Spikers Lose Ivy Finals As Tireless Tigers Roll

During the daytime Saturday, the men's volleyball team was invincible at the Ivy League Championships in the IAB. But night fell, and so did the spikers, losing to an inexhaustible Princeton squad in the finals.

The Crimson had miraculously managed to weave through the maze of the all-day, quasi-round-robin tournament unscathed, winning four matches without losing a game--including a ruthless crushing of Cornell, the defending champion.

But when it came time to meet Princeton--which despite an early-afternoon loss to the Crimson had compiled the day's second-best record--weariness and mental mistakes replaced enthusiasm and keenness, and a decisive loss ensued.

After methodically defeating Columbia, Brown. Princeton and Cornell in succession, and even winning the first game of the best-of-three final, the team went out of control.

Following a 15-11 Crimson victory in the first game of the finale, the squad's fortunes finally soured.

Senior Rich Rohan, whose outstanding tournament play garnered him first-team Ivy honors, ironically made the final mistake of the second game, when he dinked the last point into the net, giving the Tigers at 16-14 victory.

During the third game--in the strangest aspect of the final--coach Roger Martin learned the hard way about an Ivy League rule technicality which prevented him from substituting in senior co-captain and all-Ivy Terry Trumbull at his usual center spiker position.

Those two errors were the only dramatic ones. During the last two games, the spikers failed to capitalize with spikers, serves and dinks in the style that marked their previous matches. Instead, the team receded into tentative play which yielded it only two points in 11 serves during one stretch of the 15-7 final game.

"I don't think Princeton thought they could win, but then they saw we weren't going to blow them off the face of the court," Martin said, adding. "We let them into the match. We didn't have to."

Martin added that an Ivy League rule--a rule not used in the Crimson's usual Eastern Collegiate League--preventing more than two players from alternating at the same position prohibited him from installing a rested Trumbull in where Dave Coatsworth and Kevin O'Sullivan had taken turns substituting. Princeton won just before Trumbull was going to play at another spiker position, he said.

But the absence of the Trumbull was not the only reason for the Crimson defeat. The most important element may have been the absence of rest.

"Princeton is more experienced and better at these day-long tournaments." Rohan said, adding. "We petered out a little early."