The Dartmouth Sports Weekly 04/20/15

4.20. 15

MEN’S TENNIS WINS TWO IVY MATCHES

PARISI ’15 STARS FINEGAN ’17 LEADS FOR BIG GREEN EQUESTRIAN TO SECOND WEIJIA TANG/THE DARTMOUTH STAFF; ANNIE DUNCAN/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF; Courtesy of Emily Estelle

THE DARTMOUTH SPORTS WEEKLY

SW 2

BY THE NUMBERS

8 Consecutive Red Rolfe titles for baseball

35 National ranking of women’s tennis team

3 Points separating equestrian from Cornell University

1 Additional wins required for softball to clinch division crown

04.20.15

MONDAY, APRIL 20, 2015

Men’s tennis wins two matches over weekend B y ALEXANDER AGADJANIAN The Dartmouth Staff

On the heels of two consecutive conference victories last weekend, the 47th-ranked men’s tennis team was looking to extend its win streak this past weekend as the Ivy League season winds down.

After victories against unranked Brown University (15-7, 1-5 Ivy) by a score of 4-3 and against Yale University (11-11, 1-5 Ivy) at 5-2, the Big Green (13-10, 4-2) now enters its final home match on a four-win surge and a chance to end the season in second place in the Ivy League.

On Friday afternoon, the team played the final leg of a three-game intra-conference road trip and its final away game of the season in Providence, Rhode Island, facing the Brown Bears. As was done in last weekend’s slate of games, head coach Chris Drake elected to break up his 26th-ranked doubles team of Chris Kipouras ’15 and Dovydas Sakinis ’16. Kipouras was paired with Max Schmidt ’17 in the No. 2 match and Sakinis with Brendan Tannenbaum ’16 for the No. 1 match, an effort to help the team possess more even strength across all three courts in doubles action.

The decision, however, would not reap the same dividends it did against the University of Pennsylvania last Sunday, where both pairs won to claim the point for the Big Green. The No. 1 doubles match was the first to conclude, as Brown’s pair of Justin To and Brandon Yeoh maintained a lead for much of the match and won 6-2 against Sakinis and Tannenbaum. After jumping out to a 2-0 advantage and controlling the match early, Kipouras and Schmidt dropped five straight games to lose 6-3 as Brown clinched the doubles point.

Entering the six singles matches trailing their opponents by a point has been a familiar sight and challenge for the Big Green this year.

In six out of the seven previous matches, the team has been forced to play from behind.

Due to Brown’s home site only containing four tennis courts, the No. 1 through 4 matches were the first singles played on Friday — not all six simultaneously as is custom. In both the No. 1 and No. 2 contests, the Big Green leapt out to quick leads as 52nd-ranked Sakinis and Kipouras won their first sets 6-3 and 6-2, respectively.

After Diego Pedraza ’17 fell in his first set in the No. 4 match, Ciro Riccardi ’18 managed to recapture some positive momentum for the team by climbing out of a 4-1 hole to take his No. 3 first set 7-6 on a tiebreaker.

The tide moved further in the Big Green’s direction with the en-

suing set results. Kipouras notched the first singles point of the afternoon, cruising to a 6-3 triumph in the second set of his No. 2 match.

In doing so, the senior extended his stellar streak of consecutive sets won to eight and consecutive singles matches won to four, dating back to three team matches ago. “[Kipouras] is tough, he’s experienced and a tough competitor,” Drake said. “He’s worked hard to get in really good shape, so that’s helped him with his confidence. He played another good solid match, he got a point on the board for us right away to even the score oneone.”

Not long after, Riccardi continued his dominance to secure the second set 6-1, evening the battle at two wins for each side.

As the No. 5 and 6 singles matches opened up, Brown returned with a strong response to the first deficit it saw on the day, placing the Big Green in a 3-2 hole and on the edge of defeat.

Brown’s Peter Tarwid defeated Pedraza in straight sets 6-3, 7-6, and after grabbing the first set in the No. 1 match, Sakinis faltered in the subsequent two, losing them 7-6 and 6-2. Having once been on the brink of seizing the match in the second set, Sakinis instead endured his first single match loss during Ivy League play.

So the contest came down to the No. 5 and 6 singles matches, with the Big Green needing victories in both for the overall match win. The team took a sizable step forward in this effort through the performance of George Wall ’17, who fought through a close contest to win 6-4, 7-5 in the No. 5 to level the overall score at three.

With all eyes on the decisive No. 6 singles match, Schmidt, after losing 6-3 in his first set, stormed back in the second set to win 6-3 and even the set count. In a back-andforth final third set where Schmidt and Jack Haworth both held their serves in each of the first twelve games, Schmidt finally prevailed on a 7-6 tiebreaker, winning his singles match and clinching a 4-3 team match victory for Dartmouth.

