Even in the one of the best women’s lacrosse conferences in the country, Penn is making it look easy.
The Quakers locked up a third straight Ivy League regular season title with a third straight undefeated conference season, sweeping all seven Ivy League opponents. Penn, currently ranked third in the country, has only one loss in the season—after a clash of the titans with No. 1 Northwestern last Saturday. The Wildcats came away with an 11-9 win to spoil Penn’s bid for a perfect season.
Nonetheless, the Quakers blew through the league with ease. Only the No. 16 Big Green gave Penn a fight in a 7-6 game that was decided in overtime. Outside of that contest, no Ivy team got within five goals of the Quakers’ score in a game, not even No. 6 Princeton, who fell 10-5 to Penn on April 15.
Penn’s success shouldn’t be a surprise, even despite the loss of last year’s National Goalkeeper of the Year Sarah Waxman. Her backup last season, Emily Szelest, has been more than up to the task of replacing Waxman with a sterling 5.14 goals against average—by far the best mark in the league. Szelest also boasts the third best save percentage in the league at .480, narrowly behind Yale’s Whitney Quackenbush.
All in all, Penn has excelled in just about every facet of the game. The Quakers are second in the league in scoring with 11.57 goals per game, barely behind Princeton. Penn also led the league in assists, drew the fewest fouls of any Ivy team, and committed just 10 turnovers per game, five less than second-place Brown. Additionally, the Quakers allowed only 5.25 goals per game, clearly the best defensive unit in the league.
Penn did all of this without an individual standout on offense. The team’s leading scorer, Ali DeLuca, finished with 29 goals, only seventh in the league. But the Quakers had eight players score at least 10 goals on the year, including five with 20 or more goals. Penn’s depth on offense was virtually unmatched in the league.
While Penn will lose several key players to graduation—including the defensive tandem of Hillary Renna and Katie Mazer and a combined 42 goals from Becca Edwards, Samantha Bird, and Kaitlyn Lombardo—the Quakers will keep their starting goalkeeper, their top scorer in DeLuca, and arguably the Ivy League’s top rookie in Erin Brennan. So far, nothing short of Northwestern has been able to slow down the Quakers. A rematch with the Wildcats in the NCAA Tournament is almost a certainty.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Ivy League teams have to wait and see if they will be a part of the tournament along with Penn. Princeton is virtually a lock with a 6-1 league record and a 12-2 record overall. Dartmouth, meanwhile, is in a precarious spot as the No. 16 team in the country. There are only 16 spots available in the NCAA Tournament with five going as automatic bids for the conference winners of the Big Ten, the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Ivy League, the Atlantic 10, and the Big East. That leaves 11 spots, and Dartmouth currently has 11 teams ranked ahead of it in the latest Intercollegiate Women’s Lacrosse Coaches Association Division I poll released on April 21. Cornell, ranked 20th in the nation, is in an even tougher spot, but the Big Red only has the smallest of chances to grab a tournament bid.
With a postseason conference tournament still a season away, the mid-ranked teams in the Ivy League will most likely be on the outside of the national tournament. The gap between the top three schools and the rest of the Ivy League, however, remains rather large. Yale, in particular, took a huge tumble from 2008, winning only one game in conference play. This downturn be attributed to the loss of last year’s leading scorer, Lauren Taylor, as the Bulldogs scored a league-worst nine goals per game in 2009. Joining Yale at the bottom is Columbia, who won an Ivy game for the first time in four years but dropped several close contests in the season.
But as in years before, Penn is the story of the season. The Quakers will almost certainly get another shot at a national title, the first in the program’s history. A national championship would also make Penn the third Ivy team to win it all, joining Harvard, who won in 1990, and Princeton, who pulled the trick off in 1994, 2002, and 2003.