Since the award was first given in 1987, there have been just four women who have been named Ivy League Player of the Year two times.
Since the first All-Ivy team was announced in 1978, five women have earned first-team All-Ivy all four years they played.
In both cases, only one of those women hailed from Penn. In both cases, that player was Melissa Ingalls.
Ingalls was the Ivy League Rookie of the Year in 1986, when she led Penn to the Ivy League Tournament championship with a 3-0 win over Princeton in Cambridge, Mass.
The Ivy League began formal round-robin play in 1987. That year, Ingalls was named the Player of the Year as she led the Quakers to a perfect 7-0 conference campaign and the Ivy League's inaugural regular-season championship. Penn went 24-10 overall that season, a win total that remains third in program history for one season.
One year later, the Red and Blue went 17-15 overall including 6-1 in Ivy play to repeat as the regular-season champion. Once again, Ingalls was named the Ivy League Player of the Year.
In 1989, Penn finished with a 14-16 overall record and tied for second in the Ivy League regular season with a 4-3 mark. A captain of that Quaker unit, Ingalls was not named Ivy League Player of the Year that season -- Yale's Cathy Bell received the honor -- but the Penn player had the last laugh. Playing in front of its home crowd at The Palestra, the Red and Blue won the Ivy League Tournament with a 3-0 win over Harvard in the final. After losing in the tourney final in both 1987 and 1988, it was a sweet exit for arguably the greatest player in Penn volleyball history.
Ingalls was named team MVP three times, from 1987-89, and remains the only player to be honored so many times. The MVP award has been presented every year since 1981.
As a sign of her versatility, Ingalls graduated as the program's all-time leader in two very different statistics -- kills (1,129) and digs (1,313) -- and was second all-time with 155 service aces. Nearly 25 years after her graduation, Ingalls' kill and dig totals remain third on Penn's all-time lists, while her service ace total is fourth.
