SEASON RECAP: Soccer Cruises through Ivies, Wins League Title

A victor always has a target on her back.

After sharing the 2008 Ivy League championship with Princeton, the Harvard women’s soccer team took the field this past fall with the rest of the Ancient Eight clamoring to take the Crimson down. But last year’s win was no fluke.

Harvard (9-7-1, 6-1 Ivy) held off threats from all seven conference opponents to win its second Ivy League title in as many years. A 1-0 loss to the Tigers was the only blemish in the squad’s first outright Ivy championship in a decade.

“The Ivy League is so competitive,” co-captain Lizzy Nichols said. “There is a target on everyone’s back, to be honest. Everyone takes every Ivy League game as if it’s the championship game.”

But before the wins, the trophies, and the NCAA tournament appearance, it seemed all too soon that the championship would be out of the Crimson’s grasp, as the team fell to five of its first seven opponents. Although all were nonconference games, Harvard’s players couldn’t clamor back from deficits on both the offensive and defensive ends.

“In the beginning of the season, we were trying to find ourselves as a team, and our record definitely struggled,” Nichols said.

The Crimson started the season with a tie against San Diego State before falling the next day to Connecticut, 3-1. A 1-0 win against New Hampshire, the only win in the preseason, came on Sept. 8, but the excitement was lessened by losses to Long Beach State, Hofstra, and Boston College.

Yet there was a silver lining in preseason play, illustrated during the team’s final game before the regular season. Facing local rival Boston University on Sept. 20, the Crimson again walked away with a tight 1-0 loss.

But this time, things were going to change.

“The BU game was the turning point in our season where we came together after that game and decided together that we were going to turn this season around and find the results that the team deserved,” Nichols said. “From then on, we went into the Ivy League season with a feeling of confidence and experience because of the challenging first half of the season we had had.”

In its first game as a reborn team, the Crimson held onto a 2-1 lead at halftime to beat Penn, 3-2. The last two nonconference games of the season, against Holy Cross and Fairfield, ended in similar victories for Harvard but this time with larger margins. The Crimson scored two goals against the Crusaders within seven minutes to win, 2-0, before besting the Stags, 4-1.

Harvard then reeled off three more wins over Ivy opponents. Cornell fell first, 2-0, followed by Brown’s 1-0 loss to the Crimson in overtime.

Harvard extended its winning streak, traveling to Yale for the second time after the first scheduled contest was cancelled midway through the game due to bad weather.

For other teams in the league, Harvard’s 3-2 win against Yale on Oct. 20 showed that the squad was finally finding its rhythm—and put the team in the driver’s seat of the Ancient Eight race.

“One of my favorite games was the Yale game, both times,” Nichols said. “That game was huge. It was an up-and-down game, a very emotional game. There were key moments, including when [junior defender] Katie Kuzma saved our season and saved the ball off the line towards the end of the game.”

The 1-0 loss against Princeton followed, but with a 2-1 win over Dartmouth on Halloween, the Crimson earned at least a share of the Ivy League title. One week later, after a 2-1 overtime win against Columbia, Harvard took sole possession of the crown. The excitement couldn’t last long, though, as six days later the Crimson faced its first opponent in NCAA tournament play— Boston College.

“We went into it with the mentality that we most definitely could beat them,” senior goalkeeper Lauren Mann said. “They were playing well, we were playing well. It was an unfortunate way to end. They scored in the first couple minutes of the second half, but we kept fighting up until the end.”

Harvard fell in the first round of playoffs to its crosstown rival, 1-0.

“I’m very proud that we did not stop fighting to turn that game around, never stopped until the whistle was blown,” Nichols said. “It’s always sort of disappointing ending the season on a loss, but I think anyone walking away from that game can say that they were proud of the way we had developed our team.”

For seniors Nichols, Mann, Christina Hagner, and Kelli Okuji, who in their first year as Crimson athletes won a total of three games, this season was still a winning one.

“It was something we joked about, but we never doubted that we were going to win an Ivy League championship,” Nichols said. “Every year we got closer and closer.”

And now they have two.

—Staff writer Alex Sopko can be reached at sopko@fas.harvard.edu.