any close friends on any other Ivy League teams, to put it mildly.”

“Every other team is gunning for us—that motivates us more,” graduating co-captain Courtney Bergman added.

Because of the weak Ivy competition, Harvard focused on the larger challenge of its non-league schedule and used its league matches as a chance to tune up and get conditioned for the postseason.

“Generally, our toughest matches are non-league matches,” said junior Melissa Anderson, who will serve as captain next year along with O’Riain. “We need to get more pumped up for them.”

Despite going undefeated in the league, the Crimson was not able to secure a top-16 seed in the tournament—a placement that would have helped it avoid Stanford—because of some critical non-league losses earlier in the year.

“We had the potential to be top-ten this year, but we let a few matches out of our hands,” O’Riain said. “Hopefully, next year we’ll be able to tighten up a little bit and not lose concentration.”

Harvard started its season 6-1—the sole loss coming to Stanford—a feat that earned the team a No. 18 national ranking. The team then fell to No. 16 Clemson and No. 4 Northwestern in close 4-3 decisions. After taking an impressive 5-2 win over No. 9 North Carolina to bump its ranking to No. 7, Harvard dropped decisions against No. 30 Alabama and No. 49 South Alabama.

“It’s those kind of matches that top teams don’t lose,” O’Riain said.

The Crimson wrapped up its non-league schedule with a 2-1 California trip, and after rolling through Ivy competition, Harvard stood at 17-6 overall. The earlier losses ensured that the Crimson would be a 17-32 seed, but for the third straight year, Harvard was named one of the 16 regional host sites for the first two rounds of play.

Home-court advantage didn’t help the Crimson last season, when it was upset in the first round by Ohio State. This year, however, Harvard took care of Maryland in its opening match and then dispatched higher-seeded Tennessee to get to the Sweet 16 at the University of Georgia.

Waiting for the squad in Athens, of course, was No. 1 Stanford, the team that had knocked the Crimson out of the tournament in 2003. The Cardinal ended Harvard’s season with a 4-0 win, then went on to beat Georgia, Clemson, and Texas for its second straight national title.

The Crimson, meanwhile, was left with a 19-7 record and No. 16 national ranking to end the year.

“[Stanford] played even better than expected,” Bergman said. “But we are still pretty pleased with how the season went.”

—Staff writer Caleb W. Peiffer can be reached at cpeiffer@fas.harvard.edu.