Erin Appleman never cared much for the idea of an Ivy League tournament. The way she saw it, each team played all the others in the league twice — home and away — and that was a fair enough method for deciding who would represent the league in the NCAA Tournament.
But the Ivy League did have a tournament last season for the first time, and Appleman’s Yale Bulldogs won it.
“It was super exciting,” she admitted. “Having experienced it, it was very exciting. It was do-or-die … kind of gave it an NC2A feel.”
And it helped Appleman, now in her 20th season at the helm in New Haven, Connecticut, add to her already sterling resume.
In her previous 19 seasons at Yale, the former Penn State assistant won 11 Ivy League titles and made seven NCAA Tournaments. Twice she has been named the league’s coach of the year, an award that wasn’t bestowed by the Ivy League until 2014.
After beating Penn in four sets last Saturday — a match that broke Yale’s streak of winning five straight sweeps — Appleman has a career record of 358-130, making her the winningest coach in program history. What’s more, Yale has a commanding three-game lead in the Ivy League with four matches…
