Women Hoopsters Stun Brown

The Harvard women's basketball team won perhaps its biggest game ever Saturday afternoon by knocking off two-time defending Ivy League champion Brown, 71-66, in Providence, R.I.

The cagers, winners of only one road game in the past three years, had not defeated the Bruins since the '82-'83 season and managed only two league victories all of last year.

Sophomore forward Sharon Hayes led the way for the Crimson with 18 points, on 8 for 11 shooting from the field and 2 for 2 from the line. Nancy Cibotti added 12 points and Trisha Brown 10 as the Crimson won its third consecutive game at the start of the season.

"This is the biggest win for the women's basketball program at Harvard--at least since I've been here," said elated fourth-year Coach Kathy Delaney Smith.

"We had all kinds of reasons to roll over and die," Delaney Smith said after seeing her team quickly fall behind by 11 points in the opening minutes, "but we stuck with our game plan, even when we trailed, and it paid off."

Yale put a damper on Harvard's weekend yesterday afternoon, though, giving the Crimson (3-1 overall, 1-1 Ivy) its first loss of the year, 64-48.

But the big story took place the day before in Brown's Marvel Gym.

The Bruins, winners of the last four meetings between the two squads, were red-hot, shooting 55 percent from the floor and taking a 37-28 advantage into halftime.

Brown continued its high percentage shooting in the second half, but the Crimson suddenly found its range, too. The cagers wound up shooting 58 percent from the floor and better than 90 percent from the line in the second half on route to their upset win.

And, ironically enough, the key may have been in turnovers because the same team that averaged 25 in its first two contests turned the ball over only eight times against the defending Ivy champs.

Co-Captain Anne Kelly made two key steals that she took in for lay-ups--the last of which tied the game at 60 with three minutes left--and Mary Baldauf came off the bench to pick up another theft for the game's turning point.

The two teams traded baskets to knot the score at 62-62, and after the Crimson held on defense, it cashed in on five unanswered points from the free throw line to go ahead for good. Hayes, Kelly, and sophomore point guard Barbarann Keffer all contributed in that parade to the charity stripe which sealed the Crimson's first win of this year's Ivy schedule.

"The win was especially outstanding because we beat Brown when they had a good night," Delaney Smith said. "I felt that Brown was a better team than Yale, but there is always a tendency to have a letdown after a big win like we had on Saturday."

Cibotti led the way for the Crimson against the Elis, scoring 12 points (on 6-for-8 shooting from the floor) and pulling down six rebounds. Brown also played well, scoring 10 points and grabbing four rebounds.

"We outplayed Yale in the second half but just dug too deep a hole to crawl out of," Delaney Smith said. "They took us completely out of our game and we were just never able to recover," she added.

Harvard shot only 35 percent from the floor and committed 25 turnovers against the Elis.