Lady Spikers Suffer Two Tough Losses

What do you get when you cross a Tiger with a Quaker?

Cracklin' Frosted Oat Flakes? Sadly for the Harvard women's volleyball team, no. Last weekend at the Malkin Athletic Center both of these things translated into losses for the Crimson.

On Friday night, Harvard (0-2 Ivy, 3-9 overall) hosted Penn, and played decently, but nevertheless lost by the score 15-12, 8-15, 3-15, 15-17.

And Saturday against Princeton, Harvard was not very good at all in its 5-15, 4-15, 3-15 defeat.

All in all, it could have been a better weekend.

"[Against Penn] we came out very strong," captain Rachel Heit said. "Then, I don't know exactly what happened.

"Sometimes you just let up after winning the first game--you kind of take it for granted."

It wasn't until Harvard was down two games to one that the team realized that it was in deep doo-doo. And it acted accordingly, almost pulling out the fourth game.

The Quakers actually had a 10-4 lead at one point of the game, but the Crimson came back to tie it at 14-14, only to lose the game and the match.

The next day against Princeton, Harvard had problems. To put it mildly.

"We had an off day," Heit said. "None of our hitters controlled the ball well--everything went wrong."

And the thing about volleyball is, when a team is down and out, the match seems to end really quickly.

To put insult to injury for Harvard, it had to happen to Princeton, which is the team above all others that, as Heit put it, "we want to beat." Penn  3 Harvard  1

Princeton  3 Harvard  0

Princeton  3 Harvard  0