Sophomore first baseman Whitney Shaw, who leads the Ivy League with 12 home runs, was named the Ivy League Player of the Week on Tuesday for strong hitting in key games against Dartmouth and BU last week. Tops on her team in runs, RBI, and slugging percentage, Shaw and her .338 batting average—second on the squad—will try to overpower Cornell’s pitchers in the Ivy League Championship Series, beginning today in Ithaca, N.Y.

Graduation is a time for most seniors to reflect on how much things have changed since their freshman year.

But the seniors on the Harvard softball team (25-20, 17-3 Ivy) are hoping that their careers in crimson will wrap up just as they began: with an Ivy League title.

“We won our freshman year,” co-captain Margaux Black said. “Ever since then, we’ve wanted to get another one.”

Harvard’s veterans will get a chance to bring things full circle this afternoon when they take on Cornell in this year’s Ivy League Championship Series.

The doubleheader will begin today at 12:30. Should the teams split, as they did the last time they faced each other, a final game will take place on Saturday, starting at the same time.

The Crimson headed to Ithaca yesterday in preparation for the big matchup. The team will face a Big Red team (35-12, 17-3) so much its equal that one tiebreaker wasn’t enough to determine hosting rights for this series.

Harvard and Cornell finished the season with identical league records and even head-to-head results, so hosting was determined based on which team had the best record against the third-place team, Penn.

Both the Crimson and the Big Red dropped only one game to the Quakers. Because Penn is in Cornell’s South Division and not Harvard’s North, the Big Red played it four times while the Crimson and the Quakers met only twice, giving Cornell the higher winning percentage and therefore the hosting rights.

“I think it’ll be a tough battle,” Harvard coach Jenny Allard said. “It’ll be a great serie. I think both teams have strong pitching, solid defense, and good hitting. They’re very evenly matched.”

The last time the teams faced, two of the Crimson’s top pitchers, rookie Jess Ferri and sophomore Rachel Brown, struggled against a potent Cornell offense, before Black took the mound and led Harvard to a 7-6 nightcap win.

“They’re free swingers,” Black said of the Big Red’s hitters. “They come up and hack at it. It’s really fun to pitch against them because they come out swinging. It’s different from other Ivies.”

Black, Brown, Ferri, and the rest of the Crimson’s pitchers have only gained momentum since splitting against Cornell.

The team swept Columbia a day after splitting with Penn and went on to take three of four from Brown. Then Harvard swept its past two weekends, when it faced Yale and Dartmouth.

Not only have the Crimson pitchers honed their games, but the hitters have also found their swing recently. After a series of low-scoring games, the team has put up no fewer than five runs in each of its past eight league games, highlighted by a 10-3 win over Yale on April 24 and a 9-0 win over Dartmouth last Saturday.

Junior Ellen Macadam and sophomore Whitney Shaw have led the charge. Macadam has the team’s highest batting average at .365, with Shaw right behind her at .338. Shaw’s .714 slugging percentage, meanwhile, takes the cake, with Macadam’s .554 good for second on the team.