The 2001-2002 Dartmouth women's team replicated the accomplishment of their male counterparts in edging out Williams, five matches to four, in the 5th/6th play-off in the postseason team tournament. For 2002-03, the core of last years team returns, augmented by a group of three new recruits who are expected to have an impact on the team.

Sarah West, the 01-02 squad's only senior and team captain, who has played at the No. 1 position for each of her last two seasons, concluded her strong
intercollegiate career with a 9-6 9-5 5-9 9-1 victory in the final and
deciding match against her Williams opponent Adrienne Ellman to carry her
appreciative teammates to a placement one notch higher than Dartmouth had
earned in each of the prior two seasons.

Juniors Charlotte Haldeman, No. 2 last season and like West a native of
the suburban Philadelphia region whose deservedly highly regarded junior
programs have produced so many fine intercollegiate players, and No. 6
Farrar Evans will be co-captains during the forthcoming campaign. Evans, a
Hotchkiss alumna, is one of many returning team members who attended either New England prep schools or New York metropolitan-area private schools: No. 3 Kelly Sennatt is a sophomore from Greenwich, No. 4 Crosby Haynes (whose parents played on both 1974 Princeton National Championship teams) is a junior from the Phillips Exeter Academy, No. 5 Abigail Drachman-Jones is a senior from Milton Academy, No. 7 Courtney Schenk is a sophomore from St. Ann's in Brooklyn, No. 8 Martha Ucko is a sophomore from Short Hills, NJ and two New Yorkers, Emily Turner and Elizabeth Vadasdi, graduates of from Chapin and Brearly respectively, vied for the last position in the starting line-up
with Groton's Jocelyn Woolworth, a multi-talented athlete whose father, Rick,
played at No. 1 for several years for Dartmouth in the mid-1970's, where he
was teammates with Lloyd Ucko, Martha's dad.

INTERNATIONAL FACTOR
No serious college roster, men's or women's, can realistically expect to seriously compete in the top tier without substantial representation from overseas players, two of whom, in fact, Trinity's Amina Helal and Lynn Leong, who are British and Malaysian respectively, played in the final of the 2002 Women's Individual Intercollegiate championship this past March. The absence of this element
from either of Dartmouth's rosters has caused the women's (and to a lesser
degree the men's) team to have to forge their team victories from
hard-earned victories in the nether regions of the starting nine, freshman Ryan
Donegan's season-long achevements and West's Williams win notwithstanding.

DEPTH
The women's 7-2 and 6-3 victories over Ivy League rivals Cornell and
Penn respectively both entailed Dartmouth sweeps of the Nos. 4-9 positions
and Dartmouth's individual wins in their 7-2 loss to Harvard were by Ucko
and Schenk at the Nos. 7 and 8 slots. Coach Power's women compiled a 10-5 mark
overall, 3-4 in the Ivy League, with regular-season losses to Trinity, Yale,
Harvard and Princeton, who then also pinned a first-round defeat on
Dartmouth in the opening round of the postseason team tournament before the Big Green recovered to defeat Cornell 8-1 and Williams by that 5-4 tally.
Dartmouth was only able to capture a combined total of three matches in
the Trinity, Yale and Harvard meets (none against eventual champion
Trinity), but as noted this was a young contingent dominated by underclassmen, and the experience they gained this past season should help them greatly going
forward, especially because eight of last season's starting nine are
returning and virtually all of these returning letter-winners will be
playing pretty much in the same positions this year that they occupied last season.

This is so due to the expected influence of three incoming freshmen, namely
Canadians Jessica Vyrastko (Ontario) and Jessica Tory (Montreal and Phillips Academy Andover) and Julia Drury, a Buffalonian who placed No. 6 in last year's U. S. Junior rankings.

All three should crack the varsity squad and Coach Power, now entering
his fifth season at the Hanover helm, expects Drury to join Haldeman and
Sennatt in the top third of the line-up. Haldeman has steadily improved
throughout her collegiate career and the extra training sessions and
off-season work-out regimen followed by Sennatt and especially Haynes should
generate dividends this fall and winter.

PREDICTED FINISH: NISRA: Fifth IVY: Fourth