The Harvard women’s squash team begins its quest today to recapture the national title at the Howe Cup, held at Yale this weekend. The path to the finals will be tricky, but the Crimson (7-1, 5-0 Ivy) is up for the challenge, just one year removed from winning its own national championship.

Seeded No. 2 in the tournament, Harvard will likely not face a difficult match-up until the semifinals. There, the Crimson will probably square off against No. 3 Yale. Harvard has yet to battle the Bulldogs in competitive play but won both scrimmages against the Elis earlier this year.

Due to individual tournaments held at the end of the year, Harvard will actually compete for the national championship before finishing its regular season schedule. Harvard plays Yale on February 19, three days Sunday’s Howe Cup Final, to conclude team play.

Yale is the only other undefeated Ivy, and its lineup features the top two recruits in the country, Michelle Quibell in the first slot and Amy Gross at No. 2. Based almost solely on the Bulldogs’ success this season, reaching the championship match is no longer a given for Harvard.

“We will be really happy getting to the finals,” junior co-captain Louisa Hall said. “The Ivy League is so much stronger than in the past.”

In particular, the match-ups at the top of the ladder against Yale should be extremely tight. Quibell and Hall typically have close matches at No. 1, and the second-seeded Gross has a long history against Harvard sophomore Lindsey Wilkins.

Gross and Wilkins were rivals in junior squash, with the Bulldog freshman usually coming out on top. But this season already, Wilkins has defeated Gross at both scrimmages.

“I’m just going in with the attitude that it’s just one match,” Wilkins said. “I’ve trained really hard for this, so I’m just going to go out there and have fun.”

If Harvard can get by Yale, the Crimson almost certainly know what—or whom—to expect in the finals. No. 1 Trinity is the defending champion, having taken the crown in a 5-4 duel against the Crimson last year. Harvard took the title with its own 5-4 win in 2001.

Last year’s match was decided by, quite literally, the slimmest of margins—a tiebreaker in the fifth game of the final match. Playing in that match was this year’s co-captain Ella Witcher. The contest this year would seem to be much more lopsided after the Bantams posted an 8-1 win over Harvard just two weeks ago. But the Crimson maintains that the match was far closer than the score indicated.

“There were a lot of matches that were close and should have gone our way, if people hadn’t made stupid mistakes and bad calls,” Hall said. “Even though the scores were one-sided, people ended up being encouraged by how close the match actually was.”

Hall also pointed out that freshman No. 3 Moira Weigel and sophomore No. 9 Stephanie Hendricks were both returning from injuries against the Bantams. The Crimson has also since tinkered with its lineup, which must remain set throughout the tournament. Sophomore Laura Delano will shift up one spot to No. 4, with freshman Tina Browne dropping down to No. 5.

Such changes are partly an effort to obtain the best possible match-ups against Trinity. The Bantams infuriated Harvard last year by moving their regular No. 9 to the fifth slot for the Howe Cup, seeming violating the ladder stacking prohibition.

All technicalities aside, the weekend’s play should at the very least provide a preview for the Crimson’s Ivy League championship match against Yale on Feb. 19. And if all goes right, Harvard may possess its second Howe Cup in three years by Sunday night.

“The weekend is going to be great,” Wilkins said. “The nine months of work that we’ve done thus far will definitely pay off this weekend.”

—Staff writer Brenda Lee can be reached at belee@fas.harvard.edu.