For the men, it was the third straight year the team failed to advance to the NCAA tournament. Dartmouth finished fourth in the Ivy League with a conference record of 3-3 and finished with a winning record of 8-7 after a triple-overtime sudden-death victory over Harvard to close the 2006 season.
The team has learned from last year's shortcomings.
"I think the biggest thing we want to do this year is win the close games," captain Ryan O'Connor '07 said. "Last year, we had three one-goal losses. Pretty much every game we lost other than the Cornell game was within our grasp. If we win the close games, we'll give ourselves the best chance to make it to the postseason this year."
In addition to the 18-9 loss at Cornell, the Big Green lost 14-2 against Maryland on the road. Both the Big Red and the Terrapins finished in the top 10 in the final 2006 national polls, and it is the games against top opponents that Dartmouth needs to win in order to make the NCAA tournament.
Dartmouth will open its regular season with back-to-back big games against No. 6 Duke and No. 21 North Carolina. The game with Duke will be the Blue Devils' first game since their season was cancelled early in 2006 after rape, sexual harassment and kidnapping allegations arose after a team party.
O'Connor, however, is more focused on knocking off a top-ranked team in Durham, N.C., than the media hype that will inevitably surround the Blue Devils' return to action.
"I think it's a great opportunity. They've been a great team for a while now," he said. "They were pretty highly ranked last year and they're still pretty highly ranked this year and the ability to play the best team in the country is what we want and it's what we're going to have to do if we want to make it to the tournament."
Dartmouth will enter the weekend in North Carolina as the No. 22 team in the nation.
"We're excited to play teams like [Duke and North Carolina] early in the season, and see what we're made of," O'Connor said. "We're a little bit under the radar as far as the national scene goes."
Last year, the Dartmouth women qualified for the NCAA tournament for the fourth straight year and won three tournament games to advance to the national championship. The Big Green suffered a 7-4 loss at the hands of Northwestern and was forced to settle for national runner-up.
Captain Margo Duke '07 looks back on last season as a success but knows that the real goal is still within reach.
"We kind of had a slow start last year, so we all think it was a great success that we were able to turn our season around. We're hoping to make that last step this year," she said.
After finishing second in last year's polls, Dartmouth is ranked sixth in the 2007 preseason polls.
Duke is indifferent about the preseason rankings. "At this point I don't really care [about rankings]," she said. "They rank us there probably because we lost some good players last year, but we have a good class coming in. Polls don't matter to me; we're going to do great things regardless."
The women's team will also open its schedule with a stiff challenge as No. 15 Syracuse comes to Hanover in two weeks.
"I think it will be great for us to have some good competition to start out with and to see where we need to improve as we get closer to Ivy League games because that's where we need to focus on this year is our own league and our own conference games," Duke said.
Both teams saw their first competitive action of the 2007 season on Saturday in the form of scrimmages. The men traveled to Loudonville, N.Y., to scrimmage host Siena and Binghamton. The women hosted Notre Dame at Dartmouth's Scully-Fahey Field in Hanover.
Both teams conceded that the scores of the scrimmages are not important, and the value of the scrimmages lies in the discovery of remediable weaknesses.
The women won their scrimmage by a score of 14-13.
"We really went into it just trying to figure out what we're good at and what we need more work and to figure out what we need to work on before our first game against Syracuse in a couple weeks," Duke said.
The men won their game against Siena and tied Binghamton.
"We definitely played it competitively, we were playing hard the whole time ... there's only so much you can practice in the week and a half that we've been practicing," O'Connor said. "We definitely played as hard as I had expected and did the things we were supposed to do well. There are still some small things we need to work on, but I think everything is pretty much correctable and overall, I think it went really well."
The men have one more tune-up scrimmage before beginning their regular season, as the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, last year's national runner-up, will travel to Hanover on Saturday, Feb. 17.
The men will then travel to North Carolina to face Duke on Saturday, Feb. 24 and UNC on Sunday, Feb. 25.
The women will continue practices with no outside competition before their season home opener against Syracuse on Saturday, Feb. 24.
