By April 10, 2006
After suffering its lone defeat of 2006 at the hands of Penn on April 1, the men’s lacrosse team came to practice each day this week with the resolve to play smarter and harder when it traveled to Cambridge, Mass., to take on Harvard this past Saturday. Practice paid off, as the No. 5 Red used a 7-0 scoring run over two quarters to earn a 10-3 win over the Crimson in front of a 1,500-plus crowd at Johnson Field on Saturday.
“I think our staff felt we were a little bit more focused in practice,” head coach Jeff Tambroni said. “There was a little bit more conviction and urgency, which led to a little bit more competition in practice, which I think we’ve been lacking in the last couple of weeks.”
“We didn’t play too hard or too together against Penn. We wanted to come out and fix that [against Harvard],” said senior co-captain Joe Boulukos.
Boulukos helped ignite the Red (7-1, 2-1 Ivy) on the offensive end, scoring three goals. His hat trick was matched by freshman Max Seibald, who added an assist to lead Cornell with four points on the day. Senior Derek Haswell contributed two goals and two assists for four points of his own, while juniors Casey Lewis and Eric Pittard each added a goal and an assist.
Senior Mike Pisco provided the spark on the defensive end, picking up a career-high 10 ground balls for Cornell, as well as earning a point on offense with his first assist of the 2006 campaign.
“We were asking our seniors to all step up and lead that charge, and he did a great job of stepping up,” Tambroni said.
Evan Calvert tallied two goals in a losing effort for the Crimson (4-3, 1-1), and Greg Cohen added a single marker for Harvard.
Junior Matt McMonagle had a season-high 14 saves for the Red in goal. Evan O’Donnell and Joe Pike shared netminding duties for Harvard, and each allowed five goals and made four saves.
The Red held an edge in shots, 33-28, while the Crimson picked up more ground balls, edging the visitors, 38-32, on the stat sheet. Harvard held an edge in face offs, as John Henry claimed 10-of-17 for the Crimson. Cornell converted on both of its extra-man opportunities, while Harvard scored on just one-of-three man-advantage situations.
Cornell opened the scoring with just 1:17 gone in the contest, as Haswell found the back of the net off a pass from Pisco. Calvert evened the score at 1-1 when he scored his first goal of the day for Harvard four minutes later. The exchange continued, as Lewis put Cornell ahead with an unassisted goal with 5:17 left in the first quarter, answered by a goal from Cohen with 2:43 remaining off a failed clear attempt by the Red.
Boulukos notched the go-ahead tally with 29 seconds left in the opening stanza, scoring an unassisted goal to put Cornell ahead for good.
The Red settled down and began to execute its game plan in the second quarter, as the offense exploded for seven unanswered goals over the next two quarters.
“We were kind of knocking on the door a little bit, and the way the defense was playing we felt confident we’d have a lot of opportunities,” Boulukos said. “We kept plugging away on the offensive end and the ball started going in.
By April 10, 2006
The men’s tennis team was victorious in both of its matches this weekend, defeating Harvard, 5-2, and sweeping Dartmouth, 7-0. The win over the Crimson marked the first time Cornell has beaten Harvard since 1960. The Red improved to 11-6 (2-1 Ivy). The women’s team split its matches, losing to Harvard, 6-1, before toppling Dartmouth, 5-2. The Red improved to 7-5 (1-2 Ivy).
Against Harvard, the men overcame the loss of the doubles point by winning the top-5 singles matches. Senior Brett McKeon, juniors Josh Raff, Nick Brunner and Dan Brous and freshman Kyle Doppelt were all victorious in their matches.
“We did well this weekend. Nobody beats Cornell tennis 46 years in a row. It was a really sweet victory to beat Harvard,” Raff said. “We were pretty down after last weekend; losing to Columbia wasn’t a good start. Harvard is a team I want to beat probably more than any Ivy League team.”
Freshman Josh Goldstein was also pleased with the team’s efforts over the weekend.
“It was a huge weekend for our team. … It was the first time in the 17 years our coach has been at Cornell that we’ve had two wins back-to-back on the same weekend,” he said. “It was as strong a weekend as we could possibly have had.”
The Red was able to take the momentum obtained from the Harvard victory to win every single match against Dartmouth, including all three doubles matches.
“For Dartmouth, we knew going in that we were the stronger team, but we had to make sure to guard against a possible let down,” Raff said. “However, we got it together and took it to them, and the better team won.”
The women’s team did not have quite the same success that the men’s team had, as it fell to Harvard before defeating Dartmouth. The Harvard match was much closer than the score would indicate, according to freshman Elizabeth Googe.
“Going in against Harvard, we knew it would be a tough match. [Head] Coach [Laura Glitz] said before that match that our goal would be to focus on the thing that we could control, such as our effort,” she said. “For the doubles point, all three of our doubles matches were extremely close.”
The doubles team of Googe and freshman Shayna Miller fell 8-7 (3) to the Crimson’s Eva Wang and Stephanie Schnitter. The second and third doubles matches were also close, as the Red teams of junior Kasia Preneta and senior Liying Wang along with freshman Catherine Duboc and senior Mollie Edison lost by scores of 8-4 and 8-5, respectively.
However, the Red recovered nicely against Dartmouth, as Googe would attest.
“We knew that against Dartmouth we had a really good chance of winning. The doubles point gave us a lot of momentum going into the singles matches, knowing we only needed to take three of them,” she said. “It was our first Ivy win of the season. … It was a really good feeling to win that match.”