W. Hoops Tops Cornell to Complete Weekend Sweep

The Harvard women’s basketball team found itself in a familiar position, having won big the previous night and opening the game with a cold shooting spell. But Saturday night, the Crimson (12-10, 5-4 Ivy) was able to buck its trend of tightening up when shots aren’t falling and held off a spirited Cornell (8-15, 3-7) squad 68-55 at Lavietes Pavilion.

“I am thrilled,” coach Kathy Delaney-Smith said. “This was a great victory.”

Together with the 85-44 trouncing of Columbia on Friday, this marks the first time this season Harvard has swept its weekend games.

“It feels really good to get two in row,” co-captain Tricia Tubridy said. “It feels good because we did things tonight correctly that we haven’t been doing correctly, like working the offense more, and when our shots weren’t falling we didn’t tighten up.”

The Crimson players opened the game zero for their first six shots from the field and missed all eight of their first-half attempts from behind the arc.

Going into the locker room at halftime with a 30-27 edge, Harvard was nursing a tenuous three-point lead that appeared susceptible to a second-half charge by the Big Red.

Yet the Crimson refused to let history repeat itself and again lose grip on a close game against Cornell as they did on Jan. 30 in a 66-64 overtime loss in Ithaca.

“I think we kept our heads,” Tubridy said. “When we were playing in that game you could feel it on the court—we were all tense and scared that they were going to come back, and the fear became reality, and tonight we just knew they weren’t going to [come back].”

The first shot of the second half sent that message clearly. A smooth three-point toss from co-captain Hana Peljto found nothing but the inside half of the net, and propelled Peljto that much closer to a milestone.

But the Big Red’s guards Karen Force and Lauren Kilduff, and forward Tanya Karcic, kept their team in the game. The trio accounted for Cornell’s first nine points of the second half and both Force and Kilduff finished with 15 points.

Harvard paid special attention to Force, the player who shocked the Crimson in the teams’ previous match-up by driving the length of the floor and tying the game with under one second left on the clock.

“We put in a zone [defense] and she kept on driving, and then we went to a triangle-and-two for the last few minutes of the game, and I think that’s what made a big difference because they didn’t know whether we were in a zone or man [to-man defense] so they didn’t know what offense to run,” Tubridy said.

A breakaway layup from Pejlto, who ignored excited yells of “Dunk it!” from fans, and a lay-in from junior center Reka Cserny midway through the first half pushed the Harvard lead to nine, but Cornell managed to trim the advantage to five with just over four minutes to play.

The dominating duo of Peljto and Cserny then accounted for the next eight points and pushed the Crimson’s lead up to 13 with 2:12 to play.

Coming into the game, Peljto had amassed a career total of 1,967 points, or 33 short of 2,000. After sinking two free throws with 31 seconds remaining in the game, thereby restoring the Harvard lead to 13, Peljto’s point total for the game stood at 31. Well aware of this fact, the Crimson players got the ball into Peljto on the team’s last possession, but the two-time Ivy League Player of the Year was unable to convert on two shot attempts in traffic from the right block.

Peljto finished with her 31 points, and also grabbed 16 rebounds, and Cserny scored 23 while snatching 11 boards. Together the pair accounted for 54 of Harvard’s 68 points.

While the Crimson players may not have tightened up on the court, Harvard’s two victories this weekend combined with league-leading Penn’s loss on Friday to Brown certainly tightened the race for the Ivy title.

No team has ever won the Ivy crown with four losses, but there is still a chance that, with enough help from just about every Ivy team, the Crimson can grab a share of the title.

But Harvard players and coaches are not wasting breath discussing such a possibility, or devoting any time thinking about the championship and the automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament that goes with it.

“We’re absolutely not talking about it,” Delaney-Smith said. “Of course it would be exciting for us, but I think it’s important for us to just take care of each game and stay in the moment.”

This weekend, the Crimson will host Yale, a team that upset Harvard earlier this month, on Friday and Brown on Saturday in the Crimson’s last home games of the year.

“We’ve kind of put ourselves in the state of mind of dividing the season in two halves and starting last night we get to play everybody again and avenge every loss and whatever happens, happens,” Tubridy said.

—Staff writer J. Patrick Coyne can be reached at coyne@fas.harvard.edu.