Dec. 13, 2005

Coming off an Ivy League championship and the program's first NCAA Tournament berth in 2004, expectations were high for the 2005 Yale volleyball team. The road to another championship wasn't going to be easy, however, as the Bulldogs' Ivy League rivals were eager to end Yale's championship reign.

Yale started the season at the Georgetown Classic and defeated the host Hoyas in three games in the opening match before falling 3-1 to Ball State. After the Ball State loss, Yale did not lose another non-conference match, rattling off ten consecutive wins, nine of them in three games.

The Ivy League schedule started full-bore the weekend of Oct. 7-8 with a trip to Columbia and Cornell. The Bulldogs lost the second game against Columbia, ending their streak of 28 consecutive games won, but held on to close out the match in four. Up next was Cornell, the team that Yale had defeated in five games to win the 2005 Ivy League playoff. Cornell exacted some measure of revenge with a 3-1 victory.

The Bulldogs swept through their next four matches, beating Harvard, Dartmouth, Penn and Princeton, all by 3-0 scores, setting up the rematch with Cornell. This time, the Bulldogs struck first, taking game one 30-20 and earning a hard-fought 35-33 win in game two. Cornell responded to take the next two games, 32-30 and 30-26, setting up a deciding fifth game. The Big Red capped their comeback with a 19-17 win in the deciding game to move to 8-0 in the Ivy League.

Now sitting 6-2 in the conference, with both losses to first place Cornell, Yale knew it needed to run the table to have any shot at returning to the NCAA Tournament. The Bulldogs won their next five matches to move to 11-2 in the Ivy League with just the season finale at Brown remaining. Cornell, meanwhile, swept through the Ivy campaign undefeated until the final weekend, when the Big Red were beaten on both ends of the Penn/Princeton trip and concluded the year with a 12-2 league record.

With any hope of defending its Ivy championship already eliminated, Yale lost the season finale in five games.

Nevertheless, the 2005 season was remarkably successful for the Yale volleyball team. The Bulldogs set a program record with a winning percentage of .833, and their 11 Ivy League wins also set a new program mark.

Individually, Yale was the only school with three players selected First Team All-Ivy, another first for the program. Jackie Becker and Shannon Farrell were each named to the conference all-star team for the second consecutive year. They were joined on the squad by Renee Lopes. Becker notched 1,005 assists on the season, making her Yale's new all-time leader with 4,222 career helpers.