W. Volleyball Wins Five at Tourney

The Harvard women's volleyball team (23-7, 7-0 Ivy) trampled all five of its opponents in the Harvard Invitational this weekend as it prepares itself for the Ivy League Competition that will determine the Crimson's possible berth in this year's NCAA championships.

"We were not really looking forward to any one opponent," said sophomore Linda Jellison. "We wanted to use the whole tournament to pump ourselves up for next weekend's matches."

The Crimson has already seized the Ivy title with its undefeated season--only the second perfect record in Ivy League history--but it still needs to win next week's tournament in order to qualify for the NCAAs.

If Harvard's scores from last weekend foreshadow its performance in the upcoming Ivy tournament, Harvard should have no problem capturing the NCAA berth.

The Crimson crushed both Holy Cross and Sienna in straight games, and defeated Manhattan, Navy and Loyola in four games.

The tournament seemed more of a last minute tune-up for the team, rather than actual competition.

"Going into the weekend we knew that we would have a couple of tough matches," said senior co-captain Elissa Hart. "They were good dress rehearsals for next weekend."

Surprisingly, the five home matches did have a lot of similarities to the Ivy League tournament and gave the team some needed last minute preparations.

"Like at the Ivies, this weekend had a lot of matches," Hart said. "We won a lot of confidence from these matches. The team didn't always play at its best, but we still could come up with the big plays when we needed them."

That mental preparation could prove to be the most important factor which came out of the Harvard Invitational. The Crimson squad will now face Columbia in its first match of the Ivy tournament.

"The team will go into next week's matches knowing that we are as prepared as we can be," said Jellison. "This weekend everyone got to play and win; that was important to us."

Even though the Harvard players are excited about the weekend's results and the confidence it gives them for the rest of the season, they still expect some difficulty and refuse to overlook any competitor as a possible defeat.

"We were not expecting Loyola and Sienna to be difficult matches," Hart said. "But they turned out to be really tough. We've gone into the Ivy League Tournament as underdogs before and surprised a lot of people. So we are going to take this year's tournament one match at a time."

Going into the tournament as the heavy favorites, Harvard will use that experience as it hopes take away the steam power of any of the underdogs it will meet next week.