Harvard Edged Out by Strokes

By PABLO S. TORRE

Crimson Staff Writer

After an uncharacteristic 6-0 loss to No. 4 Duke on Sunday, the Harvard field hockey team could have used a win over No. 11 Northeastern before heading into the meat of its Ivy schedule.

The Crimson (5-5), as is usual this season, came as close as it gets.

Harvard fell 3-2 to the Huskies (12-1) last night in a game that was decided on penalty strokes after both teams battled through 30 minutes of overtime.

Since beating then-No. 15 Connecticut on Sept. 22, the Crimson has dropped four games in a row—twice reaching at least one overtime, and another time recording a 1-0 defeat.

“I know it was a loss but it was a kind of a moral victory for us,” junior forward Gretchen Fuller said. “It puts us in a really great spot going into the rest of season.”

The scoreboard was frozen at 1-1 until Northeastern’s Rachel Wikles collected her third goal of the year with less than four minutes remaining in regulation at 66:49.

But then came the Harvard response.a

Senior forward Beverlie Ting converted a shot from sophomore back Devon Shapiro with under two minutes remaining at 68:20 to regain the tie.

“This was the best team effort we’ve been able to put together so far,” Fuller said.

That effort, resulting in a late 2-2 stalemate, set the stage for overtime. But a half-hour and two overtimes later—100 cumulative minutes of field hockey—the same 2-2 margin remained.

“The overtimes were amazing,” Fuller said. “People were playing their hearts out. It went back and forth. They’d have an opportunity, we’d have an opportunity.”

As per the rules in field hockey, there is no third overtime. The game was instead sent to penalty strokes, the sport’s equivalent of a shootout in hockey or soccer.

Defending the cages in the best-of-five strokeoff were freshman netminder Kelly Knoche and Northeastern frosh Colleen Duffy, both of whom impressively pace their conferences in goals against average.

After the Huskies’ Jay Quinn scored on Northeastern’s first attempt, sophomore stroke-specialist Tamara Sobek-Rosnick was stopped by Duffy. Kristen Keating, Abbie Harpstead, and Laura Werner then found the back of the cage for Harvard.

Unfortunately, however, so did three Huskies.

And when Northeastern’s Whitney Shean beat Knoche on the team’s fifth stroke, the scoreboard finally ticked off one more, final goal in the Huskies’ favor.

“It was a fairly even match-up,” Fuller said. “In the end it came down to execution and we just happened to be unlucky. They had some very talented strokers.”

Knoche finished with a grand total of 11 saves, Duffy with seven.

Now, though, the Crimson has its work cut out for it with Ivy foe Cornell on the docket for Sunday. Following the Big Red will be Yale, Boston College, Princeton, Boston University, Dartmouth, and then Columbia to round out the regular season.

Harvard is currently 1-1 in the Ancient Eight, and it may have little wiggle room the rest of the way.

Nationally ranked Northeastern, though—which has now won 11 in a row, good for the best start in program history—is as good a test as any.

“This game brought out a new team in us, a new knowledge that we can overcome losses,” Fuller said. “We still have a shot at doing extremely well in the Ivies. We can play as well as we did today and even better at Cornell.”

The Crimson will find out at noon on Sunday in Ithaca, N.Y.

--J. Patrick Coyne contributed to the reporting of this story.

--Staff writer Pablo S. Torre can be reached at torre@fas.harvard.edu.