The Harvard men's tennis team will head down to the mid-Atlantic states this weekend to take on Princeton and Penn in its first Ivy league matches outside of Cambridge.
The Crimson (15-4, 2-0 Ivy) will take on Princeton on Friday afternoon at the Lenz Tennis Center and Penn (11-4, 1-2) on Saturday in Philadelphia.
Harvard enters the weekend on a four-match winning streak, during which the team has gone 21-7 in individual matches. The streak follows a mid-season lull in which the Crimson lost two of three matches, the first to No. 25 Virginia and the second to No. 38 Boise State, a team that the Crimson defeated just one week before.
The two losses dropped Harvard from its season high ranking of No. 16 to No. 23, as of the April 6 rankings.
The streak includes Harvard's first two Ivy League wins last weekend at the Murr Center. The Crimson steamrolled Columbia last Friday, 6-1, then blanked Cornell the next afternoon, 7-0.
Strong singles play and new configurations at doubles have sparked the Crimson's recent success.
Sophomore James Blake, currently ranked No. 1 in the country, has been consistently stellar all season, but has played in only two of the last four matches. He sat out a match against New Mexico State because of a back injury and rode the bench against Cornell to allow less-seasoned teammates some match experience.
With Blake in and out of the line-up, Harvard has looked to other players for key wins and has found them from different people at different times.
Junior John Doran has been the most consistent on the team in the last month. The Ireland native has won his last 11 matches in dual-match play, and broke into the Top 100 with a No. 96 singles ranking in the last published polls.
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