A defining characteristic of the Harvard women’s soccer team is its selective memory. The Crimson is a team that requires its members to look forward and ignore the past. This is an essential component of what Harvard coach Tim Wheaton refers to as a positive attitude.

Enforcing such a policy has become a necessity given the wide swings in his team’s performance over the past three years.

The Crimson has been brilliant at times, with peak national rankings ranging from No. 7 to No. 12 in each year—no small task in a sport with a Division I sponsorship of 280 teams. The program is also one of only 10 nationwide to make the second round of NCAAs each of the past six years.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Harvard suffered a shocking loss to Boston College in its 1999 tournament opener when it was one of just eight nationally-seeded teams. In 2000 and 2001, the team achieved the rare distinction of making the NCAA tournament in spite of 0-5 and 2-4 runs, respectively, to close out the regular season.

The team’s most stinging failure, however, is its fourth-place finish in the Ivies each of the last two years.

In order to return to the top of the Ivy standings for the first time since 1999, Wheaton didn’t want his team dwelling on any negative thoughts, so he demanded in an e-mail last May that each member of the team return to preseason this year with a positive attitude.

“We made a commitment last spring, that if we’re going to come back, we’re going to come back positively giving everyone the benefit of the doubt and working towards common goals,” Wheaton said. “And basically everyone who’s come back has come back with that feeling,”

So far, Wheaton’s strategy has achieved its goals. The returning players have expressed only positive thoughts through the preseason.

“It’s been the best preseason we’ve had as far as team chemistry,” said senior Joey Yenne, Harvard’s leading overall scorer each of the past two seasons. “For the last couple of years we’ve been losing a lot, and there’s been a little bit of dissension. Now it’s finally completely positive.”

“It’s a different energy this year,” added senior Beth Totman, who led Harvard in scoring her freshman year. “We all have the same goals. We’re focusing on this year. Everything from the past is the past.”

The team arrived earlier than all other Harvard athletic teams for preseason, a full week before the end of August. That allowed the team to focus, said junior co-captain Katie Hodel. Within the first few days, the team had a meeting to set its goals for the year. The team’s ambitions included the usual fare, such as an undefeated Ivy record.

“We’re really good at stating the obvious,” Totman said.

Hodel also emphasized that the meeting was necessary to show the team’s high standards to the freshman class, which is further removed from an Ivy title than any incomers since 1994. Nobody wanted last season’s events—losing to Penn for the first time ever, losing to Princeton for the first time in nine years—to become the norm.

Among Wheaton’s favorite stories from the preseason, ironically, is one where his players disobeyed him. When doing fitness sprints one day, Wheaton implemented a system where he split his players into teams and the first-place teams had to do fewer sprints in the end. Instead of following his instructions, the team did every one of the sprints together, because players refused to stand idle while their teammates were perspiring.

“That’s a great sign of a team caring about each other,” Wheaton said. “It’s bad for me. I got to figure out a different way to get them psyched to do those things—no, I’m kidding. It’s awesome.”