CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – The women's squash team will look to move up the ranks this weekend at the College Squash Association's National Team Championships, staged at Harvard's Murr Center.
 
Cornell (11-6, 3-4 Ivy League) will be competing in the Howe Cup, which serves as the A Division of the CSA's national tournament and crowns the national champion. The Big Red is seeded seventh, which is where it has been ranked by the CSA this season from start to finish.
 
First up for Cornell will be a clash against second-ranked Yale at 1:30 p.m. Friday. The teams have met once before this season, with the Bulldogs pulling out a 9-0 victory on Jan. 14 in New Haven, Conn. Only four of the matches were decided in three games, with junior Jaime Laird (No. 3) and senior Clare Berner (No. 7) taking their tilts to a fifth game. A win over Yale would be Cornell's first in the quarterfinals of the Howe Cup in program history.
 
The winner of Friday's match between the Big Red and Bulldogs will advance to a semifinal at 1:30 p.m. Saturday against the winner of a Friday first-round match between third-seeded Princeton and sixth-seeded Stanford. Cornell fell to Princeton, 8-1, on Feb. 10 and also dropped a 7-2 affair against Stanford in the season opener Nov. 19 at the Williams Round Robin.
 
The other side of the Potter Cup bracket features the top seed, unbeaten Harvard, fourth-seeded Penn, fifth-seeded Trinity and eighth-seeded Dartmouth. The championship match is at 1 p.m. Sunday.
 
If Cornell loses Friday, it can still improve its national standing with a win over Princeton or Stanford in the consolation semifinals Saturday. That would put the Big Red into a fifth-place match and guarantee a finish no worse than sixth. Cornell has finished seventh in each of the last two seasons after a sixth-place finish in 2009. The six years prior, the Big Red competed in the B Division Kurtz Cup. The program's best finish all-time was fifth in 2001.
 
Howe Cup brackets
Howe Cup lineups