Against Princeton, the Harvard players were fatigued after playing Trinity, but they managed to clinch the victory before Patterson took the court against Nate Beck, the Tigers’ No. 7. That allowed the Crimson senior to experiment with different strategies during the match.
“I could have beaten him just playing drop shots and being cheap about it, but I wouldn’t beat anyone better playing that way,” Patterson said.
Thus, he took a different tact.
“I went out there and said to myself, ‘I’m going to beat Beck only playing rails to the back of the court and crosscourts’,” Patterson said.
But Patterson had difficulty putting the ball away, leading to long points that further exhausted him. He tried to end the match quickly, but found Beck fitter than he had expected and made several unforced errors before recovering from the brief hiccup to win.
In the Plate final, Storch overcame Rob Endelman—an opponent so intense he twice sprawled across the court, bloodying his hands—to win 3-1 and spearhead the Crimson’s victory.
Harvard’s inexperienced second team—comprised of four sophomores and junior Peter Wallach—struggled throughout, falling to fourth-seeded New Jersey, Hartford I and Trinity’s second quintet.
Sophomore Vikas Goela, playing at No. 5, earned the Crimson’s only win over Hartford I, while his classmate Gaurav Yadav took Trinity’s intercollegiate No. 14 Nadeem Osman to five games at No. 1.
The Harvard players also got to catch up with some old friends. The second-seeded Harvard Club of New York, led by former Crimson captain and four-time All-American Tim Wyant ’00, 1996 intercollegiate champion Daniel Ezra ’98 and last year’s co-captain, Peter Karlen ’02, fell 4-1 in the semifinals to Trinity I.
All of the Crimson players expect to benefit from having watched their predecessors and other professionals play.
“A lot of those guys have played so much they’ll play shots and do things that some of the college players won’t do,” Storch said. “So they’ll give you a bit of a different look. It’s those sort of matches that you can glean things from.”
And using what it gleaned this weekend when it faces the Bantams and Princeton, who beat Trinity in the final, will go a long way toward helping Harvard forget the unimpressive results that were the cost of that experience.
—Staff writer Alan G. Ginsberg can be reached at aginsber@fas.harvard.edu.