Men’s Hockey
Blazing through what a Boston Globe headline deemed a “season of redemption,” the men’s hockey team in late March, for the first time in 23 years, secured its return to the Frozen Four, the NCAA semifinals, with a 3-2 win over Air Force in the tournament’s second round. That triumph, before a large crowd in Providence, Rhode Island, capped a remarkable six weeks that saw the Crimson bring home its first Beanpot trophy since 1993, close out the regular season with an unbroken string of wins and a share of the conference title, and then capture the Eastern College Athletic Conference championship. Four players—forwards Ryan Donato ’19 and Alexander Kerfoot ’17, defenseman Adam Fox ’20, and goalie Merrick Madsen ’18—earned all-conference honors. The team was warming up for its first Frozen Four contest, on April 6, against Minnesota Duluth, at the United Center in Chicago as the magazine went to press. [The Crimson lost, 2-1, on a goal scored with 26.6 seconds left.]
Fencing
After a regular season during which both men’s and women’s fencing won Beanpot trophies—the tenth for each (Harvard has won the competition every year since it began)—the program sent 11 athletes to the NCAA tournament in Indianapolis, Indiana, in late March. Sophomore Eli Dershwitz, a 2016 Olympian, won an individual championship in men’s sabre, and Harvard finished fifth overall, one spot behind rival Princeton. Senior Adrian Jarocki, the defending national champion in women’s sabre, took fifth place this year.
Swimming and Diving
Led by freshman standout swimmer Dean Farris, men’s swimming and diving routed its opponents to win the Ivy League championship in mid March, after an unbeaten regular season. Ulen-Brooks head coach Kevin Tyrrell was named Ivy coach of the year. Four swimmers and five relay teams went to the NCAA tournament, where Farris finished fourth behind a trio of former Olympians in the 200 freestyle. Men’s swimming finished twenty-seventh overall.
Women’s swimming and diving sent two athletes to the NCAA tournament: first-year swimmer Mikaela Dahlke, who competed in three events and finished thirty-sixth overall, and junior diver Jing Leung, who came in thirty-second after defending her title as NCAA Zone A platform-dive champ. With strong performances by Dahlke, Leung, and sophomore swimmers Brittany Usinger and Meagan Popp, the women’s team took second place in the Ivy League championship, finishing just behind Yale and crushing third- and fourth-place finishers Penn and Princeton.
