W. Soccer Demands Positive Attitudes

A defining characteristic of the Harvard women’s soccer team is its selective memory. The Crimson is a team that requires its members to look forward and ignore the past. This is an essential component of what Harvard coach Tim Wheaton refers to as a positive attitude.

Enforcing such a policy has become a necessity given the wide swings in his team’s performance over the past three years.

The Crimson has been brilliant at times, with peak national rankings ranging from No. 7 to No. 12 in each year—no small task in a sport with a Division I sponsorship of 280 teams. The program is also one of only 10 nationwide to make the second round of NCAAs each of the past six years.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Harvard suffered a shocking loss to Boston College in its 1999 tournament opener when it was one of just eight nationally-seeded teams. In 2000 and 2001, the team achieved the rare distinction of making the NCAA tournament in spite of 0-5 and 2-4 runs, respectively, to close out the regular season.

The team’s most stinging failure, however, is its fourth-place finish in the Ivies each of the last two years.

In order to return to the top of the Ivy standings for the first time since 1999, Wheaton didn’t want his team dwelling on any negative thoughts, so he demanded in an e-mail last May that each member of the team return to preseason this year with a positive attitude.

“We made a commitment last spring, that if we’re going to come back, we’re going to come back positively giving everyone the benefit of the doubt and working towards common goals,” Wheaton said. “And basically everyone who’s come back has come back with that feeling,”

So far, Wheaton’s strategy has achieved its goals. The returning players have expressed only positive thoughts through the preseason.

“It’s been the best preseason we’ve had as far as team chemistry,” said senior Joey Yenne, Harvard’s leading overall scorer each of the past two seasons. “For the last couple of years we’ve been losing a lot, and there’s been a little bit of dissension. Now it’s finally completely positive.”

“It’s a different energy this year,” added senior Beth Totman, who led Harvard in scoring her freshman year. “We all have the same goals. We’re focusing on this year. Everything from the past is the past.”

The team arrived earlier than all other Harvard athletic teams for preseason, a full week before the end of August. That allowed the team to focus, said junior co-captain Katie Hodel. Within the first few days, the team had a meeting to set its goals for the year. The team’s ambitions included the usual fare, such as an undefeated Ivy record.

“We’re really good at stating the obvious,” Totman said.

Hodel also emphasized that the meeting was necessary to show the team’s high standards to the freshman class, which is further removed from an Ivy title than any incomers since 1994. Nobody wanted last season’s events—losing to Penn for the first time ever, losing to Princeton for the first time in nine years—to become the norm.

Among Wheaton’s favorite stories from the preseason, ironically, is one where his players disobeyed him. When doing fitness sprints one day, Wheaton implemented a system where he split his players into teams and the first-place teams had to do fewer sprints in the end. Instead of following his instructions, the team did every one of the sprints together, because players refused to stand idle while their teammates were perspiring.

“That’s a great sign of a team caring about each other,” Wheaton said. “It’s bad for me. I got to figure out a different way to get them psyched to do those things—no, I’m kidding. It’s awesome.”

Another asset to the team this year is Wheaton’s acknowledgement of its depth and the realization that the gap between his usual starters and the bench players was never large. There should be more substitutions than there were during last year’s regular season.

“There are groups of players that are making it hard for us to pick starters, but they’re making it easy for us to know that if we make a substitution, the level of the game will go up,” Wheaton said.

Wheaton has also switched up the formation at the outset of the season. For most of last year, he played a 3-4-3 and relied on junior Caitlin Fisher—a First Team All-Ivy and National U-21 player—to effectively cover both the back and midfield positions on her side of the field. Now, he’s favored the 3-5-2, using sophomores Liz Lima and Alisha Moran on the outside and keeping Fisher in the back.

Senior Bryce Weed and Second Team All-Ivy sophomore Liza Barber join Fisher in back for now. Past starters sophomore Lauren Cozzolino and senior Katie Urbanic figure to work their way back into the regular playing rotation when healthy.

Totman and Yenne, who Wheaton refers to as two of the best forwards in the nation, stand to be his regular starters. Sophomore Emily Colvin and co-captain Caitlin Butler, who Wheaton says is leading by example, should be among the most regular players coming off the bench.

Wheaton’s newest favorite in the midfield alongside All-American Katie Westfall is freshman Maile Tavepholjalern, who has Westfall’s ability to see the field and spot the hard-to-find openings. Hodel is Harvard’s more defensive-oriented player in the middle, but she contributes on offense indirectly—by allowing the other players in the middle to take risks—and directly, as she is often left with outside looks at the net.

The greatest unresolved situation for Wheaton is in net, where two freshmen will likely share time. He has a talented Californian in Katie Shields, who played in the national club finals each of the past two seasons. There’s also Maja Augustduttir, who’s the backup goaltender on Iceland’s national team.

Augustduttir will be missing the next two weeks of the season to play for her national team in World Cup qualifying, giving Shields the job for now. Wheaton split the two keepers against Vermont, and if Augustduttir weren’t away at present, he said he’d continue to split the two.

The season resumes with the Harvard Invitational this weekend, as the team will strive to avoid any further obstacles towards maintaining its positive attitude.