ITHACA, N.Y. — The women's tennis team will look for its first Ivy League victories this weekend when it hosts Penn at 2 p.m. Friday before hitting the road for the last time to take on Princeton at 1 p.m. Sunday.
Cornell (6-12, 0-3 Ivy League) is coming off road losses last weekend to Brown and Yale. Freshman
Valerie Ho accounted for the Big Red's point in a 4-1 loss to Brown with a 6-2, 6-3 victory at No. 3 singles. Ho leads the team with a 10-6 record in in singles, and classmate
Sarah Campbell is 8-7 from primarily the No. 5 position. In doubles, senior
Mariko Iinuma, freshman
Maria Adiaconitei and Campbell are all tied for the team lead in victories with six apiece.
Penn (12-5, 1-2) enters the weekend on the heels of its first Ivy League victory, a 4-1 decision against Dartmouth on Sunday. The two losses prior were close – a 4-3 setback to open the league slate against Princeton on March 30, then a 4-1 loss to Harvard in which the Quakers were handily ahead in the two unfinished matches.
The Quakers started off against the Big Green by winning the doubles point for a ninth consecutive match. Marija Curnic and Marta Kowalska are 10-3 from the No. 1 position and are ranked 48th nationally. And while Iuliia Bryzgalova and OJ Singh (12-1 at No. 2) are outside the national rankings, the tandem is ranked fourth-highest among Ivy League entries.
In singles, Bryzgalova is ranked 91st nationally with an 11-1 record in dual matches after she won the ITA Northeast Region Championship in the fall. Kowalska is 10-6 from primarily the No. 2 position.
Cornell is just 6-31 all-time against the Quakers, but the field has been leveled recently with the Big Red emerging victorious in two of the last four years. Cornell earned a 5-2 victory in its last visit to Philadelphia in 2016, simultaneously setting a program record with its 15th win of the season. The Quakers then won last year, 4-3, to hand the Big Red the first of its two league losses despite a win from Iinuma at No. 5 singles.
Princeton (14-4, 3-0) enters this weekend ranked 39th nationally and on a five-match winning streak. Two of the Tigers' Ivy League victories so far were 4-3 decisions, including last Sunday's victory at Harvard. Princeton started the weekend with a 4-1 win at Dartmouth.
The strength of the Tigers' lineup to date has come from the middle of the order in both singles and doubles. Using the ITA's ranking formula, Grace Joyce (15-2) and Clare McKee (10-4) are ranked highest in singles. Stephanie Schrage is 8-8 from the No. 1 position, and Brianna Shvets is 11-4 at No. 2. In doubles, the Tigers are 12-2 at No. 2, when Joyce and McKee teamed up to compete last weekend.
Cornell has defeated Princeton four times in 42 all-time meetings between the programs since 1973, but two of those victories came as recently as the memorable 2016-17 campaign for the Big Red. The other two Big Red victories against the Tigers came in 1995 and 1996 — which coincided with the program's best all-time Ivy League finishes before it shared the 2017 title. The Tigers won last year's Ivy League meeting, 7-0, and defeated the Big Red, 5-0, about two months ago in the first round of the ECAC Indoor Championships.
