The red-hot Cornell field hockey team (4-2, 2-0 Ivy) will look to make a further impact this weekend on both the Ivy League standings and the Big Red record books. Cornell is riding the wave of a four-game winning streak into this weekend’s match-up against Yale (0-7, 0-1 Ivy).
With a win tomorrow against the Elis, the Red has a chance to make team history. A fifth-straight win will tie the mark for the longest string of wins in the Cornell books, set in 1988. It would also mean that Cornell would open its Ivy slate of games 3-0, which has not happened in the 28-year history of the program. It currently sits at 2-0, a mark that also had not been reached in 12 years.
Cornell sits tied for second in the Ivy standings with Harvard, half a game behind a potent Princeton team. With both of those teams idle this weekend in Ivy play, the Red has a chance to grab a share of first place.
Standing in the way of both history and a piece of number one is Yale, a team with sharp passing skills. Although it has not won a game yet this season, Cornell head coach Michelle Tambroni is being careful not to overlook the Bulldogs.
“They’re having a tough year. Their record is 0-7 right now, but that doesn’t mean anything, because when you put two Ivy teams on the same field together it’s usually war. So it scares me, because they could either come into this game and be very fired up because they want to get their Ivy League win, or they could come in and we take over the first five minutes. If we get up on them, I think we can just dominate. But if we don’t, it will be an all-out fight for this game,” she said.
The Red will have to fight through a Yale system which fills up the midfield, a task which will be made more difficult by the absence of senior co-captain Kate McMahon. Tambroni will shuffle the lineup a bit to replace McMahon at her center-midfield position.
Senior Catherine ‘Cat’ Kelly will be taking McMahon’s spot, and Tambroni will slide sophomore Sarah ‘Rosie’ Rosenbaum to center back. Freshmen Kelly Soltis and Karleigh Burns will play left- and right-midfield, respectively.
“I think with Rosie behind Cat, with the system that they’re going to play, we’re hopefully going to open up lots of lanes,” Tambroni commented.
The allure of making team history is an additional edge for the Red. Winning five straight is “definitely a goal for us, and I think it will be a motivational factor, and I’m happy that we’re home, so we’ll be in front of our own fans,” Tambroni said.
A key part of the Red’s success lately has been the play of sophomore Anna Starkey, who notched goals in the first three Red wins and assisted on all three goals in Wednesday night’s overtime victory. Along the way, she picked up the Air Force ROTC Player of the Week honors for her two-goal effort against Columbia two weeks ago and made the Ivy League honor roll each week of the season so far.
Archived article by Alex Fineman