By wpengine
The field hockey team will look to keep its Ivy League title chances alive as it takes on the No. 14 Princeton Tigers at 5 p.m. this evening on Schoellkopf field. Last year’s contest saw the Tigers shut out the Red, besting Cornell by eight goals. Three of them came from current Princeton senior Ivy Friebe. Princeton also shut down Cornell on the offensive end, preventing it from earning a single shot on net in the first half. Don’t think that head coach Michelle Tambroni has forgotten about any of this. Her current game plan is to shut down Friebe, who recently earned her 21st goal of the season. Tambroni feels that neutralizing the senior will catch the Tigers off guard. “We’re going to force them to make decisions,” said Tambroni. Also look for Cornell to bunker in defensively in order to avoid a repeat of last season. One of Tambroni’s goals is to prevent Princeton from crossing the defensive 35 yard line. Aside from these few changes, however, Cornell will continue with its usual style of play. “We need to work on playing our game,” said Tambroni. Along with a strong defense, this also means fast penalty corners. Though it seemed to suffer in the middle of the season, the corner unit has gotten back on track. The most recent evidence of this comes from the Brown game, in which Cornell was able to get off most of its corners. With better drainage on Schoellkopf field, fans should also look for improved speed and accuracy from the usual ringers. Princeton has dominated the Ivy League this entire season with its most recent wins being a 9-1 contest over Brown, and a 4-1 showing over Harvard. When facing top 10 opponents, however, things change. The Tigers have dropped contests to the likes of Michigan State, Old Dominion and Boston University. Cornell has performed well in games against ranked opponents. Syracuse, Maine and Kent State were all tight games that could have gone either way. Perhaps the most memorable contest so far was a 2-1 overtime win against current No. 19 Virginia. While the Red controls what happens tonight and against Dartmouth on Nov. 10, it will not be able to control much else in the Ivy Title race. For a two or three-way split to occur, Princeton would have to lose its final Ivy game to Penn, and Harvard would have to drop a game to either Brown or Columbia. Besides making the contest for the league title more interesting, a win today might also force open the Cornell record book. Currently, the team has nine wins. One more would break the single season mark set by the 1996 team. Junior attack Carissa Mirasol is also on the brink of breaking a personal milestone. She needs three assists in the next two games to break the single season assist record set by Cari Hills ’98. Archived article by Matt Janiga
By wpengine
Friday was a day for the cross country teams to get things sorted out, as both the men’s and women’s teams participated in the John Reif Memorial Run on the Moakly Course in Ithaca. In his years at Cornell, Reif ’86 was a hard-working cross country runner, finishing as the team’s fifth man. A year after his graduation, a truck hit and killed him while he was training for a triathlon. In each of the sixteen years since, the Cornell teams have held the Reif Memorial Run in his honor. This year, the meet offered the Red teams a chance to get ready for the Heptagonal Championships in a week. “It’s the week before Heps, so virtually all the work has been done,” noted women’s head coach Lou Duesing. The men’s team rested its top seven runners, and the women’s team its top eight, in preparation for this Friday’s competition in Van Cortland Park. “We’re only allowed to run twelve people at Heps,” said Duesing, and for the women’s team, Saturday’s meet was all about figuring out who would be supporting the varsity runners there. “It’s not exclusively based on the results of this race,” Duesing said. The coach declined to say who the women’s last four participants would be at Heps, because the runners don’t know themselves. He did, however, point to several runners with admirable performances at the meet. Sophomore Sarah Coseo claimed victory in the women’s 5K race, followed by senior Natalie Whelan. Sophomores Alyssa Simon, Amber McGown and Kari Haus rounded out the ladies top five runners in places three through six. Duesing pointed to Coseo first, also noting her strong performance the week before at the Harry Anderson Invitational in Rochester. “Natalie Whelan had a very good run,” he continued, “and [Haus] perhaps had her best race of the season.” Simon also had a good race, Duesing said, and McGown continued her strong return from an early season foot injury. “I’m happy to see the progress that Amber McGown has made,” Duesing said. Over the next week, the Red will begin to taper itself for Heps. The women’s team has one hard effort run and then some quicker workouts. The goal is for the runners to be sharp but rested. The Memorial Run provided the first step in that direction, both mentally and physically. It offered the teams a chance to reflect on their heritage and sort out the last of the team’s top runners. “I think a lot of people appreciate the tradition of Cornell cross country,” said Duesing. “I think it helps them when they race. Hopefully they’ll carry that into the meet next week,” Duesing concluded. It’s one more thing the team can use, along with its considerable strength and talent, to get it to a conference championship. On Nov. 1 in Van Cortland Park, the Heps await. Archived article by Matt James