PLAYER PROFILE: Katie Murphy '05, Basketball

A quick glance at the stat column doesn’t tell you anything about Katie Murphy. The number under total points—two, five, sometimes 10—doesn’t turn heads or spark conversation.

But Murphy, one of two seniors on this year’s women’s basketball team, came to Cambridge prepared for that anonymity. The night before decisions were due, Murphy chose Harvard over Princeton despite no promise of a varsity spot from Crimson coach Kathy Delaney-Smith.

“Kathy had said they didn’t have room for me,” Murphy recalls. “I would have to prove myself when I came and beat people out.”

In Murphy’s first practice with the Crimson, she showed up in her own T-shirt and sneakers. All the other players wore Harvard-issued gear from head to toe. Murphy was the outsider, the unknown walk-on fighting for a spot, as anonymous as they come—at least until practice started.

“I let her take part in preseason, and she blew me away in the tryout,” Delaney-Smith says. “There was no way I couldn’t take her.”

Murphy earned not only her Harvard practice gear, but a Crimson varsity uniform—and, by her senior year, a starting spot.

While captain and Ivy Player of the Year Reka Cserny attracted the most attention this season, Murphy consistently matched up against the opposition’s biggest offensive threat. The former walk-on turned stalwart defender quietly averaged 2.32 steals per game, good for third in the Ivy League. Her 3.71 assists per game placed her fifth in the Ancient Eight.

But even those statistics—the few quantifiable measurements of what Murphy does on the floor—do little to assess her role accurately, according to Delaney-Smith.

“[She] is the kind of player who brings all the intangibles to your program without ever getting credit for them,” Delaney-Smith says. “The steals, the take-the-charges, the strip from behind, the pump-the-team-up—she has done that all year.”

In a March 4 game against Princeton, Murphy’s defensive effort helped a hot Harvard team to its sixth consecutive win. The Crimson had just come off a huge road victory over second-place Brown, a game in which Murphy finished with 11 points, three assists, and two steals.

Murphy was even more dynamic on the defensive end against Princeton. She scored just five points but contributed four steals, two of them back-to-back swipes that put Harvard in command late in the first half.

For a team that preached defense all season long, Murphy became the face of a late-season campaign for an Ivy title. Her three steals in a 70-67 championship-clinching win over Dartmouth helped the Crimson overcome a 15-point deficit in the second half.

“She was one of our best defensive players this year,” Cserny says. “We emphasized defense so much, and we couldn’t have done it without her.”

During her four years at Lavietes Pavilion, Murphy went from unrecognized to indispensable. Game after game, she dove for loose balls, took charges under the basket against bigger interior post players, and made the extra pass for two points on the offensive end.

Very little of that effort made the box score, but the former walk-on is fine with that. Her efforts on defense sparked the Harvard offense—even if she wasn’t scoring the points.

“The best defense is the best offense,” Murphy says. “You could see our players get really excited if we made steals.”

She now speaks as a four-year veteran, a member of two Ivy champion squads—one of which made it to the NCAA tournament. It’s a place few would have thought Murphy would be when she entered Lavietes Pavilion four years ago.

But as frustrated Ivy offenses will tell you, Murphy has always had a knack for being in the right place at the right time.

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