W. Basketball Gets Warm Welcome

The celebration for the Harvard women's basketball team started in Palo Alto and continued in Cambridge.

A crowd of several dozen Crimson fans, organized by the Undergraduate Council, and local media were on hand at Logan Airport to greet the players upon their return to Boston late yesterday afternoon.

Harvard returns from the Bay Area following its monstrous upset of top-seeded Stanford in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Although Harvard was eliminated Monday night in an 82-64 loss to ninth-seeded Arkansas, the fans were excited about the team's history-making victory on Saturday, when Harvard became the first 16 seed ever to win a game in the Tournament.

"Everyone was disappointed about the loss, but overall everyone was proud that they had such a strong performance Saturday night," said sophomore Kristen Schaeffer, an outside hitter on the women's volleyball team. Her team attended the victory rally in lieu of practice.

"Beating Stanford outweighed the disappointment of the loss [to Arkansas]," Schaeffer said.

The fans in attendance, whose ranks included a teary-eyed Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68, held banners and signs, and chanted as the players exited the gate. The U.C. created commemorative posters which displayed the front page of Sunday's Crimson with the headline, "History."

"I thought there might be a couple of friends, roommates and TV cameras, but not signs, cheering and entire volleyball teams," senior guard Sarah Brandt said.

Several Boston media members, including Channel 7's Gary Gillis, also greeted and interviewed the players. Gillis is notorious among the team members because he and his co-workers at the local NBC affiliate challenged the Crimson to a three-point shootout just before Harvard's NCAA Tournament appearance against Vanderbilt in 1996.

"When we were out in California and we were hearing about how people were going crazy, part of us wished that we could be there going crazy with our fans, and that's why it was so great when we had that wonderful greeting at the airport," said senior forward Karun Grossman, who is a Crimson editor.

The team has been on a continued high since the "The Upset," as one Bay Area paper coined the win. Harvard celebrated Saturday night's victory with a party at a Stanford campus hang-out, Pizza A-Go-Go, after the game. ESPN analyst Ann Meyers stayed throughout the celebration, drawing a big crowd of players as she shared.

"She was wonderful," co-captain Megan Basil said. "There were about eight of us on top of the woman, and she went around to each one of us and asked what our reasons were for coming to Harvard. She said that our idea of what a team was and how we related to each other was amazing."

Greg and Sherlin Kowal, parents of freshman point guard Lisa Kowal, even presented everyone on hand with authentic leis from their native Hawaii.

Meyers was back with the team at Oasis, another Palo Alto pizza hot spot, on Monday night. The campus restaurant was such a hot spot that WNBA star Jamila Wideman, a Stanford graduate, was munching away on a pizza pie in the middle of the celebration.

Harvard Coach Kathy Delaney-Smith, as well as Basil and co-captain Allison Feaster delivered speeches at Oasis, where the team scarfed down two large cakes and a Boston creme pie.

While the players were rejoicing on the West Coast, many back east were almost equally enthused. Any place on campus with cable access--from the Crimson Sports Grille, to Tommy's House of Pizza, to several House common rooms--was packed with cheering fans.

People in the Lowell House junior common room, which drew nearly 200 people on Monday night, chanted "Defense" right along with the Maples Pavilion crowd, and gave Feaster a standing ovation when she exited her final game with 38 seconds remaining.

"People were really thrilled about them winning the first game," Schaeffer said. "Every time they hit a basket the room erupted in cheers."

"It seemed like we did provide something the whole campus could get excited about," Brandt said. "We had heard the campus was going crazy, but that was hard to believe on a campus that's typically not crazy about sports."

Indeed, outside of The Game against Yale, Harvard students are not known for their school spirit when it comes to athletics. Now the student body has another capitalized article to hold dear--The Upset.

"When reports started coming in about how campus was going crazy over what we had done, it made it seem that what we had done was not just for us, but for the entire school, the Ivy League and anyone who's ever been an underdog," Grossman said.