After opening the season with a 24-point win on the road over Sacred Heart, the Quinnipiac rugby team has dropped three straight games with a 60-24 loss to Harvard at home on Saturday.

Harvard got the scoring going early, finding the try zone less than a minute into the game after outmuscling the Bobcats for field position off of the opening kickoff. 

Harvard would strike again seven minutes later to give themselves a 12-0 lead, before Quinnipiac sophomore fullback Kat Storey broke away from the play at midfield and took the ball 50 meters for the Bobcats’ first try since Sept. 11 against Dartmouth after getting shut out at Army last week. 

Not to be outdone, the Crimson came roaring back, scoring two successive tries in the next ten minutes. Quinnipiac junior wing Maya le Rossignol got some short-lived momentum going for the Bobcats with a try of her own that would again be immediately matched by Harvard. 

It seemed as though Harvard followed the mantra of, “Anything you can do, I can do better,” matching every Quinnipiac try with several more of their own and never allowing the momentum to swing to the advantage of the home team. 

The Bobcats kept fighting though, and as the second half got underway, the two teams clashed with very little change in field position for almost seven minutes until Harvard finally broke free to score their sixth try of the day, with the seventh coming mere minutes later. 

The game became a back-and-forth stalemate once again for about  15 minutes before Storey would find open space once again, this time taking it nearly the full length of the field to put five on the board for the Bobcats in what would be their last try of the afternoon. 

Harvard would strike once more as the clock struck zero, widening their margin of victory, as they stretched their season-opening win streak to four games.

“It took us 17 minutes to figure out that Dartmouth was human, it took us 30 minutes to figure out that Army was human and today it took us about 20 minutes to figure out that they (Harvard) were human,” Quinnipiac rugby head coach Becky Carlson said following the loss. 

While it certainly wasn’t the result the Bobcats were looking for on the scoreboard, there were still encouraging aspects to be taken from the game. 

“The thing that I’m the most hopeful about is the fact that they (Quinnipiac) got scored on, and then they started to fight back,” Carlson said. “They fought back and they would score, they got scored on again and they fought back.”

With a bye week on the schedule before traveling to Brown on Oct. 16, Carlson expects the Bobcats to be a different team coming out of the break. 

“Now that it’s mid-season, we’re definitely feeling it physically,” Carlson said. “Out on the field you can see how they’re feeling the effects of that, so it’s going to be good for us to have that week off and I think you can expect this team to be undefeated in the regular season for the rest of the season.”

After squaring off against Brown out of the bye week, the Bobcats will meet Long Island University at home on October 16 before closing out the regular season on the road at Mount St. Mary’s on October 30.