Harvard Falls Once Again to the Tigers

For the second year in a row, Harvard women’s swimming and diving completed its regular season 6-1, with the sole blemish on its otherwise perfect Ivy League record coming at the hands of Princeton.

This past weekend at the annual HYP meet, hosted this year by Yale, the Crimson handily topped the Bulldogs, 217-83, but lost to the Tigers, 207-93. The split result at the HYP meet was strong enough to earn Harvard a second place in the final Ivy standings.

In diving competition, Harvard comprised three of the top-five finishes in the three-meter event—led by senior Jenny Reese in second place and sophomore Brittany Powell and junior Leslie Rea in third and fourth places, respectively.

Rea also clinched second place in the one-meter dive. Senior Kate Mills added a third-place performance in the 200-yard freestyle, registering a 1:51.01 mark, and a runner-up finish in the 200 butterfly, touching in at 2:01.00. Later in the 100-yard backstroke, junior Meghan Leddy gained third place behind Princeton’s Elizabeth Boyce and Merideth Monroe.

“I think our team swam with a lot of heart this weekend,” co-captain Christine Kaufmann said. “Ultimately, our goal comes with the two championships [Ivies and ECACs] at the end of the year, and I think our team is capable of going even a lot faster.”

Senior Katy Hinkle also came in second in the 50-yard freestyle, closely followed by teammate freshman Jenna Gregoire who seized the third-place spot in that race with a time of 23.85 seconds.

Harvard’s first Ivy loss of the 2010-2011 season came against a Tiger squad that swept all 16 events at HYPs in addition to establishing seven new Yale pool and four new Princeton team records.

Among the record-setters was Tiger senior Megan Waters in both the 100 fly and 100 free races.

But Princeton’s momentum from the earliest stages of the meet did not deter the Crimson’s efforts, as Harvard challenged its top rivals until the closing races of the meet.

In Saturday’s final event, Hinkle, Gregoire, co-captain Ali Slack, and Mills achieved a first place finish in the 400 free relay, one of four Crimson quartets that rounded out the top-five performances in that exhibition event.

“We were actually very happy with how our team did,” Hinkle said. “We did what we wanted to do. We went out there and executed our strategies, and we had some of our best season times so far. I think we’re in a good position for the rest of the season.”

With this year’s HYP sweep, Princeton improves its dual-meet streak to 37 wins and is speculated to perhaps be in the running for the new Top 25 national rankings. Meanwhile Yale, which had also possessed a perfect league record prior to the meet, enters its final season contest against Brown next week with two losses under its belt.

“Princeton’s a very strong team, but I think ours is strong as well,” Kaufmann said. “[Ivies] are going to come down to which team has the deepest competition and which has a lot of people who can score highly. As far as focusing now goes, we’d really like to focus on just ourselves in the next couple of weeks.”

All of the Ivy squads are scheduled to converge on Princeton for the Ivy League Championships on Feb. 24-26, a title Harvard lost by only 27 points last year.

“We knew what to expect from the end of this season,” Hinkle said. “This weekend didn’t scare us in any way. We’re prepared to put up a much stronger fight in the championship setting.”

—Staff writer Aparajita Tripathi can be reached at atripathi@college.harvard.edu.