ITHACA, N.Y. — The women's tennis team enters the final weekend of the regular season with a chance of winning its first Ivy League title and its first trip to the NCAA tournament since 1996. Now ranked 63rd in the country by the Intercollegiate Tennis Association, Cornell will play at 1 p.m. Friday at #52 Penn before returning to Ithaca for a 10 a.m. Sunday match against #50 Princeton on the outdoor courts at Reis Tennis Center.
Cornell enters this weekend as one of four Ivy teams with two league losses, all of which are chasing #33 Columbia and its 4-1 league record. The Big Red is coming off home victories last weekend against Brown and Yale despite losing the doubles point each day. Sophomore
Lizzie Stewart ultimately clinched both matches with victories at #4 singles, with juniors
Marika Cusick (#1) and
Alexandra D'Ascenzo (#2), and sophomore
Priyanka Shah (#6) also winning each of their respective singles matches. Shah has now won 10 consecutive singles matches, and Stewart and D'Ascenzo have matching team-best 15-5 records.
Cornell would set a program record for victories in a single season with one more victory, and two wins would give the Big Red five in a league season for the first time since 1996 — but it still would need help to win a league crown. Columbia can wrap up the outright title with victories this weekend against Princeton on Friday and Penn on Sunday. But if Columbia loses one of its matches this weekend and Cornell wins twice, the Big Red would clinch a share of the Ivy League title (though the Lions would lock up the league's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament via tiebreaking procedures). If Columbia loses twice and Cornell wins twice, the Big Red would then earn the NCAA bid — the program's first since 1996. Under that scenario, the Big Red would share the league title with Yale if the Bulldogs win their final three league matches or win outright if Yale loses at least once.
Penn (10-8, 3-2 Ivy) also enters this weekend on a roll, joining Cornell as the only Ivy teams to win both of their matches last weekend. Freshman Marta Kowalska clinched a 4-3 win over Harvard on Saturday with a three-set victory at #5 singles, then Penn won three of its five singles matches in three sets for a 5-2 victory over Dartmouth. The wins vaulted the Quakers up 22 spots in the ITA rankings.
Cornell is just 5-30 all-time against the Quakers, but the field has been leveled in recent years. Penn prevailed by a narrow 4-3 margin last year, but the Big Red won the last time the teams met at Penn in 2013 by the same score. The Big Red also won the 2010 clash at Penn, 6-1.
Two-time defending league champion Princeton (11-9, 3-2 Ivy) momentarily climbed into a first-place tie last Saturday after a 5-2 victory over Dartmouth, but the Tigers stumbled to a 4-3 loss Sunday against Harvard to create the current logjam in the league standings. Amanda Muliawan and Katrine Steffensen typically fill the top two singles positions and are technically ranked 89th in the nation as a doubles pairing, though they haven't competed together since the fall. The Tigers have found the majority of their singles points from the bottom half of the order, where it has a .661 winning percentage compared to .509 from the top three positions. Sunday's match is free to attend and open to the public.
The Tigers have won 35 of 37 all-time meetings with the Big Red dating back to 1973. Those Cornell victories were in 1995 and 1996, which coincided with the best Ivy League finishes in program history. Princeton actually clinched the Ivy title last season with a 4-3 win over the Big Red on the final match of the regular season. The teams also met earlier this season, with the Tigers earning a 4-1 victory during the ECAC Indoor Championships in February.
