Sports: June 9, 1999
Heartache comes in threes
The women's lacrosse team loses a trio of tough games to end the
season
The women's lacrosse team lost to Penn State, 9-7, in overtime on May 8 at 1952 Field in the NCAA championship quarter-finals, denying the Tigers their first trip to the Final Four since 1996 and thwarting a furious Princeton rally.
The game seemed all but over when Penn State took a 6-3 lead four minutes into the second half. The Nittany Lions had scored five of the last six goals, and Princeton had lost starters Hilary Maddox '00, who left with torn ligaments in her ankle, and Kim Smith '02, the team's third leading scorer, who was ejected.
But the Tigers persevered against a Penn State stall. Cristi Samaras '99 scored on an eight-meter shot 13 minutes into the second half to pull the Tigers within two. With seven minutes left, Princeton defender Johanna Deans '99 forced a Penn State turnover. Samaras scooped up the ball and passed to attacker Tice Burke '99, who hit a streaking Deans with a pass. Deans scored to cut the deficit to one goal.
Still, Penn State appeared to derail the comeback by scoring with four minutes left to stretch the score to 7-5. But the Tigers refused to wilt. Burke intercepted a pass from a Penn State defender and scored with three minutes left, closing the score to 7-6. After a furious two-minute stretch, a shot by Julie Shaner '01 went wide with 35 seconds left in the game, and Princeton recovered the ball and passed it to Samaras.
Everyone in the stands expected the All-America, two-time Ivy League player of the year to take the last shot. Everyone was right. Samaras took her defender to the right of the goal, drew another defender, and was fouled, yet nevertheless bounced a shot past Ames to tie the game at seven with 19 seconds left.
"That ball was going in the goal," Samaras said after the game. "If it wasn't going past her, it was going through her." Princeton controlled the face-off to start the first overtime and worked the ball behind the cage to Burke, whose feeds to Samaras had been a staple of Princeton's offense all year. As they had all day, however, Penn State defended the play well and recovered Samaras's off-balance shot wide of the net. The Lions took the lead on a goal with 30 seconds left in the first overtime period and sealed the win with a goal 30 seconds into the second.
The loss left Princeton with a record of 12-5. The last three of those losses came during an agonizing two-week stretch where the team lost by identical 8-7 scores: first, to Dartmouth on a goal with 13 seconds left in regulation, and then to the University of Maryland in sudden-death overtime, before the loss to Penn State. "It's extremely disappointing," says Princeton coach Chris Sailer. "We didn't play well against Dartmouth, but Maryland and Penn State were games that could have gone either way. We kept getting opportunities, but we just didn't finish our scoring chances.
"But we never gave up."
Men's track dominates Heptagonals
Last spring, the men's track team edged out Penn by a mere two points to win the outdoor Heptagonal meet and secure track's triple crown: Heps championships in cross-country, indoor track, and outdoor track. This year, the Tigers entered outdoor Heps knowing that they had a chance to repeat as triple champions -- an unprecedented achievement. "I felt going into the meet that we had a very good chance of winning," says head track coach Fred Samara.
But the Tigers didn't just win Heps, they dominated the competition -- beating their closest competition, Navy, by 79 points. Princeton's margin of victory was the largest in the meet's long history. "This was one of the best two or three teams I've coached," Samara says. "The '82 and '96 teams both had a lot of superstars, but this team was amazingly balanced." At Heps, Princeton was strong across the board, and Tiger athletes finished in the top three in 16 of the 26 events.
Perhaps the finest performance of the meet belonged to junior John Mack, who won two individual events -- the 200-meter and 400-meter -- and anchored the 4x100 and 4x400 relays. After the competition, the coaches and media members voted Mack the Outstanding Performer of the Meet. But Princeton's dominance rested upon a cumulative effort from every member of the deep and well-prepared team. "Every athlete fed on the other kids' performances," Samara says. "And it all added up." Samara also credits his seniors, who have known virtually nothing but winning since arriving at Princeton, with setting the tone for the rest of the team. "We're going to miss both their leadership and their competitive ability," he says. "We've known all season that we could rely on their points regardless of the situation."
One of those seniors, Jim Colling, provided the feel-good story of the meet. Colling, who has enjoyed a superb career in long distance running at Princeton, had nevertheless never won an event at Heps. This year, he finished fifth in his regular event, the 1,500. It looked like Colling's career might end without a title, but Samara decided to give him a shot in the 5,000. "We wanted him to go out, set a good pace, and see what he could do," Samara says. "He ended up being the class of the race." Colling won the event by four seconds. "It's hard for me to put the feeling of winning into words," Colling says. "I had a really emotional last lap -- it was such a great thing to look over and see my teammates egging me on."
Women's Track
The women's track team finished third at Heps behind first-place Brown and Harvard. The team, which has been plagued by injuries this season, was too thin to seriously challenge its deeper Ivy rivals for first -- the team didn't even enter any competitors in either the hammer or javelin. Aiyanna Burton '99 took second in both the 400-meter hurdles and the long jump, and Bynia Reed '99 took second in the 400.
Men's lacrosse falls to Syracuse
On March 21, the men's lacrosse team met to ponder an 0-3 start. Another loss would doom their drive for a fourth national title in a row. The problems were obvious: the team's young attack had disappeared in the second half of all three games, and the absence of four-year starting defenseman Kurt Lunkenheimer '99, who'd suffered a severe knee injury the previous week, had been apparent in a 10-9 overtime loss at the University of North Carolina. During the meeting, Lunkenheimer, who hoped to return by the end of the season, challenged his assembled teammates. "I asked the guys to win the next couple of games so that if I could come back, I could help win a playoff spot," he says.
