Tomorrow morning, most Harvard students will undoubtedly be sleeping in, basking in end-of-classes bliss before the rigors of finals week begin.
The women of the Crimson squash program, on the other hand, will be braving the cold and snow in Ithaca, N.Y., as they hit the Belkin International Squash Courts to face No. 7 Cornell (1-2, 0-2 Ivy).
Harvard (4-0, 2-0) enters the weekend with a No. 1 CSA ranking and a roster boasting talent one-to-nine: not a single player has dropped a match yet. The squad also carries into the match a 9-0 victory over last year’s Big Red team.
Sophomore Laura Gemmell will likely continue her play in the top slot, having yet to drop a single match in the position since the start of her collegiate career last fall. The 2010 CSA individual champ boasts a 20-0 record.
Cornell’s likely No. 1, sophomore Jaime Laird, has her work cut out for her. She enters the match with a 1-2 record after beating her Franklin & Marshall opponent but falling to Ivy foes Penn and Princeton. She also lost to Gemmell in last year’s top match-up, 11-2, 11-8, 11-7.
Other Crimson players to watch this weekend will be sophomore Natasha Kingshott, a fixture in the No. 5 spot, No. 3 captain Alisha Mashruwala, and junior Nirasha Guruge, who has opened this season with dominant performances in the No. 2 position. Sophomore Sarah Mumanachit has also played well at No. 4. Collectively, the ladies have dropped only five games in four matches.
Slots six through nine have been shuffled around a bit so far this season, but the shifting has done little to slow Harvard down. Senior June Tiong, junior Cece Cortes, sophomore Vidya Rajan, sophomore Eliza Calihan, freshman Natasha Anzik, and senior Bethan Williams have all seen action in the latter end of the varsity rotation thus far, and none has dropped a match yet.
The Crimson hopes to carry this momentum into its first road contest of the season and use it to topple the Big Red, which is no doubt hurting after a 7-2 loss against the Tigers and a 9-0 blanking at the hands of the Quakers.
