Seven games into the regular season, the women’s soccer team is finally ready to open Ivy League play.

Yale (4–3) will travel Saturday to Princeton (2–4–1), where the two Ivy competitors commence conference play with a 5 p.m. kickoff at Roberts Stadium.

Eli head coach Rudy Meredith said he counts both Yale and Princeton as teams capable of vying for the 2009 title in the competitive Ivy League. Harvard and Princeton split the crown in 2008.

The Bulldogs recently snapped a three-game losing streak with a 1–0 victory over intrastate rival Quinnipiac on Tuesday and will ride the wave to Saturday’s contest.

With only two wins tallied after seven games, Princeton’s record appears decidedly unimpressive. But Meredith said the statistics are deceptive — failing to reflect the difficulty of the schedule Princeton has already confronted.

“They’ve played some really tough teams,” Meredith said of the Tigers. “They’ve played Rutgers and St. Johns. They’ve played some really good teams, so that’s definitely a misleading representation of how good they are.”

Yale’s squad also continues to cope with a number of injuries as it enters into tomorrow’s match. While Meredith hopes none of the team’s ailments will run a long-term course, they will certainly affect imminent games like the Yale-Princeton match.

“They’re all pretty much injuries with time periods of a week, two weeks, three weeks,” Meredith said. “We may have to play a little bit differently depending on who’s healthy enough to play on Saturday.”

Several freshmen saw increased playing time against Quinnipiac earlier this week because of injury-related lineup changes, and the move paid off for Meredith as forward Mary Kubiuk ’13 stepped up to score the night’s game-winning goal.

Meredith hopes to see similar contributions from his younger team members this weekend.

“Some of [the freshmen] are coming into their first Ivy League game, and they will have to step up and be ready to go right away,” the coach said.