They responded. Knowing, as coach Bill Tierney said, that "we had to win nine playoff games to get to the playoffs," the team won five straight games without Lunkenheimer. And, living up to his own promise, the cocaptain returned to the starting line-up in a 9-6 win at Cornell on April 24 which gave Princeton its fifth straight Ivy League title.
A stiffer test came the next day at Syracuse. The Tigers took a 9-5 lead in the second quarter, but the Orangemen rallied, and the teams battled through a second half in which they were tied six times. When defenseman John Harrington '99 left with a concussion late in the game, Lunkenheimer was given the job of shutting down Ryan Powell, one of the best offensive players in college lacrosse. He did, and with 25 seconds left in the game's fourth overtime, Josh Sims '00 scored to secure a 15-14 win. A thankful Tierney called the game one of the best he's ever seen.
It also underscored the emergence of creaseman B.J. Prager '02, whose four goals on the day helped earn him Ivy League Rookie of the Year honors. "He's going to be a good one," said Lorne Smith '99, himself a three-time All-America.
After routing Dartmouth, 16-1, and Hobart, 16-8, to end the regular season, the Tigers traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, for a rematch with Syracuse in the first round of the NCAA tournament. Foiled by opposing goalie Robby Mulligan's 16 saves, and perhaps mentally worn from a pressure-packed season, Princeton fell, 7-5, to finish with a 9-4 mark.
Unbowed despite an uncharacteristically early exit from the playoffs, Tierney looked back at his team's amazing run in recent years and hinted at a reprise. "Let's just say we'll start the new millennium with a continuation of [our success]," he says. "We lose phenomenal defensive players, and we lose one of the best that's ever played at Princeton in Lorne Smith.
"But it's funny, whenever we've lost a great team, they've told us [that our success] was a fluke. But we'll be back. It's just going to have a new century written on it."
-- David Marcus '92
The scene was familiar to the local fans who saw Princeton play Harvard in the Ivy Championship series. After all, Harvard's O'Donnell Field is just a few miles from Fenway Park, where generations of Bostonians have watched generations of Red Sox teams transform the act of blowing a lead in a critical situation into a high form of tragic art.
But this time it was the visitors who let one get away. With the best-of-three series tied at one game apiece, Princeton entered the ninth inning of the final game up 4-2. Freshman Tom Rowland had pitched eight strong innings, but in the top of the ninth he allowed two runners to reach base. Still, when coach Scott Bradley replaced him with Jeff Golden '99, a first-team All-Ivy relief pitcher and the holder of Princeton's single-season record for saves, it seemed that Princeton was going to advance to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1996. But instead, the Crimson scored three runs in the inning, and for the third straight year Princeton had lost an Ivy Championship to Harvard.
The first two games of the series were also close. Princeton led by three runs in the opener, but Harvard knocked Chris Young '02, later named co-Rookie of the Year in the Ivy League, out of the game in the fifth inning, and Princeton lost 8-7. In the second game, junior Jason Quintana pitched extremely well, striking out eight batters and allowing five runs in eight innings. The Tigers won 7-6.
All series, Matt Evans, part of a senior class that won four straight Gehrig division titles, hammered the ball. During the three games, he had seven hits in 14 at-bats and hit two home runs. With his performance against Harvard, Evans captured the Princeton record for both home runs (26) and doubles (48) in a career.
Women's Water Polo
Princeton (25-10) and Maryland had met four times already this spring -- with each team winning twice -- so it was perhaps inevitable that they would end their seasons by playing each other at Nationals. And, sure enough, with 13th place at stake, the two teams met for a final time, with Maryland emerging the 6-3 victor.
The Tigers played three games in the tournament before reaching Maryland. In their first game, they played California, one of the best programs in the country, and lost 12-3. Princeton scored all three of its goals in the second half. In the next game, against Long Beach State, the Tigers were determined to prove that they could hold their own against a West Coast team in a national competition. But Princeton was sluggish at the beginning of the game, falling behind 5-1 in the second quarter and 8-4 in the third. Despite a furious comeback in the closing minutes, the Tigers lost 9-8. Utility Cassie Nichols '02 had six goals in the loss.
Princeton's third opponent was Michigan, and once again the Tigers fell behind in the first half, this time 5-4. But Princeton dominated the second half, scoring five unanswered goals on their way to a 9-5 victory. And so it was Princeton and Maryland once again. In the game, Maryland held a narrow 3-2 lead in the third quarter, but scored three goals en route to relegating the Tigers to 14th place.
Throughout the tournament, goalie Goga Vukmirovic '00 solidified her reputation as perhaps the East Coast's finest netminder. She had at least 10 saves in each of the four games, and stopped 15 shots against Maryland. Vukmirovic and Nichols were both named to the All-East and Mid-Atlantic Division first teams.
Young Honored
Chris Young '99 became the first male athlete in Ivy League history to be named Rookie of the Year in two sports. He was the unanimous winner of the 1999 Rookie of the Year award in basketball. In the spring, despite getting a late start to the baseball season, Young's league ERA of 1.69 was the lowest in the Ivies, and he was elected co-Rookie of the Year. He was also named to the All-Ivy first team.
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