Comebacks, Close Games Define W. Hoops Season

After the Harvard women’s basketball team blew away Dartmouth 58-42 to close out its regular season last Tuesday, Big Green Coach Chris Wielgus acklowledged a few obvious facts about the Crimson in defeat.

“I’ve been part of many championship teams, and Harvard played like a championship team,” Wielgus said. “They’re experienced. They have five seniors that have not put a ring on their finger, and they got it this year. That’s what you need to win—experience, depth, and a little bit of luck.”

Harvard was the preseason favorite to win the Ivy title not just because it returned the vast majority of its scoring talent from last year’s second-place team, but also because of the sense of desparation from its seniors. And on that strength, the Crimson lived up to its expectations, winning the league title by a school record-breaking margin in the standings and outdistancing nearest competitors Cornell and Penn by five games with a 13-1 league record.

Harvard exceeded expectations in some area and fell short in others. Crimson posted a solid 9-4 record in nonconference play—a far cry from the 2-10 start from its 2000 season—boosting Harvard to a 22-5 overall record and a school-record 13th seed in the NCAA tournament. But those wins never came easy. They were typically characterized by early deficits and blown leads—but always comebacks.

Harvard Coach Kathy Delaney-Smith now calls her 2001-02 team the best in her 20-year coaching history at coming back from deficits and winning close games, and she has reason to be confident if her team’s first-round NCAA matchup against North Carolina comes down to the wire.

Pre-Ivy Play

On Nov. 17, the day the Harvard football team closed out is best season since 1913, the women’s basketball team aimed to begin a run at its best season ever.

In an opening 77-54 victory over Wagner, Harvard unveiled its newest weapon to complement 2001 Ivy Rookie of the Year Hana Peljto—a lanky 6’3 center named Reka Cserny who could do more than rebound and hit one-foot jump shots; she could drive inside, hit the three, and play great defense. Cserny scored 19 and grabbed eight boards in her Harvard debut, making her year-long sabbatical prior to this season with the Hungarian junior national team well worth the wait.

For all the offense Cserny could provide, it would all go for naught if Harvard couldn’t play defense, and the Crimson suffered its defensive low of the season with a 93-77 defeat to BU in which it gave up six threes to one player.

Harvard had nowhere to go but up after that.

“The BU loss was a really tough loss for us and that was the kind of loss that we felt [in a 1-10 start] last year,” said sophomore Tricia Tubridy. “It was a wake-up call because no one wanted to feel that way again.”

Harvard improved its defense following the BU loss with a 68-62 win over Fairfield and a 59-51 loss to eventual Big East semifinalist Villanova. As senior Jenn Monti had warned, teams had started to find ways to stop Cserny, and the freshman was limited to four points for the weekend.

But Cserny came through the next with two double-doubles in a second-place finish at the Kansas State’s tournament. In the semifinals, Harvard won in spite of Peljto’s absence due to an ankle sprain in a 12-point win over Idaho St., thanks largely to one of Tubridy’s many team-best rebounding efforts. Peljto’s return the next day wasn’t enough to lift Harvard over the Wildcats in the tourney’s final.

The remainder of Harvard’s pre-Ivy campaign was marked by comebacks. The Crimson won despite halftime deficits against Central Connecticut, Rhode Island, Northeastern and Manhattan. Every single Harvard opponent was surprised by the turnarounds, which were often the result of Peljto or Cserny sitting before the break with foul trouble. By the time of the Manhattan victory, the comebacks had become routine.

The end of the Crimson’s nonconference season, which included a 67-44 blowout of eventual Patriot League Bucknell and a 78-66 loss to Syracuse, had several individual highlights—the emergence of sophomore Dirkje Dunham as a starter in place of an injured Katie Gates, the re-emergence of senior guard Jenn Monti as a three-point threat, and Cserny’s freshman-record 33-point effort against Manhattan.

Ivy Play

Harvard’s 88-77 Ivy opening win over Dartmouth featured end-to-end scoring—much of it coming from one player in the Crimson’s case, as Peljto scored 17 points in a row for Harvard at one point.

Dartmouth and Penn—not 2001 Ivy cellar team Princeton—were supposed to be Harvard’s toughest challenge, yet the Tigers were the team that dealt Harvard its only Ivy loss. In that game, the Crimson turned a nine-point halftime deficit into a four-point lead late in the game, but couldn’t win it. Embarressingly, the team was outrebounded 43-29 by the Tigers.

Harvard would never lose again during the regular season. The Crimson came back the next day with a 20-point blowout of defending Ivy champion Penn at the Palestra going into exam break. Getting contributions from all of its players was a key to victory.

“We almost did everything right that we didn’t do against Princeton,” Peljto said.

Harvard had to play under some adversity when it came back from exams as Cserny missed the next two games due to injury, but didn’t let down, however, thanks to junior Kate Ides stepping into the starting lineup, and senior Sharon Nunamaker making important contributions off the bench. Harvard rebounded from halftime deficits to win against Brown and Yale, then coasted over Cornell and Columbia the following weekend to gain sole possession of first place.

In its rematch against Penn, Harvard began a new discoraging pattern—blowing leads. The Crimson opened the game with a 16-6 run but found itself down by as many as five in the second half. Three clutch threes by Tubridy were the key to Harvard’s victory. It was a similar story against Princeton when Harvard went up 16-3 early but could never put the Tigers away comfortably in a 78-70 win.

Then in the most important league showdown of the season, Harvard narrowly averted disaster against top Ivy challenging Cornell, who had hung tough just a half-game back in the standings. Up 62-50 with 2:37 left, Harvard tried to run out the clock too early and let the Big Red back into the game. It took two more overtimes and a Peljto fainting spell before Harvard finally won, 77-75.

The Cornell game was so draining that Harvard fell behind by 12 early against Columbia before coasting to a 61-49 victory. The Big Red had a more difficult time recovering, however, and ended up not winning another Ivy game for the rest of the season.

Cornell’s struggles allowed Harvard to become the earliest team in school history to clinch a share of the Ivy title. The Crimson then clinched the outright title with a victory over Yale and posted comfortable wins over Brown and Dartmouth to close out its Ivy season.

Despite the victories, Harvard couldn’t be happy about everything. The team struggled in the second half of each of those last three wins, leaving the Crimson with few games all season when it could accurately say it had played a full 40 minutes.

“We’re Ivy League champions without really playing that well all year,” Peljto said the night Harvard clinched the title. “Tonight was probably one of our best games and it still wasn’t complete. Maybe in the tournament our best games will come out.”

Ivy League play might not have brought out the best of the Crimson. The NCAA tournament, on the other hand, has a longtime history of inspiring teams, and this year’s Harvard players—all making their tournament debuts—are hoping that their turn to shine is coming soon.