Laxmen Ready For Big Game Against Brown

The Crimson stickmen travel to Providence today to meet Brown in Harvard's first honest-to-goodness, no-holds-barred, crucial game in half a decade.

Brown is 8-2, 3-0 in the Ivy League, and ranked eighth in the country. Assuming that top-ranked Cornell beats Brown in their showdown two weeks from now, Harvard could earn second place in the Ivy League and an outside shot at a NCAA tournament bid by topping Brown today.

A more feasible path to the tournament is the New England Championship, and Brown is an obstacle along that route too. UMass is currently first in New England, Brown second, and Harvard third. The Minutemen bagged the Bruins last month, 15-10.

If the Crimson gets past the Bruins today, the New England championship and an assured NCAA berth will ride on Saturday's UMass-Harvard shootout at Amherst.

Erstwhile Hopes

You have to go back to 1971, Harvard's last winning season, for the last time the Crimson held tournament hopes. The stickmen were 4-2, had already eliminated UMass in double overtime, and were home against Brown battling for the New England crown.

The team Brown fielded that day included national scoring leader Bob Scalise, now the Harvard coach, and midfielder Jeff Wagner, now one of Scalise's assistants. Those two were on the winning team that day, as Brown rolled over the Crimson 11-5, and hopefully they'll be on the victorious side again today.

But today's match will clearly be an uphill fight for the Crimson. A team doesn't sit where Brown is--in the top ten this late in the season--on reputation alone.

Yet there's also no denying that 15th-ranked Harvard is confident. Before the Princeton game, midfielder Andy Gellis said, "If we beat Princeton, that will give us momentum for the Brown and UMass games, and if we win those, we're going to the tournament."

That's an awful lot of ifs, but the Crimson stickmen came from four goals down to upset Princeton and they think they can pull an upset again today. You never know. IVY LACROSSE LEADERS   W  L  GF  GA Cornell  4  0  80  25 Brown  3  0  39  26 Princeton  2  2  50  40 Harvard  2  2  43  56 Dartmouth  2  2  31  60