SEASON RECAP: Harvard Starts Strong, Falters Late

Despite a promising start, Harvard field hockey struggled through its fall season, finishing 5-12 for the year and 2-5 against Ivy League opponents.

For the fifth consecutive year, the Crimson finished with a sub-.500 season. The team’s last winning record came in 2004.

But the win-loss totals are not completely representative of the fall. Of Harvard’s 12 defeats, seven were by two goals or less. Two of those were one-goal overtime losses to New Hampshire and Columbia at the end of the season.

Still, though the Crimson kept many games competitive, it struggled throughout the second half of the season.

After opening the year with three consecutive wins, the Crimson managed only two after Sept. 12.

Harvard ended the season on a five-game losing streak, part of a 1-8 slide.

“[This} season was a tough season,” said junior and rising co-captain KJ Warren. “We had a young team, and there was a lot of learning and growth that needed to go on, but we actually progressed in a way that we were very proud of.”

Crimson coach Sue Caples also pointed out that her squad dealt with injuries throughout the course of the year.

“Not only did we have a small team, but we had a few players out with season-ending injuries,” she said. “Then we went through the whole swine flu, which wiped out our team, so a lot of players had really great playing experience.”

One of the season’s most notable games came against Cornell in Ithaca, N.Y. on Oct. 17. Harvard, which entered the contest having lost seven of its last eight, shut out the Big Red—one of the leaders in the Ivy League at the time—in a 1-0 victory. A second-half goal from co-captain Elizabeth Goodman-Bacon accounted for the game’s only offense.

“It was one of those games where everything seemed to click—everything that we had been working on in practice, forward movement, [and] constant communication throughout the field,” Warren said. “It just all seemed to work together.”

Caples viewed the game as one of the on-field highlights of the season as well.

“We had, I think, our best game,” she said. “It was really a great team win, and everybody executed the game plan, and it worked.”

The win over Cornell was the last of the season for the Crimson. Three of its five losses to close the year came against Ivy League competition, including a 9-0 defeat to eventual champion Princeton a week after the upset victory over the Big Red.

Junior Chloe Keating was the team’s most prolific scorer for the year, netting 10 goals in her 17 starts.

Three Harvard players scored five goals of their own to tie for second on the team, but the Crimson never scored more than four goals in a single game during the fall.

Co-captain Kristin Bannon and sophomore rising co-captain Carly Dickson shared the team lead in assists with seven.

Despite its difficult finish, Harvard holds high hopes for next season.

Caples noted that eight rising freshmen will join the team in the fall.

“There will be competition for positions,” she said. “It will really make a difference on how we keep players healthy [and] how we’re able to press.”

Warren shared this optimism for the upcoming season, and like her coach, she praised the incoming freshman class and the role she expects them to play.

But she said that Harvard’s spring season will also be a factor heading into the 2010 campaign.

“I think we did a great job as a whole team this spring just going after it and working as hard as we can and improving as much as we can,” Warren said.

—Staff writer E. Benjamin Samuels can be reached at samuels@college.harvard.edu.