With two weeks remaining in the regular season, Harvard and Cornell are on track to repeat as division champions. Can anyone spoil the all-red Ivy League Championship Series? We break it down here:
The baseball team lost 8-4 to St. John’s in a non-conference game on Wednesday evening. Junior shortstop Matt Bowman collected two hits, but the rest of the Tigers combined for only three as the Red Storm led from start to finish.
While the baseball team is warming up before a game, Clarke Field could easily be mistaken for any diamond in the South. The midday sun is shining, the mosquitoes are gnawing and Tim McGraw is blaring over the loudspeakers. But a trip across Washington Road to Sherrerd Field at 1952 Stadium, where the men’s lacrosse team warms up to a pregame mix of Quintino and Swedish House Mafia, presents an entirely different atmosphere.
Junior attackman Luke Armour hails from Upper Montclair, N.J., about an hour north of the Orange Bubble, and holds a diploma from the local Lawrenceville School. Last year, he finished fourth on the men’s lacrosse team with 14 points while boasting an impressive shooting percentage of 29 percent, the highest of any multi-goal scorer on the roster.
The men’s and women’s crews came back to Princeton on great highs and lows, as some teams succeeded and others did not. On the whole, the men’s crew came up relatively empty-handed compared to the women’s teams on a weekend that featured some incredibly tight matchups between highly ranked teams.
Playoff hockey is in full swing, and that can mean only one thing: The intensity of the competition has been ratcheted up, players are getting chippy and it’s time to discuss once again whether fighting enhances or detracts from the game.
“All I kept thinking was that we needed to score and at the last minute possible,” junior attack Brittany Zwirner said.She saved just 2.4 seconds to score her final goal, a game-winning shot to give the women’s water polo team a 9-8 win over Brown and the Southern Division Title. It was the seventh Southerns victory in school history, as the Tigers took down George Washington, Bucknell and Brown in the process.
The men’s tennis team suffered its first Ivy League loss on Saturday, falling to No. 62 Dartmouth 4-3 before losing to No. 24 Harvard 5-2 the following day. The women’s team swept its Dartmouth and Harvard counterparts, defeating Dartmouth 6-1 and No. 72 Harvard 4-3. The victories over the Big Green and the Crimson propelled the women to second place in the Ivy League, while the two losses the men suffered dropped them to a two-way tie for second place.
In his first 400m race of the outdoor season at the George Mason Invitational, sophomore Tom Hopkins was simply hoping not to trip up too badly. Delayed by the check-in to the long jump, Hopkins barely got to the start line in time to set up his blocks. Out of focus and hectic, he would have been happy with anything remotely close to 47 seconds. However, things did not turn out at all like Hopkins expected.
A movement is in place for the Ivy League to join the rest of college basketball with a conference tournament. Ivy League coaches are creating a proposal for an annual men's and women's playoff that would likely match the league’s current lacrosse tournament, involving four teams and two rounds. However, women's basketball head coach Courtney Banghart and many players said they preferred the league's current system of awarding the automatic NCAA Tournament bid to the regular-season champion.
The men’s volleyball team won its fourth consecutive match on Saturday evening, dropping Baruch College 3-1 at Dillon Gymnasium. All four victories have come in non-conference play, however, and the season concludes with two much more important EIVA matches this week.
The softball team lost three of four games against Penn this weekend in a series highlighted by some stellar pitching and big rallies.
The No. 13 men’s lacrosse team now knows it will be playing in the postseason. The Tigers (8-3 overall, 4-0 Ivy League) dominated a Dartmouth squad that is winless in conference play, topping the Big Green 21-6 on a sunny Saturday afternoon at the 1952 Stadium.
With two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning on Saturday, the baseball team was down by two runs. Freshman catcher Tyler Servais knocked in a run with a single into right-center field and junior outfielder Steve Harrington singled up the middle to tie it up. Sophomore Alec Keller came in to pinch-hit and knocked a single into shallow right field that brought home the winning run, completing the comeback.Princeton (16-13 overall, 9-3 Ivy League) took three of the four games from Penn, remaining one game behind Cornell in the division.
Coming into Saturday’s game against Harvard, the women’s lacrosse team knew that it needed a win to give it some breathing space before two tough matches to close the season. However, Princeton lost 10-7 in Cambridge, leaving itself needing plenty of hard work and a smattering of fortune to qualify for the end-of-season tournament and defend its Ivy League Tournament championship.
The baseball team is looking to build on a solid start to the Ivy League season as it begins intra-divisional play. The Tigers’ expectations are high after winning the Ivy League championship last season, and a successful series against Penn would go a long way toward meeting those expectations.
The softball team allowed only one run in 12 innings over two games against La Salle on Thursday afternoon, taking momentum into the first weekend of South Division play in the Ivy League. Princeton defeated the Explorers 8-0 and 7-1 at Class of 1895 Field, as junior Liza Kuhn and freshman Meredith Brown allowed a total of six hits and picked up two wins.
On Saturday, the four Princeton rowing teams will wake up with the sun for a morning race. As the fog is lifting, the athletes’ hearts will pound with adrenaline, and they will push their bodies to complete exhaustion. In the brisk morning air, their muscles will reach failure just as the Princeton campus begins to stir. As actor Hugh Laurie, Dr. House from the television series, said on a talk show, “[Crew] is a miserable sport.”
After nine hours, eight rounds and 102 games on Thursday, one team was left standing as champions of the 2012 dodgeball tournament: Men’s Lacrosse. The lacrosse team defeated Tiger Inn in the championship match after reaching the final four for the first time in recent memory.
The women’s lacrosse team will travel to Cambridge, Mass., on Saturday to take on Harvard in the Tigers’ fifth league game of the season. As the postseason looms closer and the brackets for the Ivy League and NCAA tournaments are slowly filled, the next couple of weeks will be crucial for the Tigers.
