Soccer player fights back from injury to conference championship

In the first half of her third game as a Harvard freshman, soccer player Dana Tenser '97 slide-tackled a William and Mary opponent who was on a breakaway. Both women went down. The opponent jumped back up, shouting Tenser's name, wanting to fight. But Tenser could only lie there. The anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee was torn. It meant she would be unable to pivot on the knee or kick a ball with that leg. She missed not only the rest of the Harvard season but what also would have been a very good chance to make the U.S. women's Olympic team.

This summer Tenser, now a senior, watched the U.S. team defeat China in the Olympic finals. She was able to watch every game the team played, even the ones that weren't televised, because a friend on the Harvard team knew the sports announcer -- and director of Harvard's International Office -- Seamus Malin, who had the tapes. Says Tenser, with a mixture of awe and regret, "I know people who have won gold medals."

From the age of one and a half, Tenser lived in Hershey, Pa., home to the chocolate giant and its corresponding amusement park. She attended Hershey Elementary, Hershey Middle, and Hershey High School. She saw movies at one theater in town three months after the rest of the country saw them.

"Hershey is very small," she says. "You can walk anywhere."

Or run, as it turned out. Tenser was, and still is, fast. "My physical asset is speed," she says. "With soccer, the coaches believe that if you have speed, they can teach you anything."

At first there was no need to teach Tenser anything. The strategy was simply to kick the ball past the opposing defense and then let the speed take over. When Tenser was 13, a local coach took an interest in her and took her to the regional tryouts for the Olympic Development Program's under-14 state team. There the coaches gambled on her speed, and the move paid off. Within a couple of years, she was a member of the under-16 regional team that frequently traveled overseas for tournaments.

It was with the under-16 team that Tenser met Harvard Coach Tim Wheaton. Tenser had been playing all year on a stress fracture in her foot that had been misdiagnosed as tendinitis. The medication she had been taking to combat the pain actually hid it, and, when she was taken off the medication, she could barely walk, let alone play soccer. When it came time for the mandatory yearly tryouts, Tenser missed the cut.

"I went to Tim really upset," she says. "He told me not to worry. He introduced me to a lot of coaches who were really great to me."

The following year Tenser got back on track. She remade the East Regional team. In the fall of her senior year she tried out for the National team. The night before they were to announce the results of the tryouts, Tenser went out to eat at a Chinese restaurant. Her fortune read: "All your hard work will pay off." The next day, she was one of 25 players named to the team -- and had the paper fortune laminated.

That spring Tenser led Hershey High to its fourth consecutive Division I state crown. She was named to her fourth All-State team and was also named Division MVP. Recruited by Wheaton and Harvard, Tenser left for Cambridge in the fall. She started Harvard's first three games as a midfielder before suffering the injury that would knock her out of action for a full year.

"I knew it would heal," she says, "but soccer was what I did. When everything else was going wrong, I could still play. But here I was, at a new school, and the one thing I was known for was gone."

Missing a year that late in the development program ended Tenser's Olympic chances. Since she could still walk without much problem, surgery on the knee was postponed until Thanksgiving. In the meantime, she went to every game and every practice. "Tim was incredibly helpful," she says. "It was devastating to me, and he knew because he had known me before."

It was in her hospital bed recovering from the surgery that Tenser received news that she had been named a high school All-American based on her senior year performance at Hershey High. The person who called to tell her had only been given her number; he had no idea he was calling a hospital.

When she came back her sophomore year, Tenser had to wear a large, mechanical brace that covered her leg from mid-thigh to mid-shin.

"It made me slower," she says. "And it really cut up the inside of my leg."

Nevertheless, she played well enough to earn honorable mention All-Ivy League honors. Her junior year the brace came off, and she was, as she describes it, "pretty much faster than ever." She was named to the All-Ivy second team as Harvard won the conference championship with a 14-2-1 mark. This year Tenser was the only senior starter on a team that finished 15-2-0 and repeated as conference champion. The first loss came to third-ranked UConn; the second came to UMass in the opening round of the NCAA tournament, 2-1, in three overtimes.

Soccer season is now over, but Tenser will continue her work in Harvard's soccer office and her studies as a psychology concentrator. She will also pursue her new hobby, scuba diving, an activity that requires very little running.

"I fell in love with the feeling of standing on the bottom of the ocean," Tenser says. "But there's one problem. I tend to smile when I'm happy, but when you smile, it breaks the air seal on your mask."