For the second straight weekend, the Penn men's tennis team will be doing more than just facing Ivy League foes - it will be trying to erase the past.
With their victory over Brown last Saturday, the Quakers avenged the loss that kept them out of last year's NCAA Tournament. This weekend, they'll be seeking revenge again as they host a Harvard team that gave Penn its only 2006 regular-season loss in the league.
Last year, Penn came into its match at Harvard on a 12-game winning streak and looked to be in the driver's seat for an Ivy title. Instead, the unranked Crimson dealt a 5-2 loss and squashed the Quakers' hopes for an outright championship.
Adding fuel to the fire, the teams come into today's match as the only two remaining undefeated ones in the Ancient Eight.
"Last year we were in the same position at 3-0 and we went up to Harvard and lost, so we know how it feels to be 3-0 and lose that match," sophomore Jonathan Boym said. "That loss made us stronger and this year as a team we are going to be much more prepared."
Harvard (7-7, 2-0 Ivy) comes off a weekend when it knocked off Cornell and then-ranked Columbia.
Penn (9-11, 3-0), which will also take on Dartmouth tomorrow, comes in with a five-game winning streak after defeating Brown and Yale.
With the Quakers and Crimson sitting together atop the Ivy standings, today's match could provide a favorite for the championship.
"Whoever wins the match is the frontrunner for first place and that's our goal," coach Mark Riley said. "We'll be ready to go and it's going to be a heck of a tennis match."
Besides pitting the Ivy League's top two teams against each other, today's match also represents a role reversal of sorts. Riley asserted that Harvard is usually the team that comes in as the league favorite, but as this year's ECAC Champions, Penn has now taken on that role.
"It's been tougher this year because we have a bull's eye on our back," Riley said. "In some ways we aspire to handle the target on our back like they have in the past, but now they're chasing people so it's a new experience for them."
Lurking after today's pivotal match will be Dartmouth, which comes in having split its recent matches against Columbia and Cornell.
The Big Green (15-3, 1-1), despite having an impressive overall record, remain under the radar for now in the chase for the Ivy crown.
But the Quakers insist they will not overlook Dartmouth, regardless of the outcome of today's pivotal match.
And Boym isn't thinking about anything else for now.
"It doesn't matter if we're playing our first match against Princeton or our last match against Columbia," Boym said. "As a team we look at it as every match in the Ivy League is equally important."
