No Southern Comfort—Or Offense—for Reeling Harvard

Despite any pretenses of Southern hospitality, Virginia has been anything but welcoming to the Harvard women’s basketball team.

After a crushing 54-48 loss at UVA last weekend, the Crimson (2-5, 0-0 Ivy) dropped its fourth straight game, 63-47, to Richmond (3-5) yesterday.

Harvard fought mightily in a nail-biter at UVA, but erratic defense and ice-cold shooting from the perimeter spelled doom for the Crimson against the Spiders. Still without injured co-captain Jessica Holsey, Harvard struggled mightily from the field yesterday. The Crimson shot 0-of-10 from beyond the arc and hit only 17 field goals on the afternoon.

“There was a lack of a spark [without the three-point shooting],” junior forward Christiana Lackner said. “That’s what gets us going. We just didn’t have them when we needed them today, and when your shots aren’t falling, you need to turn around and pick it up on D. We didn’t do that consistently.”

Sophomore guard Lindsay Hallion’s layup with 13:46 to go in the first half gave the Crimson a 12-11 lead. Harvard held that lead for 41 seconds—and that one-point margin was the only advantage the Crimson enjoyed all day.

The squad’s unfortunate first-half doldrums continued against Richmond, this time from the defensive end. Despite nine first-half points from Lackner—whose 10 points and 11 rebounds marked her first career double-double—Richmond’s hot perimeter shooting torched the Crimson defense. Spider reserve forward Kelly Roche surprised Harvard with four first-half three pointers and 18 points in the opening frame.

Before yesterday’s game, Roche was averaging 5.3 points per game and had just 42 points on the season.

“She had four threes—that should never happen,” co-captain Maureen McCaffery said. “We didn’t expect her to do that, but we didn’t make changes. We didn’t do anything to stop her. That was our fault. We changed in the second half, but it happened way too late.”

The Crimson held Roche to just two second-half points, but as has been the case all season, a lopsided first half made any second-half Harvard comeback all but impossible. Roche’s third three at 6:13 of the first frame punctuated a 9-0 Richmond run that put the hosts up 30-19. When freshman center Emma Moretzsohn stopped the surge with a layup at 4:14 remaining—ending a Harvard scoring drought of more than five minutes—Roche responded with another three-pointer to give the Spiders a 12-point lead.

“That was tough—to give up 20 points to somebody who wasn’t really one of their main players,” Hallion said. “That was a game adjustment that we should have been able to make. We had too many breakdowns like that.”

Hallion led the Crimson in the second half with eight points, including a three-point play at 13:16 to cut the Richmond lead to nine. But the absence of any perimeter game was fatal for Harvard, which mustered just five field goals in the second half and shot 26.3 percent from the floor.

“In the second half, we just couldn’t find the bottom of the basket,” Lackner said. “And we didn’t come out with enough defensive intensity. We show flashes of promising team defense, but we are still looking for consistency.”

The Crimson looks to end its losing skid Tuesday against Boston University, just the second home game of the year for Harvard.

—Staff writer Aidan E. Tait can be reached at atait@fas.harvard.edu.