Women's Lacrosse: Second half of Ivy League play opens with key trip to Cambridge

With only three crucial regular-season league games left, Princeton (5-7 overall, 3-1 Ivy League) needs to avoid repeating this 1992 result on Saturday, when the team travels to Cambridge, Mass., to take on the Crimson (5-6, 1-3) at 1 p.m. Though history is on the Tigers’ side, the team has lost three of the last four games, and a spate of injuries has taken several key players out of competition in recent weeks.

Granted, one of those three losses was against No. 3 Maryland on Wednesday evening, when Princeton dropped a 13-6 decision to the national powerhouse in the team’s last non-conference game. On the bright side, the Tigers kept the game close in the early going and trailed 4-3 midway through the first half. The remainder of the season was threatened, however, when junior attacker and tri-captain Lizzy Drumm, the leading goal-scorer on the team, was sidelined with a leg injury.

“It’s hopeful,” head coach Chris Sailer said about whether Drumm will play on Saturday.

According to senior attack and tri-captain Kristin Morrison, the Maryland game showed Princeton’s potential.

“It’s no secret that Maryland is a very athletic and talented team,” Morrison said in an e-mail. “To our credit, we did run with them for short spurts at a time over the course of 60 minutes. Obviously a 13-6 loss is hard to swallow, but we’ve improved over the course of the season and we are looking forward to the next three league games.”

Unlike the Tigers, the Crimson is coming off a win on Wednesday night, when the team soundly defeated Holy Cross 15-9. Harvard attacker Jennifer VanderMeulen has scored 41 goals this season, 15 more than any Princeton player and four more than anyone else in the league. The offensive unit isn’t a one-person team — five Crimson players have scored 10 goals or more, while only four have done so for the Tigers.

Morrison cited shooting percentage as an area of concern.

“In the past two games, against Yale and Maryland, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to score, and still our shooting percentage is below the mark we need it to be,” Morrison said. “Shot selection will be crucial for the next three league games.”

Conference records bode well for Saturday’s game, as Princeton dismantled Yale 11-2 last weekend — the same Yale team that dropped Harvard 17-13 two weeks ago. But as Morrison pointed out, the league standings are close enough that anything could happen from weekend to weekend.

“When scouting a team, we don’t focus on mutual opponent scores — any team can beat any team on a given day,” Morrison said. “We played a great game versus Yale last Saturday, but Harvard is a different team and a new game. We need to be prepared for them to come at us hard.”

Princeton currently sits at third in league standings, while Harvard hovers above last-place Columbia in seventh place. The top four teams in regular-season round-robin competition advance to the Ivy League tournament, so the Tigers must fiercely defend their top-four position in their last three games.

This year marks the first time that a postseason Ivy League tournament has taken place to determine which team will receive an automatic bid to the NCAA championships. As it stood before this spring, the automatic bid recipient was sometimes decided through a tiebreaker formula, which many deemed unfair.

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Despite the fact that the tournament is brand new, Princeton players are already taking it into account in the regular season.

“Any league game we play, we are in it to win it,” Morrison said. “With the Ivy League tournament, every game is important for seeding and field advantage.”