Making the case for an NCAA tourney bid

By Albert Chen

JULIA TIERNAN/YH Alyssa Chen, TD '99, drives past a Harvard defender.

Women's lacrosse attacker Alyssa Chen, TD '99, knows what the Bulldogs (11-2, 4-2 Ivy) have to do to qualify for the NCAA tournament. Twelve teams will be selected to the Big Dance, but Yale is only ranked 13th in the most recent poll. To move up in the rankings, the Elis not only have to win their remaining three games, but they also have to win big.

Was their 9-5 win over Brown on Wed., Apr. 22, big enough? "Well..." Chen hesitated. "Probably not." The team still has three games left to impress the pollsters. In the next week, the Bulldogs will face Cornell, Syracuse, and Rutgers, and will have to be at the top of their game to win...and win big.

"We have to win enormously," Amanda Cox, MC '98, said. "We have to win by at least six goals or so." The Bulldogs are certainly capable of delivering a drubbing. They have outscored their last four opponents by a whopping 44-19 margin. Their four-goal win over Brown matched their smallest win margin since a 12-10 victory over Boston University nearly three weeks ago.

However, head coach Amanda O'Leary cautioned that looking for big wins could be dangerous. "The last thing you want to do," she said, "is put pressure on your team to kill your opponents. If you try too hard, you forget to do the important things."

Too many times this season, the squad has lost sight of the little things that win games. "All season," Cox said, "we've had too many turnovers, played with too many stupid fundamental mistakes."

The Brown game was no exception. While the Bulldogs jumped out to an early lead, they stumbled midway through the game, leaving the door wide open for the Bears. "We had trouble shooting," Chen explained. "Sometimes we just don't do the little things."

Heather Bentley, SY '00, the league's second-leading scorer, said, "We have to clean up our game and work on the basics, like catching and throwing and cradling without getting checked."

But to be perfect, the Bulldogs will also have to rely on all their players to give a strong competitive effort. Recently, teams have begun to focus their defense on Bentley, with more pressure and frequent double-teams. Encouragingly, the players have noticed that the team has depended less on top scorers such as Chen and Bentley, and has been boosted by strong performances from the entire line-up. "In the past four or five games, we've been playing more like a team, a cohesive unit," Bentley said. "Things haven't always clicked this year, but lately, things have been better." In the 20-8 clobbering of Columbia on Wed., Apr. 15, the team received strong contributions from the bench.

If an NCAA bid is to be a realistic goal, the team must play "like animals," as Cox put it. "We have to play with more of that raw attitude," she added. According to several players, the performance in the Brown game lacked the killer instinct that the Bulldogs need to close out the season. A lapse during a game could mean a string of unanswered goals for the opposition, which could cost the team a tournament invitation.

On Sat., Apr. 10, the squad faced Princeton, ranked No. 2 in the nation, in a match that would determine the Elis' chances for their first title in 18 years. Yale led early, but then the Tigers took control and won 14-10. "After the game," Bentley said, "Coach told us that we still had a lot to play for, that the season wasn't over."

"We had to put it behind us," Cox added. "You have to move on from losses like that--you can't dwell."

In the face of this disappointing loss, the team has certainly rebounded. The Bulldogs enter this final three-game stretch on a four-game winning streak. "We've really been building up our momentum," Cox said.

Although the players know that the margin of their victories will make the difference in getting an invitation to the NCAA women's lacrosse tournament, held Sat., May 9 through Sun., May 17 at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, the Bulldogs know that they must take their last contests one game at a time, one goal at a time.

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