Author:
An Observer
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Date Posted: 14:48:12 11/10/25 Mon
I have posted many times about GBI's point (2), that Harvard and Princeton's field hockey teams, the class of the Ivy League, are too loaded with foreign talent -- though Yale also received an NCAA bid (marking the first time that three Ivies have made the field).
Just to review the history here, Princeton of course has dominated Ivy League lacrosse for decades, building a dynasty originally on what I first called, "blonde girls from Pennsylvania."
Harvard, as often is the case, got tired of playing second fiddle to Princeton. But instead of stepping up their own recruiting efforts up and down the mid-Atlantic and New England states, Harvard pressed what I will now term, "the Trinity College nuclear button."
That is, Harvard took a page from the playbook of how Trinity College turned the tables on HYP in men's squash; the Bantams built their roster entirely on foreign players.
American collegiate field hockey coaches are uniformly women. That makes sense in that, in North America, field hockey is almost entirely a girls' sport. But across the world, field hockey is as much a male as a female sport.
So Harvard pressed the Trinity nuclear button and hired a Dutch man, that is, a Dutchman and told him, "Forget about recruiting against Princeton in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We can't win there against the Tigers. Go and recruit Europe."
That he did and the results were immediate. Princeton meanwhile noticed that, during games against the Crimson, a lot of the Harvard women were speaking with funny accents.
Princeton, long accustomed to ruling the Ivies, decided that they would not be Trinity-ed off the topic of the totem pole like their men's squash team had been. So the Tigers decided to give their coaching staff a platinum frequent flyer membership account and told them to spend their summers in Europe. Which they did.
And that's how we got to a whole bunch of girls on the Harvard and Princeton rosters speaking with funny accents. They also spell "color" with a "u" and "theater" with the "er" reversed.
Like GBI, I don't think this is good for America and, frankly, not that good for Harvard and Princeton, either.
As usual, I blame Harvard. Like Tommy Amaker forcing lower academic standards onto Yale and Princeton to stay competitive in men's basketball, Harvard is leading this conference in a race to the bottom.
Shame on the Crimson.
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