SEASON RECAP: Stellar Season Ends In Disappointment for Women's Golf

For the Harvard women’s golf team, the 2009-10 campaign can be best described as bittersweet.

Despite putting together a season filled with victories—including a six-tournament winning streak—the Crimson fell short of its ultimate goal: capturing a third straight Ivy League title.

“We played really well and accomplished a lot of things up until the last week of our season, but the fact that we finished it in a way that we hadn’t hoped for tainted the whole year,” incoming captain Mia Kabasakalis said.

Although freshman Katie Sylvan earned the title of Ivy League Rookie of the Year, and sophomore teammate Christine Cho—last year’s top newcomer—was honored as Player of the Year, Harvard ended its season with a disappointing third-place finish at the Ivy League championships in late April.

But the Crimson started out the year with a bang, placing seventh out of 18 teams at Golf Week’s Conference Challenge in mid-September. Its performance among some of the top teams in the nation earned it votes in the Golf World/NGCA Division I Coaches’ Poll—a first in the history of Harvard women’s golf.

“The field in that tournament is pretty similar to the field that we would see at the NCAA regionals,” said outgoing captain Claire Sheldon, whose consistently strong play throughout the year earned her a spot on the All-Ivy Second Team. “It speaks to the level of play that we’re capable of when we’ve had more time to practice.”

Following a second-place finish at Princeton the next week, the squad continued to improve, winning at Yale and at Lehigh to finish out the fall season.

The members of the Crimson then headed indoors for the winter to hone their games, and their hard work clearly paid off. The team’s early momentum carried over into the spring season, when Harvard returned quickly to its winning ways.

Once again playing outdoors, the squad took down Central Florida and Lynn in head-to-head matchups in Florida in March. Next came the Dartmouth Spring Invitational, where the Crimson nabbed the top prize with a dominant 38-stroke victory.

And in its final regular season tournament of the year, Harvard once again came up big.

Avenging a second-place finish at Columbia’s Roar-EE Invitational the year before, the squad placed first out of the 14-team field—which included all of the Ivy teams that would be represented at the Ivy League championships a week later.

To many observers it looked as if Harvard was ready to take home yet another Ancient Eight championship and cement its status as a dynasty in the Northeast.

“I think we were actually playing better [than we ever had in the last two years],” Sheldon said. “We had more team members playing well than we ever had...We were definitely trending in the direction where if we continued to do the things that we had been doing, we probably would have won.”

But the three-peat was not to be, as the two-time defending champions fell behind on the first day and were unable to make up ground over the next two rounds, ultimately ending up in third—25 strokes behind first-place Penn.

“Unfortunately, we didn’t play well when we needed to,” Sheldon said. “This year, it just didn’t happen...We had an off week when we needed to be on.”

“I honestly think that we prepared as best as we could have for that tournament,” Kabasakalis added. “There really wasn’t anything different from last year...if you look at our year as a whole—and the last couple of years—that was one bad weekend out of how many? I think next year we’ll have renewed energy and motivation, and hopefully we’ll look at it as a fluke.”

—Staff writer Dennis J. Zheng can be reached at dzheng12@college.harvard.edu.