W. Water Polo's Surge Cracks Rankings

It was the way everyone would want a season to end.

The Crimson walked out of the Eastern Championships with a fifth-place finish, a 6-2 win over Princeton—a team which it had lost to by six earlier in the season—and a No. 20 ranking.

“The biggest difference between the two games [this season] was our defense,” Harvard coach Scott Russell said after Easterns. “The way we played defense today was fantastic, especially since Princeton is a high-scoring team.”

But the scenery had not always been so auspicious for the women’s water polo team. During spring break, the Crimson undertook a slate of nine games in as many days, three of which took place in California. After taking the first three, Harvard dropped five of its last six, including a last-place finish in the ECAC tournament.

“[Playing this schedule] was not only psychologically but also physically challenging,” junior two-meter Teresa Codini said after the ECAC Championships. “We didn’t have any energy left, and we lost to teams we shouldn’t have lost to.”

The Crimson fell to 14-11 on the season, and with just the Northeastern and Eastern Championships on the horizon, it would have been easy for Harvard merely to coast to the finish.

But the Crimson rebounded in a strong manner, taking its first three games at Northeasterns by a combined score of 44-7. Harvard’s only loss in the tournament came to then-No. 20 Brown in the finals, 9-2.

“It sounds like we got our hats handed to us, but it wasn’t until the end of the third quarter the game began to get away from us,” Russell said.

The following weekend brought the Eastern Championships—a tournament in which the Crimson was seeded 10th out of 12 teams, due to its poor finish in the ECACs.

Harvard started out strong, taking a 6-3 lead into halftime against seventh-seeded Iona. The two sides traded goals in the second half, as the Crimson stayed in the upper bracket with the win.

Despite a late rally that pulled the Crimson to within two, Harvard fell to second-seeded and eventual champion Hartwick 10-5 in the next round.

The Crimson trailed its next opponent George Washington—a team to which it had lost to in the ECAC tournament—3-0 midway through the second quarter, but ran off five straight goals en route to a 5-4 victory over the Colonials.

“The biggest problem for us was our intensity in the first quarter,” Russell said. “After playing so well against Iona and Hartwick, we weren’t as focused as we would have liked to have been. But when they scored that goal to go up 3-0, that was the wakeup call.”

Then came Harvard’s finest hour—the defeat of then-No. 18 Princeton. The Crimson jumped on the Tigers early, scoring twice in each frame during the first half, while surrendering just one goal.

Harvard managed to stifle the potent Princeton offense for the duration of the match, en route to its 6-2 win—its 20th of the season.

The season did not begin on such glowing terms.

Despite taking six of its first 10 contests, the Crimson struggled to learn the new sets implemented by Russell, who was in his first year at the helm of the women’s water polo team. Harvard’s best win was a 9-7 victory over Bucknell—to whom the Crimson later lost 10-9 in overtime. Harvard’s matchups with ranked opponents were abysmal, as the Crimson lost to Indiana, Princeton and Brown by a combined score of 27-6.

But the Crimson had a midseason surge, taking three out of its four home matches, sweeping Connecticut College and splitting with Brown.

“The last time we beat Brown was the first time we played them my freshman year,” co-captain goaltender Elana Miller said.  “There couldn’t be a better end [to my home career].”

Harvard rode that momentum to take four out of its next five before hitting a wall as fatigue set in on its West Coast swing.

Regardless of the ups and downs through which Harvard suffered all season, finishing among the top 20 teams in the nation was the goal from day one. For the Crimson, that’s one big mission accomplished.

—Staff writer Michael R. James can be reached at mrjames@fas.harvard.edu.