Women's Soccer Season Recap

Eighty-three seconds into the overtime period, junior forward Elizabeth Weisman collected the ball from the scrum off of a corner kick and shot it past the Brown goalkeeper to give the Harvard women’s soccer team a 1-0 victory and coach Ray Leone his 250th career win.

“Ray was really excited to get the win,” sophomore midfielder Meg Casscells-Hamby said. “He doesn’t care a lot about his personal accomplishments, which just says a lot about him, but we were all really excited about it as a team, and he deserves it—he’s a great coach.”

But the win, which came in the first nonconference game versus an Ivy opponent in program history, was too little, too late with two matches remaining in the season. The Crimson’s championship hopes had already ended in its previous contest, a 3-1 loss to Princeton in which the Tigers tallied three goals in the final 30 minutes.

“We knew after that game that we couldn’t really advance in our season in the Ivy League, but we just kept on going and we just know that after every loss, you have to learn,” Casscells-Hamby said. “We learned a lot from that loss about problems in our midfield and our defense, but I think we did bounce back pretty well, and we got some good wins after. We’ll learn from it for next season—it was a tough loss, but I think it’ll help us moving forward.”

The Crimson, which went 3-3-1 in Ancient Eight play and 9-5-3 overall, had a strong start, dropping just one game in the first five to kick off the season. But the team then went nearly three weeks without a win, during which Harvard lost its first conference match, 1-0, to Penn.

Only able to put up one shot on goal against Penn, the Crimson lost in heartbreaking fashion as the Quakers found the back of the net with less than four seconds in regulation. Sophomore goalkeeper Bethany Kanten recorded five saves, but the inability to produce chances on offense doomed the team.

“We just need to become more of a team towards the beginning of the season, and whenever we need help, just come to each other,” Casscells-Hamby said. “We need to learn from our mistakes from earlier in the season because we repeated them a couple of times.”

The team finished the season on a high note when, on Senior Day, freshman midfielder Brooke Dickens headed the ball into the goal five seconds before the final whistle to lift the team to a 1-0 victory over Columbia.

“The freshmen always make such a huge impact because they’re so excited about college soccer and about their skills.  They’re fit, and they’re really passionate, and I think this year’s freshman class really exemplified that, and they brought a lot of fun to the team,” Kanten said. “They worked really hard and really cared about and respected the seniors, so for a freshman to score on Senior Day was a really good way for us to wrap up the season and show the seniors how much they care about them.”

After winning the Ivy League the previous year, the team used this season as a rebuilding year as it adjusted to new roles on the field.

“On the field, Aisha Price started playing defense for us, and she had never played defense for us before, and she did really, really great,” Kanten said. “She won a team award for most improved player for slipping into that role, and I don’t know what we would do without her back there.”

But the team had to make adjustments off the pitch as well. For the first time since 2009, a junior co-captain, Peyton Johnson, was selected along with senior Catherine Coppinger, who is also a former Crimson sports executive.

“We had captains that had never been in that role before, so Catherine Coppinger and Peyton Johnson were both stepping into big leadership roles,” Kanten said. “It was really important for them, and I think they did a really great job.”

Despite a disappointing season, Kanten looks at the mistakes as an opportunity to learn and bounce back for the coming year.

“I think we’re going to continue a lot of the stuff we started this year, like keeping people open and being able to play different positions and being versatile—that’s a really important part of the game,” Kanten said. “A lot of things didn’t go well for us, so that means that we learned a lot, how to deal with not doing well and losing a game here and there. That motivated us.”

—Staff writer Samantha Lin can be reached at samanthalin@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter @linsamnity.