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Around the Ivies

Published by Kate Leist on April 21, 2010 at 10:10PM

Harvard softball finds itself in the heat of the playoff race as it squares off against Yale this weekend.

It may seem hard to believe, but the spring’s first Ivy champions were crowned this past weekend. Although the tennis season is not quite finished, the Princeton women and Columbia men clinched their respective crowns on Sunday—the second-straight title for each.

Golf will wrap up this weekend too, with both the men and women teeing off at New Jersey’s Baltusrol Golf Club in the Ivy League Championships. But for the four sports with postseason tournaments, there’s still a lot to be decided. Let’s take a look around the Ivies.

MEN’S LACROSSE

This was supposed to be the year Harvard men’s lacrosse made the leap into the Ivy League’s elite. Instead, the Crimson’s season met another disappointment on Saturday. A road trip to Penn—winless in the Ivy League—didn’t put the team back on track, but rather derailed its postseason chances.

The Quakers beat Harvard, 12-7, dropping the Crimson into a two-way tie for fifth place with Dartmouth (1-3 Ivy). And with Harvard’s remaining games coming against first-place Princeton (4-0) and third-place Yale (3-2), the Crimson needs to win out to even have a shot at making the Ivy postseason field.

Second-place Cornell and fourth-place Brown face off in Ithaca on Saturday in the weekend’s biggest matchup.

WOMEN’S LACROSSE

Members of the Harvard women’s lacrosse team were in nursery school (or just in the nursery) the last time the Crimson beat Princeton. But on Saturday, Harvard finally took down the Tigers, 11-9, snapping a 17-game losing streak against its Ivy foe.

Heading into tomorrow’s matchup against Dartmouth—which finally dropped an Ivy game last weekend at the hands of frontrunner Penn—the Crimson still sits in sixth place and out of the conference tournament. The stars will have to align for Harvard to make the four-team field—it needs to win out and have Cornell beat Yale on Sunday—but it does draw winless Columbia in the Ivy finale.

The undefeated Quakers play Princeton tomorrow and Brown on Sunday as they try to complete an undefeated conference season.

BASEBALL

Ladies and gentlemen, Dartmouth is back.

After a sluggish start to the Ivy season, the defending champs swept Yale this weekend to move into a tie for the Rolfe Division lead.

Sharing that lead is Brown, which was dealt a brutal blow yesterday when Harvard swept a pair from the Bears at O’Donnell Field. The Crimson sits two games back in the division, but gets to play fourth-place Yale this weekend while Brown and the Big Green duke it out.

Over in the Gehrig Division, Columbia put distance between itself and the field, taking three of four from Princeton to open up a three-game lead on Penn.

SOFTBALL

Usually, winning three of four in a weekend is a good result for a softball team. But for Harvard this weekend, it wasn’t good enough.

The Crimson dropped a game to lowly Brown on Sunday, allowing Dartmouth to move into a tie for first in the North Division with a sweep of Yale. The two squads sit tied at 9-3 with eight games left to play.

But while it seems that Harvard and the Big Green are again destined to settle the division on the last day of the season, Cornell continues to clean up in the South. The Big Red took three of four from second-place Penn to open a three-game lead on the Quakers.

Cornell’s weekend was highlighted by a no-hitter from Elizabeth Dalrymple, the reigning Ivy Pitcher of the Year.

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