W. Tennis earns at-large bid to NCAA Tournament
Though the No. 41 ranked Penn women's tennis team was unable to wrap up its third consecutive Ivy League title this spring, the Quakers learned yesterday, live over ESPNews, that they will be traveling to the NCAA Championships as an at-large bid.
Led by defending Ivy League Player of the Year Alice Pirsu, Penn will take on No. 52 South Carolina in Raleigh, N.C., on May 9 in the East Regional of the 64-team tournament.
The Quakers would face the winner of the Duke-Winthrop match should they defeat the Gamecocks. The Blue Devils are currently the nation's third-ranked team.
As an SEC squad, South Carolina has faced the best that college tennis has to offer. Yet Penn coach Mike Dowd feels that the Quakers' schedule has adequately prepared his team for the challenge.
"They've seen the best in the country every time they go on the court," Dowd said. "But we had a tough schedule as well, and we fared pretty well."
-- Zachary Silver
Strong final day not enough, W. Golf takes fifth
The Quakers couldn't build on last year's fourth place finish at the Ivy League Championships and finished fifth in front of last place Dartmouth.
After Round 1, the Quakers found themselves almost 30 shots behind defending champion and eventual winner Yale and virtually out of contention. In Round 2, the Quakers made no movement up the leader board and stayed at the bottom of the pack. Penn played its best on the final day, shooting 330, but it was not enough.
Sophomore Melissa Aylor led Penn with an 11th place finish. Freshman Kim Thompson came in 19th place. The team's lone senior Stacy Kress shot Penn's best round of 79 to jump into 22nd place.
There were no upsets at the tournament, as Yale, Princeton, Brown and Harvard finished first, second, third and fourth, respectively.
While this was a setback to the Quakers' progress, next year Penn will only lose one team member to graduation and can build off an experienced sophomore and freshman class.
-- Whitney Kriengkrairut
W. Crew ends season losing to Princeton, Dartmouth
It wasn't due to lack of confidence, nor lack of training. Some might attribute this past weekend's loss to lack of focus. Whatever the reason, the Penn women's crew team ended its regular season this past weekend with an overwhelming loss to No. 2 Princeton and being upset by Dartmouth
"It wasn't us out there," junior Susan Francia said.
"We weren't relaxed out there and just didn't have good rhythm."
After cruising past Rutgers and being only 0.5 seconds from first over ninth-ranked Cornell two weekends ago, the Quakers entered this weekend's race against Princeton and Dartmouth in high spirits on their home waters of the Schuylkill
Unfortunately for the Red and Blue, their third-place finish -- more than 15 seconds behind champion Princeton -- was not close to the outcome they expected heading into the race.
"We didn't row our race," Francia said.
"Though we had many great practice starts, we turned out a poor one for the race."
The Tigers were first off the line with then-No. 13 Dartmouth close behind. The Big Green crossed the finish over 10 seconds behind Princeton in 6:29.0 while Penn came in 6:33.3.
The second varsity eight squad had a similar outcome -- with Princeton dominating Penn by 18 seconds. Dartmouth, surprisingly finished less than a second behind Princeton. The Big Green's above-average performance boosted them three spots in Tuesday's Eastern Association of Women's Rowing Colleges poll to No. 10, while Penn fell from ninth to 11th.
Despite the disappointing weekend, Francia sees the light at the end of the tunnel.
"The fact that we moved lower in the rankings will give us a lower seed and thus, a better chance of doing well at Sprints."
-- Tyler Pearce
Hwt. Crew falls at Adams Cup, preps for Sprints
The Penn heavyweight crew team finished third at the Adams Cup on Saturday on the Severn River in Annapolis, Md.
Harvard, the second-ranked team in the country and top-ranked Ivy on USRowing.com, won the race with a time of 5:33.0, taking the cup for the fourth consecutive year. Host Navy, No. 5 nationally, came in second at 5:38.7, and the No. 11 Quakers crossed the finish line in 5:48.6. This loss was by a considerably higher margin than the Quakers' previous race against the Midshipmen in Palo Alto, Calif., on March 29, losing by 0.39 seconds.
Penn will have this weekend off before competing at the Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges Sprints on May 11. The Sprints, as it is commonly known, is composed of the top 15 crew teams on the East Coast. Penn won the Sprints in 1996 and 1998.
--Jonathan Tannenwald