“The first set didn’t go too well, the second set went very well and during the third set, it was really just a battle of wills,” Schmidt said.

“My opponent played very well, he didn’t really give me any free points, and he really made me work for every point and every game that I got. It really came down to the wire at the end.”

With the final margin of the came depending on the No. 6 outcome, all eyes had turned to their court. The situation, Schmidt said, was the first of its kind for him on the team.

“That’s really the first time I’ve

been on the court by myself with everybody watching to clinch the match,” he said.

Two days later, the Big Green made the trek back home for a Sunday afternoon contest against the Yale Bulldogs, who were coming off of a 5-2 loss to Harvard University. In what has now become a match-to-match obstacle that the team must overcome, the men once again lost the doubles point and put itself in an early hole. After the No. 3 team of Wall and Tannenbaum, playing for the first time together, cruised to a 6-0 win on court 3, the No. 1 and 2 pairs fell 6-1 and 6-4, respectively, yielding the first point of the afternoon to Yale.

Just as common as the pattern of dropping the doubles point has been, though, so too has the resurgent effort in response by the Big Green. Kipouras, spearheading his team’s singles action charge once more, gained the team’s first point. Winning his first set 6-3, the senior then easily blanked Bulldog freshman Stefan Doehler 6-0 in the second set to grab the No. 2 match victory. The result marked the fifth consecutive singles match win for Kipouras in his second to last match in a Big Green uniform.

On all six courts, the team saw excellent performances in the first sets of singles matches, with its players taking five of the first six sets. The onslaught continued thereafter. Building an early advantage and winning his first No. 5 singles set 6-2, Wall fought through his second to win 6-3 and take the match in straight sets.

Following closely behind, Sakinis rebounded from his first Ivy League singles match loss from Friday to boost the Big Green’s overall match lead to 3-1. The junior maintained a comfortable three-game lead throughout his first set to win 6-2, and after a much closer second set, defeated Yale’s Tyler Lu 6-4 to notch the No. 1 match victory.

Only needing one more single

match win to close out the weekend on a strong note, Dartmouth got two nearly simultaneous positive results from the No. 3 and No. 4 matches. In the No. 4 singles match, Pedraza broke his opponent’s serve to secure a close first set 7-5. Finishing closely after, Riccardi fought off Bulldog Ziqi Wang in a neck-and-neck No. 3 first set to grab a 7-6 tiebreaker win. Both Pedraza and Riccardi proceeded to work up leads and clinch their second sets 6-4, pushing the men well past the necessary four points for the win over Yale.

Schmidt, who lost his first set 6-4 but won his second 6-3, faltered in the final set 6-1 to round out a 5-2 team match victory for the Big Green.

The rhythm of the match, putting the Big Green at an early disadvantage during doubles that they needed to fight to overcome, has become familiar. Drake, however, said that the team has proven they can come back in moments like that.

“We have a resilient bunch,” Drake said about the comeback win. “I think we’ve shown that all year. We have confidence that we have six players that can go out and fight really hard and give us a chance to win on each court.”

With this weekend out of the way, the men’s team only has one match left in the season. Next weekend, they’ll take on Harvard — ranked shortly ahead of the Big Green at second among the Ivies. Now on a four-game winning streak, Pedraza said he feels good about the team’s chances against the Crimson.

“We had a very tough and emotional victory against Brown on Friday, and to be able to back that effort up with a good performance today, I think that is key,” he said. “Four victories now in a row against good conference rivals, that’s what we wanted, and I think we’re in good shape headed for the final weekend against Harvard.”

WEIJIA TANG/THE DARTMOUTH STAFF

The men’s tennis team has won its last four matches, all against Ivy opponents.

THE DARTMOUTH SPORTS WEEKLY

MONDAY, APRIL 20, 2015

Equestrian takes second at Ivies B y HALEY GORDON The Dartmouth Staff

When the equestrian team met to begin practice for their upcoming Ivy League Championships after their competition at Zones earlier this month, the riders arrived to find that their saddles were without stirrups.

“Normally when you ride a horse you have stirrups to put your feet into on the saddle,” head coach Sally Batton said. “Riding without stirrups is quite athletically difficult. It adds an extra layer to all the things you need to ride well — muscle, muscle memory, balance and all that kind of stuff. So they rode all week with no stirrups.”

The preparation paid off as the team captured second place at the Ivy competition this past Saturday in Ringoes, New Jersey. The team was led by first-year rider Morgan Finegan ’17, who earned the reserve high point rider prize.

