Cinderella’s glass slipper must have fallen off somewhere on the way to the trainer’s room.

Immediately following its NCAA Sweet 16 run last year, the potential for the Harvard women’s tennis team must have seemed limitless. Only one regular contributor to the lineup, Sanja Bajin ’03, had been lost to graduation, leaving a core unit two years to aspire for something even greater.

If they could stay healthy, that is.

But the challenge of fielding a full roster each week proved as troublesome as any opponent the Crimson faced all season.

Co-captains Courtney Bergman and Susanna Lingman battled lingering knee, shin and hip injuries throughout the spring and watched from the sideline almost as often as from the baseline. Classmate Alexis Martire fared little better in her struggle to recover from a sprained ankle, missing the final three conference matches, among others.

By year’s end, it seemed as if the only statements that could be made about the lineup with any certainty were that someone was likely to be out with an injury and everyone else was nicked up, just not badly enough to be sitting out that particular match.

Yet, after limping through a mediocre non-conference slate that saw Harvard’s highly-touted squad fall to five lower-ranked opponents en route to a lackluster 7-9 record—punctuated by a four-game losing streak—the season appeared to take a dramatic turn for the better.

Jumpstarted by effortless wins over Columbia and Cornell in the first weekend of league competition, play finally approached the levels anticipated when the team earned its preseason No. 13 ranking.

“It was expected that we’d win,” sophomore Eva Wang said. “We knew we were going to win. It would’ve been a lot more nerve-wracking for us if we’d played a team as good as us, but since we played Cornell and Columbia, and they’re not very good, it takes the pressure off.”

The Ivy dominoes fell swiftly, as even Penn—Harvard’s traditional counterweight at the top of the conference standings—bowed out of the race following a 6-1 defeat at the Crimson’s hands. In dispatching with its league opponents and locking up a second-straight NCAA tournament berth, Harvard surrendered no more than two points—to Cornell and Yale—and in both those instances, at least one regular top-four player was out of commission due to injury.

“In the end,” Wang said, “we were just used to having someone missing from the lineup.”

That talent disparity and ease of victory also allowed the Crimson to consciously devote less than its full arsenal to each match, resting key players for the tournament run.

When the first round and a date with Ohio State rolled around, Harvard was ready and healthy from the top of the ladder to the bottom for only the second time the entire spring season.

“We’re healthy, finally,” Crimson coach Gordon Graham said prior to the match. “We’ve only played one match with our full lineup, and it looks like we’re going into this tournament with our full lineup.”

Given his team’s string of bad luck throughout the year, it was only fitting that Graham was proven wrong almost immediately.