Harvard, Princeton and Yale were all selected for the 2026 NCAA field hockey tournament on Sunday evening, giving the Ivy League three teams in the bracket for the second straight season. Yale, meanwhile, locked up the conference’s automatic berth by edging Princeton 3-2 in a shootout in the Ivy League Tournament Championship game earlier in the day.
The bracket puts Harvard in as the No. 3 seed, Princeton as the No. 5 seed and Yale as the No. 6 seed in an 18-team field that includes 10 automatic qualifiers and eight at-large selections chosen by the NCAA Selection Committee. Harvard will host Old Dominion, Princeton will take on Syracuse in Storrs, Conn. at host site UConn, and Yale will face UMass in Cambridge, Mass.
The Ivy League matched its total from last season, when it also placed three teams into the tournament. This time, Harvard’s case was hard to miss. It won the outright regular-season title with a perfect 7-0 conference mark, finished 15-1 in the regular season and closed with a 13-game winning streak while going 6-1 against nationally ranked opponents. The Crimson also beat UConn, Princeton, Wake Forest, Syracuse, Monmouth and Yale during the regular season, and entered the tournament at 15-2 overall.
Princeton’s path was less clean but still good enough for another bid. The Tigers are making their third consecutive NCAA Tournament appearance and reached the national championship game a season ago, even though they lost all four of their games in penalty shootouts against top-13 RPI opponents. They also picked up non-conference wins over Northwestern, Penn State and Rutgers, then beat Cornell 1-0 in Friday’s Ivy League Tournament semifinal before falling to Yale in the championship game.
That result is the wrinkle in the bracket. Princeton lost the title game, yet still entered the NCAA Tournament as a No. 5 seed because the selection process does not hand the Ivy League’s automatic berth to the strongest overall resume; it goes to the conference champion, while the committee fills the remaining at-large spots from the rest of the field. Yale earned that automatic bid with the shootout victory, but both the Bulldogs and the Tigers were strong enough over the season to make the national cut anyway.
Yale is back in the tournament for the second year in a row after earning the first NCAA Tournament bid in program history last season. The Bulldogs entered the Ivy League Tournament at 12-3 and unbeaten in non-conference play at 8-0, then knocked off top-seeded Harvard 2-1 in the semifinals before beating Princeton in the championship. The national bracket begins with opening-round games on Wednesday, Nov. 11, followed by first- and second-round play on Friday, Nov. 13 and Sunday, Nov. 15, before the semifinals and championship on Nov. 20 and Nov. 22 at Trager Stadium in Louisville, Ky.
