Penn Game Highlights W. Basketball Season

When members of Harvard's women's basketball team look back on the 1993-94 season, their rolodex memories will instantly flip to February 19, the day that they packed up the bus and headed to Philadelphia for a game with perennial powerhouse Pennsylvania.

It wasn't particularly important game, as the Crimson were well out of the race for the Ivy League crown. But given that the team had lost to Princeton the night before by an embarrassing 16-point margin, it's safe to say that, for at least self-esteem purposes, Harvard was in bad need of a win, or at least a close loss.

What it got was a vision.

"It was a great game," junior Tammy Butler said at the time. "We went out there and beat them soundly--it wasn't even close. Everything gelled."

The offense worked smoothly, alternating between solid post moves by Butler and the outside sharpshooting of sophomore Elizabeth "Buzz" Proudfit. The defense got back on the transition, and then settled in to play solid man-to-man.

It was as if all the pieces of the puzzle that the team had been trying to find all season suddenly showed up pieced themselves together, revealing the Mona Lisa--a 72-50 drubbing of the Quakers in their own backyard.

"It was weird because it was so good that it was a little sad," senior Katie Phillips says. "We realized for once what we could do, just how good we were capable of being. Not a team at the bottom of the league, but a potential league champion. And then it was over."

Never before and never again would be Crimson play as well as it did against Penn. The team had experienced myriad offensive and defensive difficulties prior to the game and gradually returned to that level of play after the win, beating a weak Columbia team by 16 the next week, before dropping each of its last four games--to Cornell, Brown, Yale and Dartmouth--by over 10 points.

But the memory of that day still lingers and, unlike the Cranberries tune, will continue to linger for a long time to come.

"That's a game I will remember," Phillips says. "Because that's how we should have been playing.

The Crimson had come into the 1993-94 season with high expectations.

Although it had lost star co-captains Deb Flandermeyer and Erin Mayer to graduation, the squad was returning the ever-daunting Butler and a number of role players--senior Cara Frey and Proudfit, for example--who were expected to step up and make major contributions. An impressive pre-season trip to Ireland on which the team went 5-1 against a miscellany of Irish squads only seemed to confirm such promise.

But those expectations seemed to go awry from the very start of the regular season. First came a devastating 100-63 loss at William and Mary which seemed to rip away any self-esteem that the team might have had.

And after that, things hardly got better. The team won only two of its next five games, none against powerhouses, and then went on one of its longest losing streaks ever--a seven-gamer featuring home losses to Vanderbilt (by 38 points), Penn (by 22) and Princeton (by 13).

After a much-needed win over Central Connecticut State, the squad continued to fall, winning only two of its next six--both at home against Cornell and Columbia--to bring its record to a lowly 5-15 going into the Penn game in Philadelphia.

"It sort of hard to analyze what happened," Phillips says. "You can't really pin-point one thing--like a lack of defense or a lack of offense, etc. We had problems all over. I think it was mental preparation as much as anything. It was one thing one game and another the next."

Of course, figuring out what exactly happened this season will be the task of the returning players over the summer. With Butler, the team's leading scorer (18.4 ppg.) and rebounder (13.2), Proudfit (12.8 ppg., 73 assists), and sophomore Amy Reinhard (6.5 ppg.) being among those, it's a safe bet that most of the kinks will be worked out, and that Harvard will once again rise to the sort of prominence in the league it has enjoyed for the better half of the last 10 years.

But for the team's three seniors, and for those who would choose to dwell on the 1993-94 campaign, hard-core analysis will likely be eschewed in favor of more fanciful thoughts, and memories will instantly flip back to that February night when the team that "could have been," was.

WOMEN'S BASKETBALL

Record: 7-19

Ivy League: 4-10

Key Players: Tammy Butler, (18.4 ppg., 13.2 rpg.), Elizabeth Proudfit (12.8 ppg.), Cara Frey (10.3 ppg.)

Seniors: Cara Frey, Katie Phillips