Crimson Looks To Three-Peat

Over the past three years, the Harvard women’s golf team has made winning a habit, having taken the last two Ivy League team championships along with numerous tournaments.

The Crimson will have a chance to nab a third this weekend at Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield, N.J., which has hosted seven US Opens, two US Women’s Opens, and one PGA Championship, and is slated to host the PGA again in 2016. Should the team win, it would receive an automatic bid to the NCAA East Regional Championships, which would give it a shot at Nationals.

Despite the significance of the task at hand, the Crimson finds nothing particularly different about the season-ending tournament, which kicks off this morning. Harvard sees itself as facing the same opponent it faces every week: the course.

“In golf, we don’t really worry too much about our competitors,” captain Claire Sheldon said. “We try to stay more internally focused­­­­­—try to go out and play her best round. We have been able to be successful in the past.”

Those successes include the past two Ivy titles as well as a current six-tournament winning streak. Both of the tournaments Harvard did not win this year took place in the fall.

Despite its recent success, the Crimson’s golfers haven’t been able to rest on their laurels. The squad’s depth forces each golfer to stay on top of her game, as the team has a weekly qualifying system to play in weekend tournaments.

“We have a small team—just seven people—but we’ve all competed,” Sheldon said. “We really are motivating each other. Every week, you’re competing against your teammates. When you have a strong team, you have to work harder…we always do, but this year, it’s more than any other year.”

Another factor motivating Harvard is the fact that its recent successes have absolutely no impact on this weekend’s results. The only scores that count toward the Ivy title will be tallied over the next three days.

“We’ve actually had a pretty phenomenal season, but that doesn’t change anything for us,” Sheldon said.

Penn and Yale seem to pose the greatest threats to Harvard’s quest for a three-peat. The two rivals finished second and third, respectively, at the Crimson’s tournament last weekend—the Roar-EE Invitational—where all the Ivy teams competed except Cornell, which does not have a varsity women’s golf team. The Quakers finished ten strokes off Harvard’s winning score, while the Bulldogs were five behind Penn. Yale fell to the Crimson by only two strokes at last year’s Ivy Championships.

“We’re pretty confident but we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves,” junior Mia Kabasakalis said. “We’re particularly focusing on one shot at a time.”

Though not the team’s main focus, Harvard boasts several golfers that have a shot at the individual title.

Kabasakalis was the headliner this past weekend, as she tied Columbia senior Nancy Shon for the best individual score. Shon went on to take the title in a nine-hole tiebreaker.

But Kabasakalis has hardly been the Crimson’s only threat.

The weekend before, it was sophomore Christine Cho who posted the top score, followed by Sheldon, who was the team’s top finisher three weeks ago.

Both Cho and Sheldon had the lowest scores of the tournaments in their respective weeks as Harvard’s leader.

Sheldon placed third at last year’s Ivy Championships to earn first-team All-Ivy honors, while Cho placed fourth to take All-Ivy honors along with the Ivy League Rookie of the Year award. Kabasakalis placed 14th.

Standing in the way of the individual title will be Shon and Yale’s Alexandra Lipa, among others.

“I think we’re pretty team-oriented,” Kabasakalis said. “It would be nice if someone won the individual title, but I don’t think that’s any one of our goals. We’re just trying to take each hole at a time.”

With individual accomplishments off the radar, the team remains focused on continuing its rise to Ivy powerhouse status.

Kabasakalis’s classmates and younger teammates have known nothing but first place at the Ivy Championships, though the title two years ago was the first in the team’s history. The Crimson’s youngest three classes have no intention of learning what it was like before the squad rose to prominence.

“The team has been on the up,” Kabasakalis said. “We’ve been improving so much. It had never happened before [two years ago]. Now it’s kind of expected, but at the same time it’s important to get perspective, not take anything for granted, and stay motivated.”

—Staff writer Christina C. McClintock can be reached at ccmcclin@fas.harvard.edu.