A cruel wind swept away the soft-ball team's confidence and bats yesterday in its doubleheader defeat at the hands of Springfield. After thrashing Holy Cross soundly on Tuesday, the Crimson's winning streak ended abruptly with two losses, 6-2 and 8-3.

As wind tossed sand into players' eyes, the Crimson was confronted with more than it could handle.

Harvard took an early lead in the first game when Nicole Desharnais walked and Co-Captain Beth Reilly brought her home off a double to the outfield. Reilly eventually made it home on an error, pushing the Crimson ahead 2-0.

After the Crimson retired the side in the bottom of the inning, Spring-field changed their pitcher in the second inning to counter Harvard's potent offense.

The new pitcher proved successful for Springfield, but she got an added boost from the weather, which frustrated the Crimson by pulling their hits right down into the Springfield outfielders' gloves.

With its psychological advantage, Springfield rallied back in the bottom of the inning to tie the game 2-2.

Two appeared to be Springfield's lucky number for the remainder of the game. Two runs in the fourth and two in the fifth broke the stalemate, pushing Springfield out to a commanding lead with two innings left.

The Crimson could not overcome this deficit, falling 6-2.

"Springfield is a pretty strong team," centerfielder Elissa Kao said. "Their pitching wasn't that good but they had a strong defense behind it. In the first game, the pitcher forced a lot of ground balls. A lot of times what could have been good hits for us turned into outs because they had a strong defensive team."

An Eery Repeat

The second game, like the first, started off with a bang.

After Katie Fitta led the inning off with a walk, Chris Vogt followed with a sacrifice bunt, moving Fitta to second. A Reilly base hit put runners on the corners.

The Crimson then decided to get fancy, as Reilly led Springfield astray by completing a "walk-off"--also known as a 3/4 steal--letting Fitta steal home.

This lead, along with the Crimson's confidence, however, soon disappeared.

In an eery replay of the previous game, Springfield hammered pitch after pitch to score three runs in the second inning, two in the fourth, and the last three of in the sixth, making the score 8-1 going into the top of the seventh.

The Crimson showed some signs of life in their last at bat, though, as Amy Belisle led off the inning with a hit. Amanda Dawson, the next batter for Harvard, reached first on an error by Springfield's thirdbaseman, Carolyn Marchi, which allowed Belisle to score from first.

Dawson advanced to third on a grounder by Heidi Meinz, and scored on a wild pitch, decreasing the deficit to five. The Crimson could not come-back, however, losing 8-3.

Mistakes

Costly errors and stranded baserunners proved to be the Crimson's undoing in both games. The team could not capitalize on key hits and was unable to maintain early leads.

"Everything seemed to go wrong," Crimson hurler Christine Carr said. "There were a lot of mental errors and the playing conditions just made things impossible."

The Notebook: The Ivy Pitcher of the Week this week was Princeton's Lisa Moore, who struck out 19 Harvard batters in a sweep of the Crimson. The Tigers won, 11-1, 3-2. In other news, Harvard's Liz Resnick and Chris Carr are tied for fifth in the Ivy batting race with a .400 batting average.