Hockey
Heading into February and the sixty-fifth annual Beanpot Tournament, the men’s hockey team held onto second place in conference standings with a 15-5-2 record (11-4-2 ECAC). The season started strong, with early wins over Cornell and St. Lawrence, and a 5-2 triumph over Boston College, in front of a sold-out crowd at Bright-Landry Hockey Center, that snapped the Eagles’ 10-game win streak. But a series of bad losses on the road in January—including one to an underwhelming Rensselaer squad and an 8-4 drubbing at Dartmouth—broke the team’s stride. It regained its footing by beating Brown (goalie Merrick Madsen ’18 earned his second shutout of the season) and taking revenge on Dartmouth, 5-2. Senior forward Sean Malone led the team with 13 goals; classmate Tyler Moy and Ryan Donato ’19 (son of Ziff head coach Ted Donato ’91) had 11 each. Update: On February 13, the Harvard men’s team won its first Beanpot Championship since 1993, knocking off Boston University 6-3 in a game that saw the Crimson tally 46 shots on goal to the Terriers’ 17.
Squash
Both men’s and women’s squash remained unbeaten going into the season’s home stretch. For the women’s team (6-0 overall; 3-0 Ivy), perfect seasons are not unusual: in February 2016, the top-ranked women capped off their twelfth unbeaten season and captured the College Squash Association’s Howe Cup for the fourth time in six years (and the second year in a row). The current season was looking similarly strong. In a January 27 match against Tufts, the Crimson earned its third clean sweep, winning 9-0. Four Harvard players—senior co-captains Dileas MacGowan and Caroline Monrad, along with sisters Alyssa and Sophie Mehta—all moved to 6-0 for the season, winning their respective matches. Update: Both squash teams, still undefeated, were crowned Ivy League champions after wins over Yale’s squads on February 12.
Swimming and Diving
Standout freshman swimmer Mikaela Dahlke helped propel the women’s swimming and diving team—last year’s conference champions—to an unbeaten record through January, including a tough win over Penn (with perhaps tougher matchups still to come against Princeton and the also-unbeaten Yale). In the Penn contest, Harvard’s divers dominated as well: led by Hannah Allchurch and Jing Leung, the Crimson took the top four spots in the three-meter event. Junior Alisha Mah claimed the top spot in the one-meter dive. Meanwhile, as of early February, Dahlke, who qualified for the 2016 Olympic trials, owned the Crimson’s best times in the 50-, 100-, and 200-meter freestyle and the 100 butterfly.
Also unbeaten through January, men’s swimming and diving opened the season by thrashing Cornell and Dartmouth by more than 100 points each, and then went on to beat Penn for its ninth win of the season. In that meet, junior Koya Osada, another qualifier for the 2016 Olympic trials, finished far ahead of his opponents in the 200 backstroke, winning by an astonishing 9.76 seconds.
