PLAYER PROFILES: Courtney Bergman '05 and Susanna Lingman '05, Women's Tennis

It is hard enough for a team to replace one Player of the Year lost to graduation. Next season, the Harvard women’s tennis team will have to overcome the departure of two of the best players in Ivy history.

Co-captains Susanna Lingman and Courtney Bergman—both graduating seniors—put a flourish on their stellar Harvard careers this season.

Lingman won the Ivy Player of the Year award after going 21-10 overall, finishing 5-0 in the league and 3-1 in the playoffs. The senior from Irvine, Calif., was also a unanimous All-Ivy first team singles selection, just the 10th league player ever—and third from Harvard—to make the first team all four years.

“When she plays, you kind of have this feeling that she’s not going to lose,” sophomore Elsa O’Riain said. “It’s nice to have a player like that who’s so solid.”

Bergman, a senior from Boca Raton, Fla., won the Ivy Player of the Year award in 2004 after helping lead Harvard to an undefeated title season. This year, despite struggling to play due to injuries, she went 12-11 in singles action—including a victory over national No. 1 Audra Cohen of Northwestern—and 15-5 in doubles.

Bergman was named the Intercollegiate Tennis Association’s East Region Senior of the Year and was also selected to play in the NCAA singles tournament for the fourth time, the only Ivy player in history to accomplish the feat.

The remaining members of the team acknowledge that it will be difficult to transition into an era without Bergman and Lingman, the stalwart anchors that played first and second singles, respectively.

“They’re certainly some big shoes to fill—they’ve been great leaders over the years,” junior Melissa Anderson said.

“We’ve been talking to them for a while about how to handle things,” O’Riain added. “As far as the team goes, it’s going to be a huge blow.”

Anderson and O’Riain, the two captains for the 2005-06 season, are wise to tap the knowledge and experience that the two outgoing captains posses, trying to learn the keys to running a winning program.

“Once you become captain, you just have to be pretty selfless,” Bergman said. “[You’re] sacrificing time and just doing what’s better for the team [as well as] being a mediating force between players and coaches.”

Despite the obvious difficulty in replacing the two leaders, there is reason to believe the Crimson’s depth will be enough to keep its streak of 25 straight league wins going next season. The team didn’t miss a beat when both Lingman and Bergman rested injuries at the end of the league schedule, and a strong recruiting class will be coming in to add fresh talent to the Ivy dynasty.

It will be harder, however, to retain the sense of direction that both players gave to the program.

“What was really important for me was seeing our team get so much stronger by the time I left,” Bergman said. “That’s always something special, coming in with a fellow freshman and trying to build the team together, going through the same ups and downs.

“[Susanna and I] both came in with the same goal in mind—to do all we could to improve the team and program.”

The two players began to noticeably improve the team in their sophomore year, when Harvard won its first Ivy title since 1999, beating Penn to snap the Quakers’ 22-match league winning streak and advancing to the third round of the NCAA tournament.

Since then, Bergman and Lingman have made sure that Harvard has not dropped a single Ivy match, let alone loosened its grip on the Ivy title or failed to advance to the postseason.

“It’s hard to differentiate between the seniors,” Anderson said. “They’ve really been a powerful force on the team [due to] their work ethic and their mental toughness. The feel of the team will change...we’ll miss having them there.”

—Staff writer Caleb W. Peiffer can be reached at cpeiffer@fas.harvard.edu.