W. Squash Notches Another Upset Win

The Crimson is starting to make its No. 4 ranking look mighty inaccurate.

Just three days after upsetting No. 2 Trinity at home, Harvard (7-0, 5-0 Ivy) claimed a 6-3 win over the favored No. 3 Tigers in Princeton yesterday.

The victory, combined with a 8-1 win over No. 5 Penn Saturday, sets up a showdown of undefeateds with No. 1 Yale this Friday. The Bulldogs are the only thing standing between the Crimson and an Ivy title, as well as top seeding at the Howe Cup the following week.

HARVARD 6, PRINCETON 3

This weekend, Harvard got a little revenge, if not a lot of rest.

The Crimson’s third match in four days was the one it had been training for all season. Last year, Princeton (9-2, 4-2) handed Harvard its first Ivy loss in four years, beating the Crimson 5-4 in a tight battle at the Murr Center. Two weeks later, the Tigers again topped Harvard by the same score in the consolation round of the national tournament.

In this year’s preseason Ivy scrimmage back in November, Princeton also triumphed over the Crimson by a similar margin. With a young but talented squad—even with the absence of two top players to injury—Princeton seemed poised to challenge Harvard’s undefeated run yet again.

“They have a lot of potential,” senior Stephanie Hendricks said, “which is why it was important to be confident, to go in with as much energy as we could.

And this time around, the Crimson proved that it was more than a match for its league opponent.

“We went in knowing we were underdogs,” Hendricks said. “We were really psyched to play and play hard.

“We didn’t really talk about last year,” she added.

While the contest was tight up and down the ladder, Harvard got wins from four of the top five slots—including from all three rookies—to dispatch the Tigers. Sophomore transfer Kyla Grigg won her match at No. 1, 3-1 and freshmen No. 3 Jen Blumberg and No. 5 Supriya Balsekar won in four and three games, respectively.

“I was surprised it was as close as it was, but it was the third match after Trinity and Penn,” said co-captain Lindsey Wilkins, explaining how fatigue may have factored in. “It was a pretty tight match…still, I expected us to prevail.”

Wilkins won her match at No. 2, 3-2, one of several five-game matches on the day. All three Crimson losses were in five games, and several of the wins were drawn out marathons. Hendricks, playing at No, 9, went up 2-0 only to lose leads of 6-3 and tiebreakers in both the third and fourth games.

“The loss to the Trinity girl earlier this week [3-2, after being up 2-1] had been eating away at me,” Hendricks said. “My coach was really helpful, he said, ‘you don’t want to get on that bus and think for the next six hours about how you could have won.’ So I sucked it up and went out there, and won the fifth game 9-3.”

With the win over Princeton accomplished, all but the nation’s top team remains for the Crimson to dethrone.

“The team we’ve been talking about all year was Princeton,” Hendricks admitted. “We are where we want to be, where we feel we deserve to be.”

HARVARD 8, PENN 1

After the intense Trinity contest two days prior, it must have been nice for the Crimson to square off against a less challenging Ivy foe.

Harvard continued to prove itself as one of top League teams, trouncing the Quakers 8-1 in Philadelphia Saturday. The Crimson dominated the match, notching all eight wins by scores of 3-0.

Penn (4-3, 2-3) was unable to do much against a deep Harvard team hungry for an Ivy title and a national championship.

“Penn was not really a strenuous match for most people,” Wilkins said. “I like that we got one more match in before we played Princeton.”

Harvard’s all-time dual-meet record against the Quakers (excluding Howe Cup play) is 21-2. The only losses to Penn came in 2000 and in 1996, both years in which the Quakers won the Ivy title.

—Staff writer Lisa J. Kennelly can be reached at kennell@fas.harvard.edu.