Scattered by Renovations, Eliot House Rallies to Win First Straus Cup Since 2004

Intramural volleyball rarely draws a crowd of nearly 100. But for Eliot House, this was not just another weeknight at the Malkin Athletic Center.

With a win over Lowell House in the Volleyball A playoffs, Eliot would clinch the Straus Cup — Harvard’s annual trophy for the upperclassmen House with the strongest intramural program — for the first time since 2004.

But Lowell did not make the celebration easy. In the decisive third set, Eliot fell behind 14-8, giving Lowell six match points and leaving the House’s long-awaited clincher in jeopardy.

Alin Asim ’26, the team’s co-captain who has played the sport for 15 years, said the match was the “most stressful” she had ever played.

Then Eliot came back, erasing the deficit point by point. When the comeback was complete, the crowd rushed the court, and Eliot had won its third Straus Cup since Radcliffe’s integration — and its first in 22 years — in style.

“We had such a historic comeback, and the moment where everyone just jumped on the field to come and congratulate us,” Asim said, “that was one of the memories that I will hold on to forever.”

Eliot House officially clinched the Straus Cup on April 23, finishing 177 points ahead of second-place Currier House in the intramural standings.

The victory capped an unlikely year for Eliot, whose residents began the fall semester scattered across Harvard Square while the House underwent renovations. In response, Eliot’s intramural leaders turned to the more than 15 athletic leagues and events that determine the Straus Cup winner as a way to keep the House together.

“All the talk was like, ‘Your community is so great. What’s going to happen once you’re in renovation?’” said Thomas A. Tait ’26, co-chair of Eliot intramurals. “It was almost a point of pride — we want to show once we’re in renovation, that we can still have the best community of any house. And I think this sort of serves as a microcosm of that.”

The Straus Cup is awarded to the House that earns the most points across intramural competition. In league play, teams earn 20 points for a win and 10 for a loss, while forfeits cost 20 points. Playoff finishes, tournament size, participation, and attendance at Intramural Council meetings also factor into the final standings.

Tait and his co-chair John P. Phillips ’26 set out to boost participation in Eliot intramurals. Early in the year, the pair launched a door-drop campaign, sliding wax-sealed envelopes under sophomores’ doors to invite them to join Eliot intramurals.

They sent weekly emails, expanded their social media presence, created a website to track Eliot’s path to the Cup, and worked with team captains to recruit players across sports.

The result, Tait said, was a program defined by participation.

“I think a lot of Houses have the same 20 or so people that are really athletic and play everything,” Tait said. “We have entirely different rosters for different sports. I think we have over 100 people that come and play a variety of different sports, which is nearly a quarter of the House, which I think is pretty cool.”

Eliot’s success came across the calendar. Its ultimate frisbee team, which has not lost a game in two years, won a championship in the fall. In the winter, the House’s basketball A and B teams both captured titles, wins Phillips described as part of a broader “revival” in sports where Eliot had previously struggled.

By the spring, the possibility of winning the Stratus Cup had become impossible to ignore.

“At the beginning of the year, it was like, ‘Let’s go for something big,’” said Catherine “Cate” E. Cupps ’28, a soccer captain and future Eliot intramurals co-chair. “And then we started looking really good around the end of the fall, the winter, and, beginning of the spring. I think people got even more excited. We were like, ‘Hey, we could really do this thing.’”

Cupps said renovations gave Eliot “a chip on their shoulder,” pushing students to rally around the parts of House life they could still control.

Philips said that was especially visible the day after Housing Day, when more than 30 first-years showed up for a dodgeball tournament.

“We all walked over together, and we were playing music, and had our flag,” Phillips said.

“These are new people who’ve never been to Eliot before, and now we’re trying to get them involved,” he added. “So it was just such a highlight to have that kind of buy-in immediately.”

Eliot athletes said they do not expect this year’s win to stand alone.

“I feel great about next year, too,” said Jude M. Partovi ’27, one of Eliot’s volleyball A captains. “I think that we’ve got a really good shot at winning again, so everyone else has got to watch out.”

—Staff writer Samuel S. Rudavsky can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @samrudavsky.

—Staff writer Alexa M. Schmitt can be reached at [email protected] or Signal at alexaschmitt.15. Follow her on X ​​@alexa_m15_s.