Second-Ranked Tigers Look For Strong Ivy Finale, Will Honor Seniors Sunday

The second-ranked Princeton women's squash team may not have control of its own destiny in the Ivy League race, but the Tigers will still look to punctuate a terrific regular season this weekend with two more Ivy League wins, and they will try to send their seniors out with one more special Jadwin memory.

Princeton (11-1, 4-1 Ivy) enters the weekend just behind Harvard in both the national rankings and the Ivy League standings. While the Tigers remain alive in the race, they will need Harvard to lose either Friday at Yale or Sunday against Brown to get a piece of the 2018 Ivy title.

However, two wins this weekend should secure the No. 2 seed for the Howe Cup Championships, which will be held Feb. 16-18 in Boston. That would assure the Tigers to be on the opposite side of the draw of Harvard and set up a potential championship showdown during the final Sunday of the season.

Of course, there is a long way to go to get there, and that begins Friday night at 6 pm in New York City against the sixth-ranked Columbia Lions. Princeton is 7-0 against the Lions, though the Tigers were pushed in a 7-2 victory the last time the teams met in New York City. Princeton will bring five starters to the match who have at least 10 wins on the season, including at least one member of each class. The match will be played simultaneously with the men's match against second-ranked Columbia.

On Sunday, Princeton returns home to take on ninth-ranked Cornell, a noon match that will be streamed live on the Ivy League Network. Princeton defeated Cornell 7-2 last season, and it has won 43 of the last 45 individual matches against the Big Red played on the Jadwin Courts. Prior to the match, the Tigers will honor seniors Olivia Fiechter, Kira Keating, and Natalie Tung on the day of their final home matches at Princeton.

Fiechter is a three-time All-American and former Ivy League Rookie of the Year, but she is also having the best season of her career. She is 11-1, and her wins include a 3-2 victory over Harvard's Sabrina Sobhy and a 3-1 win over Raneem Sharaf that helped clinch a thrilling 5-4 win over Trinity. Keating enters the weekend with 40 career wins, and she has won several high-pressure matches throughout her collegiate career. Tung was a walk-on to the program who has consistently improved over her four years, and she has done so which achieving incredible things during her undergraduate career. Tung was honored with the prestigious A. James Fisher, Jr. Memorial Prize earlier this year for her work with HomeWorks, a nonprofit organization that provides an afterschool boarding program to underserved middle and high school girls in Trenton, N.J.

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