One can see the family resemblance in the way the Halls control the Barnaby Courts.

“When Colby plays aggressively, she’s a phenomenal player,” Wing says. “Both her and Louisa run really well and run just about everything down.”

Currently rounding out Harvard’s top nine are freshman Hillary Thorndike, sophomore Kristin Wadhwa, and freshman Stephanie Hendricks. However, with fourteen players on the roster as opposed to only ten last year, some shuffling in the lineup is almost bound to occur.

“Everyone’s wrestling for a spot, but it’s happy wrestling,” Elias says.

That bodes well for the Crimson, who must handle the added burden of being the defending national champions.

“It’s a little bit of pressure, but at the same time I think it’s sort of just psyching us up, too,” Colby Hall says.

As a result, the women have been working even harder than last year, holding morning practice twice a week in addition to their standard afternoon sessions. Still, Harvard won’t know how good it is until it sees its younger players compete on a national stage.

“It’s going to be important for the freshman to get some match experience and be able to pull out big matches,” Wing says.

Once they do, though, the Crimson women could well be celebrating their first back-to-back national titles since the Howe Cup resided in Cambridge from 1993-1997.

Harvard Men

On paper, the Ivy League champion men’s team faces a tougher road to the national title. Gone are last year’s co-captains, Deepak Abraham ’01 and Shondip Ghosh ’01, two of Harvard’s four first-team All-Americans, second-team All-American Andrew Merrill, and Gray Witcher.

However, the Crimson still has a lot of talent returning. Incredibly, the team’s entire top nine from last year finished the season in the top forty-four players nationally. Thus, while Abraham (No. 4), Ghosh (No. 7), Merrill (No. 19), and Witcher (No. 34) have graduated, co-captain Pete Karlen (No. 6), sophomore James Bullock (No. 9), both of whom were first-team All-Americans, junior second-team All-American Dylan Patterson (No. 22), co-captain David Barry (No. 38), and sophomore Ziggy Whitman (No. 44) return.

Even so, the team recognized that it would have to extend itself to compensate for its losses. Thus, six of ten returners trained full-time this summer.

The results have quickly become evident. In this year’s preseason rankings Karlen remains sixth, but Bullock, Patterson, Barry, and Whitman have all risen, to eighth, 18th, 29th, and 35th, respectively.

Throughout the preseason, Karlen and Bullock have been battling for the top spot in the lineup. The competition, though fierce, is friendly, as the players recognize each other’s excellence.