SOFTBALL '06: The Long and Winding Road

What do you tell a team that will spend its first month playing 21 games in five states and eight cities, without a home date until Apr. 4th?

“I told my team to love the bus,” said Harvard coach Jennifer Allard.

Advice for the freshmen?

“You just tell them not to get behind in their schoolwork,” senior pitcher and co-captain Michele McAteer said. That may be an understatement for a team that will open its season on Mar. 4 in Plant City, Florida, and will not see the friendly confines of Soldiers Field until an Apr. 4 date with Boston College, 19 games later.

The hazards of northeastern weather, coupled with more money for travel opportunities, have given the Crimson softball team the chance to attend three different tournaments over the course of March.

Last season, the team lost a significant portion of its non-conference games when a tournament at Fordham was cancelled due to weather. All told, Harvard played just 12 of its 17 scheduled non-conference match-ups, leaving the team with less preparation than their Ivy League counterparts.

“Unfortunately sometimes you have to have a year like you had last year to get things to change and to make improvements in your schedule,” Allard said.

The changes will mean more travel to warmer climates. After the season-opening Plant City tournament, Harvard will spend the following weekend in Miami for the Blue & Gold Felsberg Memorial Tournament.

After trips to Philadelphia to play Villanova and New Rochelle, New York to play Iona, the Crimson will spend spring break at the Utah Tournament in Salt Lake City before trips to Logan and Orem, Utah to face Utah State and Utah Valley State. After one last trip to Hamden, Connecticut to face Quinnipiac, the Crimson finally comes home.

But the respite will be brief. Between conference and non-conference dates, the Crimson will be home just five times all season, encompassing only seven games. Only two Ivy teams, Princeton and Penn, will come to Harvard this season.

The league schedule is the result of an Ivy scheduling quirk that has teams play five road dates once every four years.

Although it is too late to help Harvard and Cornell, the other Ivy team playing five league away games this season, the Ivy scheduling system will change after this campaign. The new system calls for two divisions, like the current baseball system, and 20 league games instead of the traditional 14.

“That’ll give us more home dates next year,” Allard said. “We were very pleased with passing the conference schedule that they did.”

Such a bizarre schedule is not unprecedented for Harvard. The last Crimson squad that faced five Ivy road dates, in 2000, won the Ivy title. Can this year’s unit repeat the feat?

“The team just can’t be deterred by [travel],” Allard said. “If they’re going to let that be a barrier, they’re not going to be successful.”

The players seem ready to accept the challenge.

“I think our schedule isn’t going to be an obstacle,” McAteer said, “because unlike some teams it’s exciting and fun to travel. It’s nothing we can’t handle.”

—Staff writer Brad Hinshelwood can be reached at bhinshel@fas.harvard.edu.