Finegan earned the title with impressive finishes in a handful of events, including finishing first in intermediate fences and winning the championship round in the same event. Finegan also left the competition with a second-place finish in intermediate flat and a sixthplace finish in that event’s championship round.

“The biggest stand out performance was Morgan Finegan. She had an amazing day, and she really had some of the best rides that she had all year,” Batton said. “She really nailed everything.”

The Big Green rider, however, did not place in the top riders at the competition purely from luck. In the weeks leading up to the event, Batton said, Finegan was driven to perform well.

“She came up to me and asked, ‘What can I do, extra, to get stronger, I really want to do well,’” Batton said. “It was really amazing that she had that drive and also that it paid off the way it did at the competition.”

Finegan attributed her success to prioritizing riding in the spring term,

compared to her busy fall term, and challenging herself in practice.

“I really wanted to do well at Ivies and knew that I’d be coming back a little rusty,” Finegan said. “I think it was kind of an attitude thing… I tried to be more proactive so that when I was riding I could just focus on that and not on other things.”

Finegan’s determination fueled her in practice, but before her events she calmed her nerves and tried to lessen the pressure she put on herself, she said.

Another blue ribbon winner was Sarah Cohen ’18 who placed first in the advanced walk-trot-canter event and fifth in the event’s championship round.

“It’s kind of disappointing that it didn’t work out our way, but that’s the nature of a subjective sport.”

-ALEXA DIXON ’15

Alexa Dixon ’15 also performed well in her events, getting “outstanding placing,” Batton said. Dixon placed second in the open flat event, second in the championship of that same event and third in the open fences event.

“Out of all the top riders in all of the Ivies, [Dixon] came in second,” Batton said. “That was quite an accomplishment.”

Dixon said that the work the team put in during training paid off in the competition.

“We were all really prepared, and we all did a good job,” Dixon said. “It was a tough competition, but I was really proud with how everybody came through.”

The Ivy championship is a team event, but the team’s ultimate tally comes from the points earned by appointed individual riders.

“At the start of the competition…

I have to choose which riders’ points are going to count towards the team total,” Batton said. “So it’s a little bit of luck. For instance, in intermediate… if I would have appointed [Finegan] we would have won the competition.”

Ultimately, the team would earn second place at the Ivy championship out of the seven teams participating, behind only Cornell University, who beat them out by a mere three points in the overall total.

“It was really close up until the end, it really could have gone either way,” Dixon said. “It’s kind of disappointing that it didn’t work out our way, but that’s the nature of a subjective sport.”

The team was well rounded in the competition, with three blue ribbons, nine second-place finishes and five third-place finishes in the various events.

The Ivy Championship marks the last team event of the spring term for the equestrian program. The team will begin practicing together again in the fall term.

“As a season, it was hard, because last year Dartmouth won everything and went to Nationals,” Finegan said.

“It was a lot to live up to, and we didn’t necessarily live up to that, but I think that as a team we had really good spirits this year and we really bonded.”

Batton recently started recruiting incoming students to the equestrian team. While Batton does not have admission spots to offer, she does write letters on behalf of prospective students who have potential talents that could benefit the program. Batton spoke of seven incoming riders who will be attending the College next year and plan to compete for the team.

“I’m really excited to see what happens next year, with both my returning team and the riders I’ve recruited.”

SW 3

THE

RUNDOWN Baseball SCHOOL

IVY

OVERALL

COLUMBIA PENN DARTMOUTH HARVARD CORNELL BROWN YALE PRINCETON

14-2 14-2 12-4 7-9 6-10 4-12 4-12 3-13

23-12 20-12 16-19 18-19 9-25 8-26 12-21 6-29

IVY

OVERALL

14-2 11-5 10-6 7-7 6-10 6-10 5-11 3-11

21-14 20-19 19-17 15-22 14-24 12-21 11-19 9-20

Softball SCHOOL

DARTMOUTH HARVARD PENN

PRINCETON COLUMBIA CORNELL BROWN YALE

Men’s Lacrosse SCHOOL

IVY

OVERALL

PRINCETON BROWN CORNELL YALE PENN DARTMOUTH HARVARD

4-1 3-2 3-2 3-2 3-3 1-4 1-4

8-4 10-3 9-4 9-3 6-6 4-7 6-7

Women’s Lacrosse SCHOOL

IVY

OVERALL

PRINCETON PENN CORNELL HARVARD DARTMOUTH YALE BROWN COLUMBIA

6-0 5-1 4-2 3-3 2-4 2-4 1-5 1-5

11-3 11-3 9-5 6-7 2-11 7-7 7-7 5-9

Women’s Tennis

Courtesy of Emily Estelle

The equestrian team took second at the Ivy League Championships on Saturday, finishing three points behind Cornell University.

