Rain Ends Crimson’s Hopes for Comeback Ivy Championship

For 27 of 54 scheduled holes at the Ivy League Championships, the Harvard women’s golf team poised itself to make a run at an unlikely league title, earning second place through a weather-shortened second round on Saturday.

Unfortunately for the Crimson, Mother Nature made sure that Harvard’s championship aspirations came up just short.

Bad weather on Saturday ended second-round play after just nine holes, while yesterday’s action was completely cancelled. In the end, the Crimson finished with a hard-won second-place finish behind Yale at the Great Gorge Country Club in McAfee, N.J.

Harvard’s plus-61 performance was just five strokes behind the winning Bulldogs, and it helped wipe away the memories of a sixth-place Ivy finish last year. The success was due in part to the consistent play of freshman Emily Balmert, who was crowned the individual champion, leading the entire tournament en route to a plus-seven final score. It was the first time since the tournament began play in 1997 that the winner hadn’t come from Princeton or Yale.

“When you just take it shot by shot, just focus, your scores are better,” Balmert said. “That’s all I did; we had an amazing turn around from last year.”

Although playing conditions worsened as the tournament progressed, a strong practice on Friday helped the team get situated with the course before things changed Saturday morning.

“Saturday the weather was really brutal,” said captain Jennifer Cronan, who finished in 16th place. “We had high winds, it was cold, and it rained on and off all day; but the course held up pretty well.”

The weather didn’t have much of an affect on a Harvard squad that finsihed competition with slightly higher scores than many expected. After beginning the final nine holes with three consecutive bogeys, Balmert parred her final six holes of the tournament, while sophomore Debbi Amanti, who finished 29th overall, did the same in five of the last seven holes.

Freshman Ali Bode took eighth place individually while sophomore Jessica Hazlett ended the day at No. 13. Had Sunday’s action taken place, the Crimson very well could have walked away with both the team and individual championship trophies.

“We really had a shot at winning,” Balmert said. “Harvard’s really making a name for itself, saying, ‘Hey, we’re a threat, and we’re going to win this next year.’”

The Crimson actually held a two-stroke lead over Yale after the first round, but a strong second-round Bulldog showing, coupled with the cancellation, kept Harvard out of the winner’s circle. The Tigers took third, followed by Penn, Columbia, Brown, and Dartmouth.

The season’s strong conference finish bodes well for future Crimson teams. Four of the weekend’s five competitors were sophomores or younger, and the jump from sixth to second in only a year’s time will only help future Harvard golfers.

“This was very exciting for us,” Cronan said. “We’ve been aware of the fact that we’re getting better, and we have some great recruits coming in that are really talented.”

Over the next year, though, the Crimson will wonder what could have been if Sunday would have turned out differently—or turned out at all.

“We were in a position better than we’ve been, and we were really excited about possibly winning the tournament,” Cronan said. “It’s really disappointing not being able to play.”

—Staff writer Malcom A. Glenn can be reached at mglenn@fas.harvard.edu.