Ivy Champion Volleyball Looks For Repeat Effort At Yale, Berth In The NCAA Championships Saturday

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When Princeton last left New Haven, it had a share of first place and the program's first win at Yale in a decade.

If the Tigers can find a second win in a span of months, as opposed to years, they'll leave with something far more valuable — a berth in the 2017 NCAA Championships.
Princeton, the three-time reigning Ivy League champion, will take on 2017 co-champion Yale Saturday night at 7 pm in New Haven, a match that will be streamed live, for free, on the Ivy League Network. The winner of the match will be assured one of 64 spots in the NCAA tournament, a field that will be announced the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

Yale earned the right to host the match due to a 4-3 advantage in head-to-head sets won. Princeton won the opener 3-1 in New Haven, but the Bulldogs bounced back with a 3-0 win over the Tigers on Oct. 27 in Dillon Gym. At that point, Princeton trailed Yale by two matches with only five remaining in the Ivy League season, so the thought of even getting into a playoff seemed optimistic at best.

But a wild final two weeks, which included both Princeton and Yale losing five-set matches while being alone in first place, has brought the league a second playoff match in the last three years. Two seasons ago, Princeton rallied from an 0-3 start to catch Harvard for a share of the Ivy title, though the Crimson won a 3-1 playoff in Boston to advance to the NCAA Championships.

Princeton never let it get to a playoff last year, as it rolled through the Ivy League with a 13-1 mark, and then challenged #10 BYU in two highly tense sets before ultimately falling 3-0 in its sixth trip to the NCAA tournament. Five members of the starting lineup for that Princeton team will be in Yale this weekend, which gives the Tigers an edge in big-match experience.

One of those starters is Maggie O'Connell, who was named the 2017 Ivy League Player of the Year Thursday; she is only the sixth Princeton player to ever win the award, and she is the second to win both the Ivy League Rookie of the Year award and the Player of the Year award in her career (Parker Henritze '09 was the other.

O'Connell is the only Tiger volleyball player to ever win this award as an underclassman. In fact, she is the first underclassman to win the Ivy League Player of the Year award since 2011 (Kendall Polan, Yale), and only the second in the last 15 years of Ivy League play.

In two matches against Yale this season, O'Connell led Princeton with 20 kills and 22 points, and she hit .278 against the Ivy League leader in opponent hitting percentage.

O'Connell was one of five All-Ivy honorees for Princeton (Jessie Harris, Nnenna Ibe, Devon Peterkin, and Caroline Sklaver). Ibe and Sklaver combined for 14 blocks between them against Yale, while Ibe hit .550 in her two matches against the Bulldogs.

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