Women Booters Blank Eagles To Meet UMass in Easterns

Still flying high after winning the Ivy League Championship this weekend, the Harvard women's soccer team continued to roll down victory road, blanking Boston College, 4-0, in the opening round of the Eastern Tournament yesterday afternoon at the Business School Field.

The second-seeded Crimson now faces Massachusetts, the nation's sixth ranked team which defeated Rochester, 2-1, yesterday at Amherst, in the semi-finals Saturday morning at Storrs. The other semi-final pits top-seed Connecticut, which shut out Brown, 2-0, against Cortland State, which disposed of Princeton, 2-0, last night.

If the booters were bruised or tired from the hard-fought Ivy matches at Princeton, they surely didn't show it, using their superior ball control skills to dominate the scrappy Eagles for most of the contest. While Harvard didn't outrun the psyched-up visitors (who were playing in their first Eastern Tournament ever), the nation's eighth ranked eleven simply outexecuted the Eagles on the plays--corner kicks, direct kicks, throw-ins--that often make the difference in close tournament competition.

A Jenny Greeley throw-in literally into the B.C. goal crease set up the first of Cat Ferrante's pair of tallies after ten minutes of end-to-end action. In the ensuing scramble in front of the net, striker Kelly Landry managed to control the ball for a split-second, just long enough to direct one of her patented behind-the-back feeds toward Ferrante.

The well-positioned senior co-captain wasted no time blasting a left-footed drive into the upper right hand corner of the twines to give the Crimson the all-important first goal.

Thirty minutes later, Ferrante again demonstrated the type of heads-up play which has made her so effective all season. When Eagle fullback Clare Connelly mishandled an errant B.C. goal kick, the second team All-Ivy halfback was there to steal the ball, elude the remaining defender, and beat netminder Mary McCarthy to give Harvard an unneeded insurance goal and a 2-0 lead.

Ferrante has now perfected the art of innocuously looming around the 18-yd. line on the opposing team's goal kicks, and then charging the goalie if the fullback attempts a short fullback-to-fullback-to-goalie kick.

Although tight coverage of leading scorers Kelly Landry and Alicia Carrillo hampered the Crimson offense, Ferrante praised the attack. "We've been working on the criss-crosses all season and now we feel comfortable with them. The switching in the offensive worked quite well today."

At the other end of the field, netminder Janet Judge and the Harvard backline did a superb job of containing Eagle speedsters Ann Porell and Cathy Murphy. Judge, who had to block the blinding glare as well as B.C. bullets, punched two potential Eagle tallies out of the crease while pouncing on six more en route to her sixth shutout of the season.

With senior fullback Ellen Jakovic nursing a groin pull (suffered against Brown Saturday) on the bench, talented junior halfback Laura Mayer returned to the back row where she started as a freshman and shadowed Murphy throughout the game.

At 13:40 of the first half and the Crimson leading, 1-0, junior stopper Jeanne Piersiak made the defensive play of the game. After Judge failed to intercept a lead pass to Porell streaking down the left wing, the B.C. leading scorer rocketed an off-angle drive toward the empty Harvard net. But Piersiak, a second team All-Ivy selection, anticipated the trouble and streaked into the crease to deflect the potential score.

The Crimson attack proved it didn't need the glare at its back to connect as Carrillo took a defense-splitting Jenny Rayport feed and beat McCarthy with the game's final tally at 14:15 of the second half.