Netwomen Close In on Title

The Harvard women's tennis team is now only one match away from winning the 1991-92 Ivy title.

The Crimson (11-8 overall, 5-0 Ivy) cruised to a suprisingly easy 8-1 victory over third-place Yale Saturday.

The win assured a showdown on Wednesday afternoon between Harvard and Dartmouth for the Ivy title--pitting the only two undefeated squads remaining in the conference against each other for the final game of the season.

The Big Green defeated Brown, 7-1, on Saturday to give the team a prefect 5-0 record in the Ivies.

Harvard will host Wednesday's showdown at the Beren Tennis Center, where the Crimson has not lost a regular season match in 10 years.

And it Harvard executes as it did Saturday, Dartmouth will have a hard time stopping that streak.

The Crimson took what had figured to be an extremely close match against the Bulldogs and blew it wide open from the beginning.

"It was just a great team effort," senior Kim Cooper said. "I think we're peaking at the right time. We're pretty much in the best shape possible."

"We went out there thinking we had to win every match," junior Erika Elmuts explained, "and almost everybody did. It was incredible."

In front of a crowd of almost 100 fans inside the Palmer-Dixon complex, Harvard began the day by sweeping doubles competitions--dropping only one set in three matches--to jump out to a 3-0 advantage going into singles.

Freshman Erika deLone chalked up her 30 the singles win of the season, beating Cindy Kuragami 6-2, 7-5.

With the win deLone tied Harvard's all-time season record for wins (She broke the record for rookies a long time ago). DeLone tied Kathy Vigna '97 who reached the mark in 1986.

Elumuts, Cooper and freshman Agata Passent followed deLone in the win column.

But, yet again, it was sophomore Eliza Parker who turned in the closest match of the day. Facing Yale's Audrey Delaney (who played in the second position before she was injured), Parker battled back from 5-4 in the third set, facing three match points against her at 0-40.

She pushed the decisive set to a tie breaker and won, after battling off a match point in the process.