For a brief time this season, the field hockey team was living a charmed life. This was not supposed to be the Tigers' year — the incredible talent of the Class of 1999 had departed. But for a time, it seemed as if this team was headed to the heights.
Then, on a fateful trip to Providence, R.I., in a game against Brown, it all changed. The Bears emerged with a 2-1 victory, and suddenly the Tigers were in a spot they had not inhabited for a long time: second place.
While the team came on strong at the end of the season and salvaged a tie for its sixth consecutive Ivy League title, it did not earn a berth in the NCAA tournament.
The Class of 1999 was one of the strongest groups in head coach Beth Bozman's tenure. By all accounts, this should have been a rebuilding year. The team lost 8 of 11 starters from a team that came within one victory of the national championship.
The Tigers, however, were not about to concede the league title. Princeton reloaded on talent, bringing in one of the best recruiting classes in the nation.
Top of the class
The class was highlighted by goaltender Kelly Baril and defender Emily Townsend. Baril, the top high school goalkeeper in the country, was invited to "A" camp, the final stage before selection to the U.S. National Team. And Townsend, a six-foot, one-inch sweeper, was the most highly sought-after defender in the nation.
In their first game of the season, the freshmen proved they would live up to the hype with strong performances all around.
"I asked a lot of these five kids to go out there and perform in their first collegiate experience," Boz-man said at the time. "They did a fine job of handling the butterflies and playing at an extremely high level from the opening whistle."
The Tigers followed that win with their 33rd straight Ivy League victory, soundly defeating Cornell, 4-0.
Inexperience, however, caught up with the Tigers in an early-season test with then-No. 6 Connecticut Sept. 19. Princeton outshot UConn 17 to 13 and took 10 corners to the Huskies' six. The Tigers came up short on the scoreboard, however, losing 3-1 in a game that easily could have been theirs.
"We were definitely up and down most of the game and still outshot them," Bozman said. "The game was clearly in our reach. If you outshoot a team and outcorner them, you ought to win."
Finishing was a problem that would plague the Tigers all season.
Going into the weekend of Oct. 9, the Tigers were 6-1 overall and 3-0 in the Ivy League. Since losing to Penn in the final game of the 1993 season, Princeton had won 35 straight games against Ivy League opponents and claimed five Ivy titles in that span. That dominance ended at Brown.
End of an era
Then-No. 16 Princeton lost its perfect Ivy mark and first place in the league to then-No. 19 Brown, 2-1. Despite completely controlling the flow of the game and outshooting the Bears by a 20-8 count, the Tigers came up on the short end of the score.
"It doesn't make sense to outshoot people on a consistent basis and lose games. It just doesn't make sense," Bozman said.
The four-game losing streak from Oct. 9 to Oct. 17 was the longest in Bozman's career as Princeton's head coach and the longest for the team since a four-game skid that spanned the end of the 1986 season into 1987.
After rebounding with four wins in its last five games, the team waited to see if it would get any help from the Crimson. Harvard defeated Brown, 3-2, in overtime to hand the Bears their first league loss. Brown and Princeton ended the season with identical league records and shared the title. Brown, however, took the league's automatic berth because of its win against the Tigers in October.
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