Crimson Finishes Fourth at ECACs

Following its victory over Brown last week, the sixth-seeded Harvard women’s water polo team faced its two biggest challenges of the season thus far in the final two games of the annual Eastern College Athletic Conference Championship this weekend. Winning once and losing twice, the Crimson finished fourth in the eight-team tournament.

The Crimson (8-3, 2-0 CWPA) began the tournament—hosted by Bucknell in Lewisburg, Pa.—with a rematch of Wednesday night’s conference-opener against the Bears (2-5, 0-2). Harvard snagged a convincing 9-5 win over its Ivy League rivals on Saturday, but could not find the same luck in a rematch against Iona (5-2), which this time claimed a 15-14 win over the Crimson.

Yesterday afternoon, top-seeded Princeton (2-5) took down Harvard, 12-3, in a battle for third place and sent the Crimson home with more than a few lessons to learn from the weekend.

“Overall, it was a productive weekend because we learned a lot,” junior goalie Laurel McCarthy said. “You really only learn in close games. While we’ve had a lot of success early in the season, it’s definitely good to get into these close situations. It was definitely a learning weekend.”

PRINCETON 12, HARVARD 3

A hard press from the Tigers, doubled with the exhaustion of a packed schedule, allowed Harvard to stumble into an early deficit too large to overcome in its last game of the weekend.

“It just took us a while to get into the game and clicking as a team,” junior attacker Shannon Purcell said. “We had a lot of opportunities, and we just couldn’t finish them. From the second quarter on, we were able to play with them really well...[after] making the appropriate adjustments.”

Thanks to two separate 5-1 runs in the first and third quarters, Princeton used counter-attack goals to cement a solid lead over Harvard. But the Crimson did manage to take the Tigers point for point at the end of each half.

Two of Harvard’s three goals were scored with one-man advantages, but its 6-on-5 defense proved to be one of the Crimson’s weak spots in the opening stanza, as it had been for the entire weekend.

By the second quarter, Harvard water polo coach Ted Minnis and his team had stopped lumbering in man-down situations and began to attack the ball, which proved to be a valuable adjustment.

“[When we lumbered against Iona, they had] more time to shoot it and not as much pressure,” Purcell said. “But in the Princeton game, when one girl got the ball, we would hit the ball, and they couldn’t handle it. That was really effective for us.”

IONA 15, HARVARD 14

Despite falling, 17-7, to the Crimson in Harvard’s opening weekend at Blodgett Pool, Iona appeared to have brought an entirely renewed team to Lewisburg on Saturday afternoon, beating the Crimson for the first time in the schools’ histories and providing it with its tightest match of the season.

“They were a much different team from what we played when we met them the first time,” Purcell said. “They had a lot more speed than the first game, and they had a harder press, and they were countering a lot more...They had just improved a lot.”

According to McCarthy and Purcell, Harvard’s 10-goal victory over the Gaels three weeks ago lulled the Crimson into a false sense of complacency this time around, as it gave up three separate leads of four, three, and two goals.

“We let them off the hook,” McCarthy said. “We didn’t finish the game—we just let go of a pretty strong lead.”

Harvard failed to take full advantage of its 11 6-on-5 opportunities, converting only three into goals, while Iona managed to score each time it drew an ejection.

Despite limiting the Gaels’ biggest threat, junior Cecilia Leonard, to just an assist, senior Maggie Wood and junior Mackenzie Mone helped avenge the squad’s earlier loss with four goals apiece.

“They tried to work it into the center looking for kickouts,” McCarthy said. “They were pretty heavy on [Mone and Wood] down low on the posts.”

HARVARD 9, BROWN 5

Earlier that day, the Crimson cruised to another victory over Brown to open its three-game series in the tournament.

“We were the ones setting the pace of the game,” Purcell said. “It really felt like our game. We controlled this game even more [than the last time we played Brown].”

Sophomore attacker Aisha Price and junior co-captain Devan Kennifer led Harvard with three goals and three steals each, while McCarthy added 12 more saves to her season total.

Having played nine games since last Saturday, the Crimson is more than ready for its two-week break from game play. The season will pick up again on March 13 when Harvard will launch its seven-game run through California.

—Staff writer Patrick Galvin can be reached at pgalvin@college.harvard.edu.