Princeton Heads To Yale With Ivy Tournament Spot On The Line

Friday, October 27

New Haven, Conn.

5:00 PM

Princeton University

Yale

Princeton Heads To Yale With Ivy Tournament Spot On The Line

October 25, 2023 | Field Hockey

The first Ivy League field hockey tournament is a week away, and with only four regular-season games to be played, there are still a whole lot of moving pieces.

There are two certainties: 1) Harvard, Cornell and Penn have all clinched spots, and 2) the winner of the Princeton-Yale game will get the fourth spot. Beyond that there are any number of possibilities for seeds and two possible locations for the tournament.

PRINCETON AT YALE
Five storylines

The Ivy tournament
Right now, Harvard is 6-0 in the league, followed by 5-1 Cornell, 4-2 Princeton and 4-2 Penn. Yale is next at 3-3. The schedule this weekend has the Princeton-Yale game Friday, with the other three games Saturday. Those three games are: Harvard at Cornell, Brown at Penn and Columbia at Dartmouth.

Harvard clinched at least a tie for the league championship Saturday with its win over Penn, and the winner of its game against Cornell will host the tournament the following weekend as the top seed. Should Cornell beat Harvard, it would get a share of the championship as well, and Harvard would be the No. 2 seed.

Should Yale defeat Princeton, it would be locked into the No. 4 seed, and that would also lock Penn into the No. 3 spot, regardless of its game against Brown, with the loser of Cornell-Harvard as the two seed.

On the other hand, should Harvard beat Cornell, then Princeton could still be the No. 2 seed, if it were to beat Yale and Penn were to lose to Brown. In that case, Princeton and Cornell would both be 5-2, but Princeton defeated Cornell head-to-head. If Penn beats Brown, then the Quakers clinch the No. 3 seed no matter what, even if Princeton, Cornell and Penn all finished tied at 5-2, since Cornell would then have the tiebreaker on head-to-head goal differential and then Penn beat Princeton.

Wins by Princeton, Harvard and Brown would make Princeton the No. 3 seed.

Series history
Princeton and Yale meet for the 52^nd time, and Princeton holds a 46-2-3 edge in the series. The Tigers are 6-0 against Yale under Carla Tagliente, including a 6-1 win in New Haven a year ago when Princeton got goals from Lily Webb, Liz Agatucci and Aimee Jungfer. Grace Schulze, who has missed almost the entire season due to injury, had two goals in the game, and Sammy Popper had one.

Princeton played that game without Beth Yeager, who was out with an injury.

Pan Am Tigers
Princeton has been without Beth Yeager this season as she has taken the year off to play with the U.S. national team. Yeager, a two-time first-team All-American and two-time Ivy Offensive Player of the Year, is currently in Chile for the Pan Am Games.

Elise Wong, who was the 2018 Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year and a first-team All-American herself, is playing for Canada.

The winner of the gold medal will advance automatically to the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. The teams who finish 2-3-4 will move on to the next round of qualifying, which is set for January in either China or Belgium. The teams who finish 5-6-7-8 will be eliminated from Olympic contention.

Fresh faces
Princeton freshmen Ottilie Sykes, Merle Broex and Ella Cashman account for 39 percent of the team's goals this season.

Sykes has played every minute of every game this season.

Old friends
Between Princeton and Yale, there are 44 players. Of those 43, a total of 23 are either graduates of Oak Knoll School (5), grew up or went to high school in Greenwich, Ct., (5) or from England (13).