SCHOOL

IVY

OVERALL

PRINCETON DARTMOUTH COLUMBIA BROWN YALE CORNELL PENN HARVARD

6-1 4-2 4-3 3-3 3-3 3-4 3-4 0-6

12-8 17-5 12-8 10-9 9-10 9-9 9-8 7-11

THE DARTMOUTH SPORTS WEEKLY

SW 4

MONDAY, APRIL 20, 2015

Parisi ’15 perseveres to excel both on and off the diamond B y GAYNE KALUSTIAN The Dartmouth Staff

Matt Parisi ’15, shortstop for Big Green baseball, lives the kind of life that makes you doubt everything you know about physics — like a magician pulling out an endless chain of handkerchiefs from under this sleeve.

The difference between the two is that the magician waits with a prop up his sleeve. Parisi does not deceive.

Third baseman Nick Lombardi ’15 calls him a “renaissance man.”

“He just knows how to do everything,” Lombardi said. “Say we’re talking about something random — action sports or something, like wakeboarding. He knows how to do it, knows something about it or will pick it up like that. He plays guitar. He surfs. You find new things out about him every day.”

Parisi makes room in his life where some students believe there is none, squeezing things like guitar, skateboarding and his now-defunct band into his rigidly structured athletic schedule, filling the sparse empty spaces with things that interest him.

Parisi shows up to team functions, catcher Matt MacDowell ’15 said, exactly on time or even a few minutes early because he operates on what MacDowell termed “Parisi time” — he’s never late but does not show up unnecessarily early either.

Anyone, Parisi said, can find some music they like on his iPod because his taste is “all over the place.” Yet there is something about the way Parisi goes about his interests that separates him from the pack — that turns the old adage “Jack of all trades but master of none” into a tag reserved for people who walk with a mentality of life that he does not share. He, MacDowell pointed out, does not stop until he is the master of as many trades as he can be.

“He’s what a baseball person would refer to as a total gamer,” head coach Bob Whalen said of Parisi. “I always admire and really respect him for the fact that he really wants to be good at everything he does, not just baseball, but he works at being good and he does that every day.”

Parisi is a unique combination of competitiveness and independence — traits he said he remembers learning from his parents.

His mother, a nuclear radiologist, is not as social as his father. She is focused, mostly, on her family and believes in the value of an independent child.

“She didn’t coddle me as a child,” Parisi said. “I made myself breakfast as a kid. She made me learn to motivate myself and not need her or other people to do it.”

If his personality can be drawn mostly from his mother, he said the other half can be drawn directly from his father. His father embodies competition, competing against his future wife’s brothers for much of their youths. The two families were close and have known each other for almost their entire lives. His maternal grandfather, Parisi said, used to hate playing baseball against his dad because the young player would always come up big in situations that demanded a clutch hit.

Before Parisi had even learned to walk, it seems that he knew what drove him. Many babies take their first steps to reach pleading parents with outstretched arms. The story in the Parisi household of Matt Parisi’s first steps, though, rings more true to his personality: there was a football across the room, and he wanted it, so he picked himself up and walked right over there to get it. And that, quite simply, was that.

When he was a young child, Parisi wanted to be a cowboy — the pitterpatter of his sister’s and his feet pelted their childhood homes as they would run across the floors with hats and cap guns. His grandfather, though, thought he would be a veterinarian. His father, then a cargo pilot, used to bring home gifts for his son — often sets of toy animals, which his grandmother would supplement with Beanie Babies. To this day, he said, he enjoys watching nature shows on the Discovery Channel.

As he grew up in Florida — his family moved from Connecticut when he was six — he continued to play baseball, settling into the two positions he flirts with now as a college player, second base and shortstop. Eventu-

ANNIE DUNCAN/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF

Starting shortstop Matt Parisi ’15 is hitting .341 this season for the Big Green.

ally, his father was laid off during the recession, putting financial pressure on the family, which had big aspirations for both of its children. His sister is a recent graduate of the University of Florida and now works as a nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit.

With his exceptional grades in high school, Parisi was aiming high, but the cost of attendance at schools in the Ivy League can be a barrier — especially given that athletes are not allowed to receive athletic scholarships and must pay their own way or qualify for financial aid. As things became tighter and opportunities to visit family in California became more scarce, though, he said he never worried about his future.

“My parents were ready to sacrifice anything they had to for me to go to the best spot I could go to,” Parisi said, emphasizing the equal weight placed upon athletics and academics.

