Last week, Rainey competed in the NCAA track and field championships once again, this time finishing third in the fastest 800-meter race run in the world this year.

Rainey sparked the Crimson to its first-ever Heptagonals championships this year during both the indoor and outdoor seasons. In Ithaca, N.Y., Rainey won the 55-meter, the 400-meter and the 800-meter races to help catapult Harvard to a first place finish at the indoor Heps. And Rainey ran an astounding total of six events at the spring Heps in Philadelhia, winning three of them.

Greatest Ever?

Joslin, maybe the greatest athlete in the history of Ivy League women's athletics, finished her four-year rampage through the Ancient Eight by claming Player of the Year honors in field hockey and hockey and finishing second behind teammate Maggie Vaughan for Player of the Year in women's lacrosse. Overall, Joslin--the most publicized athlete at Harvard in the last 20 years--found herself on 12 All-Ivy teams in the last four years, nine times on a first team and three on a second team.

"I think Harvard's come late to the party," Kleinfelder says. "This senior class has been doing things for four years and no one's been paying attention."

While the efforts of individual athletes may headline the success of women's athletics at Harvard this year, it was the teams that stirred the fans' excitement--and made them forget about the men's teams' disappointments.

Of course, the highlight of the season was Joslin and the women's lacrosse team doing what no other Ivy League women's team had ever done--capture an NCAA-sanctioned national championship with an 8-7 win over Maryland.

In the fall, both the field hockey and soccer teams fell inches short of their first-ever Ivy League championships. Few people could remember when the campus was excited about the field hockey team, but in October, even Bok got lost behind The Stadium trying to find the field during a critical Harvard-Princeton field hockey game.

The women's soccer team also lost out in an overtime decision to Brown. Four minutes more of scoreless overtime and the Crimson would have claimed its first Ivy title since 1981. And the women's volleyball team swept four straight matches at the Ivy League tournament before losing in the finals to Penn.

In the winter, Mary Cist clinched the school's first national championship of the year when she won the tie-breaking match in a 5-4 win over Yale. Cist also clinched the team's win over arch-rival Princeton. Senior Jen Holleran tacked on Harvard's second national championship when she captured individual honors as the best women's squash player in the country.

The women's hockey team, buoyed by Joslin and sophomore Sandra Whyte, turned in stunning upsets of Cornell and Princeton at the Ivy League torunament at Bright Center. The wins earned Harvard an invitation to the ECAC tournament, the equivalent of the Final Four in women's collegiate hockey.

Rainey, junior Suzanne Jones and sophomore Catherine Griffin were the headline names in the indoor track team's Heps title. The women's swimming team finished just for points off the pace at Easterns and the women's basketball team finished its season with a one-point shocker at Briggs Cage over Ivy champion Dartmouth on a buzzer-beating layup by Jody Fink.

And the excitement blossomed in the spring

The women's tennis team, under the guidance of Coach Ed Krass, captured its eighth straight Ivy title, sharing it this year with Princeton. The track team repeated its Heps title performance from the winter.

And two teams made appearances in national tournaments. The women's water polo squad upset Michigan at Easterns, earning its first-ever bid to the national championships, where it finished sixth.