Harvard Holds On To Lead in Close Finish

After letting a close game slip away the night before, the Harvard women’s basketball team wasn’t about to let it happen again.

Still shaking off a disappointing loss at Brown on Friday night, the Crimson recovered to hold off an aggressive Yale team, taking the lead for good with two minutes to play in the first half and holding on for a 59-54 win at New Haven.

In the first half, Harvard struggled against Yale’s stiff defense. The Elis applied aggressive ball pressure and disciplined help-side rotation in the halfcourt set to accompany a stifling full-court man-to-man press.

The pressure resulted in 24 Harvard turnovers, including 13 during the first half. The defensive intensity helped Yale to a first half lead that it held until the frame’s final two minutes.

During one three-minute stretch, the Crimson turned the ball over seven times.

“They put a lot of pressure on us,” said senior co-captain Maureen McCaffery. “In the first 15 minutes it was making us a little frantic.”

Nonetheless, the Crimson never let the game get out of reach. Trailing 18-10 with 5:05 to play in the first half, Harvard went on a 10-2 run to tie the game at 20 on a layup from freshman Emily Tay. From that point on, the Harvard women never looked back.

“Once we started applying our own full-court [press], that really helped us turn the game around,” sophomore guard Lindsay Hallion said. “It wasn’t their tempo anymore—it was us attacking them, too.”

Tay led the way for the Crimson with 12 points off the bench. The team’s second-leading assist leader, Tay took on more of a scorer’s mentality against Yale’s defensive pressure.

“Coach told us that when there’s lots of pressure, you should attack,” Tay said. “We had a lot of fast breaks and kept pushing the ball.”

“Emily is so talented,” Hallion said. “She can do anything for us. We know that she can score in every game, so it was nice to see her do her thing.”

In the second half, Harvard’s defensive struggles continued as Yale consistently found holes in the Crimson two-three zone.

Harvard increased its intensity on the other end of the floor, however, getting better looks at the basket by attacking offensively.

The aggressiveness helped the team get to the line more frequently, where it shot 7-for-8—a much better clip than in a first half, when it reached the line just three times, making two shots.

“We were really in attack mode in the second half, looking to run more and trying to build on that lead,” McCaffery said. “We had a tough time stopping them, but we just kept going at them.”

McCaffery added 10 points for the Crimson, while freshmen Katie Rollins and Niki Finelli chipped in eight each. As has been the case all season, the freshmen led a productive bench that outscored Yale’s reserves, 28-16, on Saturday night.

“I think we’re much deeper than most of the other teams in the Ivy League,” McCaffery said.

Tay said that Harvard head coach Kathy Delaney-Smith had “the confidence to sub in three or four people at once and still have the same productivity as the starting lineup.”

“We’re getting the work done,” she added.