Spring highlights: facing the nation

David Schamis ’95

Tate Evans ’26, who became a starting pitcher in his senior year, won Ivy pitcher of the year. View full image

Baseball
After two seasons away from the NCAA Tournament, the Bulldogs came close last season, but this spring, Yale baseball finally completed its return to the national stage. Having repeated as Ivy League regular season champions—its first back-to-back titles since 2017 and 2018—Yale hosted the Ivy League Tournament at Bush Field with a chance to earn an automatic NCAA bid. There, the Bulldogs ran the table: three straight wins over Columbia and Brown, the only two opponents to have taken a three-game series from them all season, to earn their trip to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2017. 

The run was propelled by both known arms and breakout performances. Last year’s national sensation on the mound, Jack Ohman ’28, was named the Most Outstanding Player of the Ivy League tournament. But this year’s top pitcher was Tate Evans ’26, who had not started a game for Yale until his senior spring. In 84-plus innings of work this season, Evans tallied an Ivy-best 2.87 earned-run average and kept hitters under .200 in conference play, earning Ivy League Pitcher of the Year honors. 

At the plate, first-team all-Ivy selection Garrett Larsen ’27 raised his average from .255 to a league-leading .372 in just two seasons, while also topping the Ivy in on-base percentage and hits. “We’re in this golden age of Yale athletics that is really exciting, and we thrive off baseball being a spring sport,” said Fay Vincent ’31 Head Coach of Baseball Brian Hamm at the end of the season. “The fall sports have success, the winter sports have success, and then we’re on the tail end of that, taking the momentum into our season.”

In the NCAA regionals, where four teams compete in a double-elimination bracket to narrow the field of 64 to 16, Yale was odd man out among Pacific Northwest rivals Oregon, Oregon State, and Washington State, with the Oregon Ducks hosting in Eugene. 

In Yale’s first game against No. 11 Oregon, the Bulldogs often put runners on but couldn’t convert, leaving 13 men stranded. The Ducks jumped out to a 3–0 lead in the first inning and only built on their advantage, beating Yale 14–2. In an elimination game versus Oregon State, the Bulldogs held the score much closer, trailing just 3–0 after six innings behind a strong start from Evans. In the bottom of the seventh, Larsen hit a solo homer to cut the lead to two, but the Beavers shut the door on the potential upset with a six-run eighth inning, ultimately winning 9–2.

For Hamm and the senior class, who started their Yale careers together in 2023, it was the culmination of a rebuilding effort. On a roster of 28 players (Oregon, by comparison, carried 40), Yale had but four seniors. “Never have I coached a team that has accomplished so much with so little,” said Hamm. “That’s about as big of a compliment as I can give a team.” Captain Davis Hanson ’26 agreed. “Every single day we wanted it more than the other teams that went out there,” he said. “I’m extremely proud of what we did this year.”

Tennis
For more than a week, the men’s tennis team could only watch and wait, their NCAA fate out of their control. “We were honestly very scared that we weren’t going to make it, because we had lost our last two matches of the Ivy season,” says Edward Liao ’28, an all-Ivy selection and one half of Yale’s top doubles pair. Instead, they channeled that nervous energy into algorithmic deconstruction. “We got it down to the specifics of which team had to win for us to get into the tournament,” he says. “I guess that’s why we’re all at Yale.” Once UC Santa Barbara won the Big West, Liao and his teammates felt “super confident” in their prospects.

Sure enough, days later, Yale learned it was heading to Illinois, ending a 48-year drought with their first NCAA berth since 1977. It was a season dominated by Liao and Vignesh Gogineni ’26, who went 15–5 with wins over pairs at Purdue, Notre Dame, Arkansas, and Oklahoma State; Gogineni was masterful with a 20–3 record in the No. 1 singles position.

The men fell to the Illini in Urbana, but in the airport afterward, they crowded around to track the women’s own first-round matchup against Texas Tech. It had become a habit all spring, Liao said, half support and half friendly rivalry. The women had earned their bid via their first Ivy League title since 2013—the first time in Yale history both teams made the NCAA Tournament in the same year. Led by Orly Ogilvy ’27 and Leena Friedman ’29, who made a run to the NCAA doubles quarterfinals in the fall, the team lost to Texas Tech but finished 19–4, their best record since 2012. For Liao, the milestone isn’t a ceiling. “This is going to become our new standard,” he says. “We’re always going to try to push for something higher.”

David Schamis ’95

Women’s lacrosse captain Emmy Pascal ’26 led a defense that ranked in the nation’s top five. View full image

Lacrosse
Both lacrosse teams also made the NCAA Tournament this spring. The women sustained their run to an unprecedented third straight tourney despite losing 87 percent of the team’s scoring to graduation in the off season, according to Joel E. Smilow ’54 Head Coach of Women’s Lacrosse Erica Bamford. They found their answer in defense.

Emmy Pascal ’26 captained one of the nation’s top-five defenses and earned a Tewaaraton Award nomination, second-team All-America honors, and Yale’s Nellie Pratt Elliot award for the top graduating female athlete.  “Every single day, she showed up, she competed, supported by her senior class,” said Bamford at the end of the season. “If that isn’t leadership, I don’t know what is.” The Bulldogs lost 10–4 to Boston College in the tournament’s first round, but Pascal and the seniors finished as the winningest class in program history. 

Meanwhile, men’s lacrosse returned to the NCAA bracket after two seasons away. Facing Syracuse at the Orange’s massive JMA Wireless Dome, the Bulldogs came agonizingly close to the quarterfinals. Down 16–12 with under six minutes to play, Ivy rookie of the year Sean Grogan ’29 scored or assisted three straight goals to make it 16–15 with 1:17 left. Syracuse turned away three Yale looks in the closing seconds, and the comeback fell a goal short. That a freshman nearly authored it is plenty of fuel for the off season.