Parisi ultimately chose Dartmouth, settling into life in Hanover in the same way he always does — struggling, at first, to adjust to the academic demands of college and the new level of competition in collegiate baseball, but ultimately rising to the challenge.

“I had to learn my way through it by getting bad grades my freshman fall and winter and just adjust to the amount of work,” he said. “That’s basically it. One small step at a time.”

On the diamond, the adjustment was similar.

“It was a hard time for me,” Parisi said. “I really thought I was going to be a big impact coming in here, and I just never really had that role. I didn’t feel like a big part of the team at all, and being super competitive and dedicating my life to this work and wanting to help the team win and not being able to do anything about it was hard for me, mentally.”

He went into summer leagues, put in work and started his sophomore season at second base. He was named to the First Team All-Ivy that year, hitting .329.

“Without exaggeration, [Parisi] has the combination of being one of the most respected and most well-liked at the same time, which is not always easy to do,” Whalen said. “Great leaders have the ability to make everybody else better, and he has that.”

Academically, Parisi has taken all the introductory level earth sciences classes at the College — which have been his favorite — but decided that the major would have been difficult to balance with baseball as the department’s travel requirements would have kept him from practices and games with the team.

He is now finishing up his senior spring with upper-level government classes and said he spends his days tortured, in a half-comical, half serious sort of way, by the great questions in life — focusing not on the political aspects of the discipline but the moral and

Courtesy of Matt Parisi

Matt Parisi ’15 attributes his success to traits learned from both of his parents.

ethical questions that arise in theory classes: the limits of torture, the justification or lack of thereof for the use of the atomic bomb. He doesn’t enjoy making arguments and constructing his own theories, but instead prefers to listen to what people are saying and think about what it means.

“I’m very analytical,” he said. “I like to take in everything before I make a decision. I don’t want to jump into conclusions with anything. I like to make sure I cover all my bases.”

As Parisi entered his junior year and moved back over to shortstop — his preferred but not his “natural” position — he, along with the rest of the Dartmouth order, experienced an offensive dip. A preseason foot surgery left him off his game, and his confidence, he said, was lacking. He went into summer league and played “the worst baseball season” of his life, hitting right at the Mendoza line.

“I was failing at a rate I had never failed before,” Parisi said.

The penultimate game of the summer had been rained out, so he flipped through the television for a game to watch. His favorite team, the New York Yankees, were playing the Boston Red Sox, and a friend back home, Shane Greene, was pitching for the Yankees during Derek Jeter’s last season at Fenway Park — just a few hours away. A couple of texts and phone calls later, Parisi and a couple of summer league teammates found themselves with complimentary tickets to the game in Boston, which the Yankees won. Parisi reconnected with Greene at the hotel, spending the night hanging out with a guy he knew “like a big brother” as a kid and tasting, if only for a second, the life of a major leaguer.

“On the walk out of the hotel, still in my clothes from the night before while there were people lining up to get a look at the Yankees at they walked out, it almost felt like they were looking at me,” Parisi said. “On my walk to the train, I was thinking to myself, ‘This is what I want to do. This is the coolest experience I have ever had. I’m going to work my hardest to attain this.’ That

night…after hardly any sleep, I ended up hitting the farthest home run of my life. It was over 400 feet.”

This season, Parisi has put himself in the position to potentially play baseball in the future, though, as Whalen pointed out, his future is partly out of his hands — scouts choose or pass over players for reasons that are often difficult to understand.

“Do I think he has the ability that is deserving or commensurate with guys who have gone into professional baseball? Absolutely,” Whalen said.

“Whether he’ll get the chance or not, you can’t know.”

The thing about Parisi, now hitting .341 and anchoring the infield at shortstop, is that things — music, sports, school — are going well, but not because they always have and always will. They’re going well because when they’re not — or simply when he wants them to go better than they are — he moves, works, negotiates, listens and corrects until he can see that things are changing in a way that serves his goals.

Parisi is always competitive, but in the endearing kind of way — where he might be returning from a grueling several hours of practice to a quick team dinner before homework but still stop and acknowledge people by name with a smile. He doesn’t openly berate his teammates to win. He doesn’t overreact at the plate. He steps in the box, first with his right foot toeing the line, as if he’s thinking about the approach he will take with a focus that makes it seem like his entire future rests upon the success of that one at-bat. From surfing the waves in Florida to playing video games in his on-campus apartment that he shares with MacDowell, from writing songs to play on the guitar and bass with Lombardi to turning a double play on a diving catch, Parisi approaches life, in all its forms, with the same attitude: “When you love the game and work as much as you do — as we do — then you want to be the best,” he said. “If you have a competitive spirit, then you want to be the best at whatever you do.”