Lee Advances to Semifinals, Fuels Women's Tennis in New Haven

­The Harvard women’s tennis team achieved success across the board this weekend after sending six athletes to the Intercollegiate Tennis Association’s Northeast Regional tournament at Yale.

In the team’s biggest individual tournament of the year, sophomore June Lee made it to the semifinals of the singles division for the Crimson’s best finish of the event.

“June got to the semifinals, which was really great,” captain Sylvia Li said. “She fought through a lot of really tough matches and a couple of three-setters. She played really well, so that was a really good tournament for her.”

Lee tore through the first three rounds of the tournament, defeating opponents from Marist, Boston University, and Dartmouth in two sets each to make it to the quarterfinals. After taking the first set, 6-2, against Columbia’s Tina Jiang in the quarters, Lee dropped the second set, 5-7, to even the match up. The sophomore captured the match and advanced to the semifinals when Jiang was forced to retire with Lee up, 4-2, in the third and final set.

In the semifinals, Lee faced Boston College senior Jessica Wacnik. The first set went to Lee, 6-4, but Wacnik followed up the defeat with a 6-4 win of her own to tie the match up. With the contest tied at four games apiece in the third set, Wacnik narrowly defeated Lee in the final two games to take the match and go through to the finals, where she later claimed the tournament championship.

In total, Harvard posted a record of 11-8 at the tournament across five singles entrants and three doubles teams. On the doubles side, Harvard’s biggest success came from Li and freshman partner Ellen Jang-Milsten. The Crimson tandem advanced to the quarterfinals with three straight victories of 8-2, 8-4, and 8-3 over opponents from Boston University, Penn, and Stony Brook, respectively, before falling, 8-4, to a team from Yale.

“We did a really good job of staying really energetic,” Li said. “We never got down on ourselves. Overall, I think we had really good chemistry, and we were trying a lot of different formations, which...in practice hasn’t been that comfortable for us, but during the tournament it was all coming together.”

Jang-Milsten also competed in the singles draw, where she advanced to the third round. The freshman defeated opponents from UMass and Cornell in straight sets before falling to Yale’s Hanna Yu, who would later defeat Jang-Milsten and Li with her teammate Ree Ree Li in the doubles bracket on their way to the finals.

Harvard’s other participants on the singles side were freshmen Nikki Kallenberg and Annika Ringblom, along with sophomore Monica Lin. Kallenberg won her opening round match, 6-3, 6-4, but was unable to get past Syracuse’s Valeria Salazar in the round of 32. Neither Ringblom nor Lin was able to break through to the second round, as both suffered first-round losses to opponents from Syracuse and Buffalo, respectively.

Lin and Ringblom found more success on the doubles side, where they teamed up to take down a team from Rutgers, 8-5. The two moved on to the second round and were defeated by Salazar and her partner from Syracuse, while Lee and Kallenberg fell in the round of 64 to a team from Boston College.

With the conclusion of the ITAs, the Crimson has now almost completed the fall tournament schedule. After the upcoming Harvard Invitational, which the team will host, the Crimson will move on from the individual fall tournaments and start looking toward the team-based spring matches.

“I think the weekend went well overall,” Jang-Milsten said. “We’re continuing to grow and gain experience together as a team, and starting to mesh together really well. The tournament gave us the opportunity to work on our individual games and see where we are at and where we need to go to be ready for our spring season.”

—Staff writer Glynis K. Healey can be reached at ghealey@college.harvard.edu.