Superstar Does Harvard Proud

Awarding senior All-American Allison Feaster The Crimson's Athlete of the Week is a bit like giving an Oscar-winning actor the Hasty Pudding Award. What more can you say about a woman who sparked one of the greatest upsets in the history of college basketball? How can words give justice to an athlete who has vaulted Harvard women's basketball into the national spotlight and earned respect for a school that rarely gets taken seriously in the world of college athletics?

In case you've been living in a cave deep in the bowels of the earth the last couple of days, Feaster scored 35 points to lead a shocking 71-67 upset over No. 1-seeded Stanford in the first round of the NCAAs Saturday night. The Crimson's win made Harvard the first 16 seed to ever upset a No. 1 seed in the history of the Tournament. Two nights later, Feaster orchestrated a 28-point masterpiece against No. 9 seeded Arkansas in the next round of the NCAAs. The Crimson lost the game, 82-64, but still managed to look respectable on national television, thanks in part to Feaster's dominant play.

Allison Feaster is a name that has been synonymous with superstar-athlete at Harvard for the last four years, but the 5'11" forward is finally getting the attention she deserves from a national audience. Skeptics who believed that Feaster's talent had largely to do with weak Ivy League competition were proved decidedly wrong as Feaster ran hoops through two national powerhouse women's basketball teams in a span of a couple of days.

Feaster even prompted Arkansas coach Gary Blair to declare, "[Feaster is] very, very special, and before she hits Wall Street I hope she hits the pro leagues for a few years because we need quality people like that."

While Feaster's accomplishments are already written in stone in the annals of Harvard athletics, the senior has played her last game in a Crimson uniform. It would be an understatement to say that we're going to miss having the soft-spoken, modest superstar tearing up our basketball courts and every record in sight. Thank you, Allison, for giving us something else to be proud of besides Nobel laureates and Rhode Scholars.