Men's Spikers Fall In Ivy Tournament

It was not a proper end to the season, but in a way, it was fitting.

The Harvard men's volleyball team went into the Ivy League tournament last weekend with high expectations of redemption after a 5-15 season of disappointment.

But the Crimson barely missed advancing to the second round of competition at the Ivies, thus ending its season on a sour note.

"It was a real disappointing week," co-captain Dave Cho said. "We pinned a lot of hopes pinned on the [tournament]."

The tournament was divided into two pools of four teams. After a round-robin stage in which each team played the other three in its pool for two sets, the top three teams from each pool went on to an elimination stage.

The seedings of the pool, as it turned out, were a bit strange. Princeton, far and away the dominant team in the Ancient Eight, was put in a pool with host Columbia, Yale and Brown--arguably the weakest three. Theoretically, this allowed the Lions a better-than-normal chance of making the second round.

Another effect of this was some weird seedings, such as Penn being behind Dartmouth and Harvard in the other pool, even though the Quakers had beaten the Big Green. Penn eventually went on to win the pool.

"The four teams in our pool were definitely the next four best teams in the league [after Princeton]," Cho said. "They're all real, real solid teams."

In the end, however, it did not matter, for the eventual champion of the tournament still had to beat everyone else sometime or other. And that's the way Harvard felt going into the round robin.

The first two games were against Cornell early in morning, a team that Harvard had yet to play so far. Judging from the outcome, the Crimson would probably not want to face the Big Red again.

In the first set, Harvard held a 14-11 lead, but a Cornell run fueled by three consecutive missed Crimson serves helped the Big Red take the set, 16-14.

The second set, in the words of co-captain setter Abbas Hyderi, "was a pretty big mental letdown." Cornell won it, 15-8.

To its credit, the Crimson did not immediately roll over and die. The next opponent was Penn, and the score wasn't even close.

Harvard came back with a vengeance, winning 15-4, 15-3. It was simply an old-fashioned blowout.

"It was the most fluent, best, most solid volleyball we've played all year," Hyderi said. "Ryan Westendorf had five aces, and the middle setting was unstoppable."

With its record 2-2, Harvard then faced Dartmouth in a do-or-die meeting. The Crimson had to win one set against a team that had defeated Harvard in two previous meetings this year.

Unfortunately for Harvard, history repeated itself in New York, as Dartmouth won both games by a 15-13 count.

As the score indicates, both sets were extremely close. In the second game, the Big Green held a 14-10 lead, but the Crimson held on to the cliff's edge as the two teams traded sideouts for about 20 minutes.

But in the end, Dartmouth pulled it out, ending Harvard's season.

Though the 2-4 record doesn't show it, the Crimson played some of the best volleyball of the season in the tournament. But like the rest of the season, it just wasn't enough.