“We didn’t want to get into a shot game with Dartmouth, because they’re very good at keeping the ball inbounds,” Weiss said.

Harvard played aggressively and jumped on Dartmouth right away, winning the first two games by margins of 30-22 and 30-18.

Early on it was evident that the more athletic Crimson team was looking to pump up its defense.

“We tried to work on getting to the perimeters,” said junior Nathalie Miller.

Guarding the perimeters enabled the Crimson to slow down Dartmouth’s offense. Miller finished with 16 defensive digs for the match, as well as 13 kills.

After dropping the third game to Dartmouth, the Crimson looked to finish out the match in the fourth game. Harvard built leads of 7-0 and 17-10 , and every time Dartmouth would attempt to crawl back, the Crimson would slam the door with its defense.

Dartmouth mounted small rallies, but the Crimson’s blockers seemed to frazzle the Big Green’s spike game.

“We made a lot of points off their errors,” Miller said.

Harvard eventually closed out the 30-26 victory with a spike by junior Amy Dildine.

Junior Allison Bendush and sophmore Kaego Ogbechie had strong perfomances. Bendush finished with a team-leading 18 kills, and Ogbechie added 16 kills.

Ogbechie was complimented by captain and setter Mindy Jellin. Jellin finished with 58 sets and a team-leading 19 digs.

“Mindy did a wonderful job for us all weekend. She has five of our hitters in double digits each game for kills, and is really spreading out the offense nicely,” Weiss said.

Harvard is looking ahead to games against Yale and Brown this coming weekend.

“We showed signs of brilliance against Dartmouth. If we can build on that going into next weekend it will be great,” Weiss.said.

—Contributing writer Matthew J. Amato can be reached at amato@fas.harvard.edu.