Yale in midst of program-defining season
No. 8 Cornell and Dartmouth may lead the Ivy League currently with 2-0 and 1-0 records, respectively, but Yale’s 8-7 overtime win over Princeton on Saturday thrust the team into the national spotlight.
Not only did the victory propel the Bulldogs (5-1 overall and 1-1 in the league) to No. 19 in the latest Sun rankings, but it also snapped a six-game losing skid to a perennial Ivy League power.
“We try not to project, but we hope to win every game and be in every game,” Yale coach Andy Shay said Monday. “I guess we’re right there with what we thought would happen. I think with the Princeton win, our history hasn’t been great, so I wouldn’t say that we expected that. We knew it would be a hard-fought game. We knew we’d have to play hard and play tough, and the guys were able to gut it out. So we’re very pleased about that.”
The Bulldogs are a confident bunch. They lost to the Tigers, 7-6, last season, but overcame a 0-2 start to qualify for the inaugural conference tournament, where they fell to Princeton again by the same score.
Shay said reaching the Ivy League tournament provided a boost to the program, which is also aiming for its first berth in the NCAA tournament since 1992.
“It was huge,” he said. “It was our first postseason in 18 years. So it was a big deal. We hadn’t had a ton of success going into that. Certainly, starting out 0-2 and losing to Cornell and Princeton put our backs against the wall, but we had a resilient group of kids, and they just wanted to keep fighting and play one game at a time, and it worked out for us down the stretch.”
Yale gets another test on Friday in No. 16 Penn, which fell to the Big Red, 13-12, in overtime last Saturday. Shay said he doesn’t think the team will bask in the aftermath of Saturday’s victory and forget about the Quakers.
“Time will tell,” he said. “We want to worry about this week, and hopefully, we can take another step this week. We try not to think about the entire season in those terms.”
