Women's Basketball Dominates Lady Lions

After perhaps the most crushing defeat of the season just a week earlier, the Harvard women’s basketball team was in need of a remedy to get back to its winning ways. On Friday night at Lavietes Pavilion, that remedy came in the form of the Columbia Lions.

Led by the freshman trio of Katie Rollins, Emma Moretzsohn and Emily Tay, Harvard coasted to an 86-63 thrashing of Columbia in a home league tilt.

It was the first action for the Crimson since a heartbreaking last-second defeat against Brown earlier in the week, but Harvard seemed to have little trouble bouncing back and disposing of the Lions (4-14, 0-5) for the 40th time in 41 all-time tries. The Crimson relied on its strong post presence, a dominant defensive effort, and some unselfish play to control the tempo against a Columbia team that trailed the entire game.

“Our problem has been not putting the ball in the basket,” Harvard coach Kathy Delaney-Smith said. “We did put the ball in the basket better tonight than we have. The combination of the good defense and putting the ball in the basket was what we were looking to do all along.”

After jumping to an early 7-0 lead with 17:04 to go in the first half, the Lions battled back with six straight points over the following three minutes to cut the lead to one, the closest they’d get. The next six points came from Moretzsohn, who finished the game with 14 points and a team-high six rebounds.

The Crimson notched 21 assists on the night, helping create inside opportunities for Harvard’s forwards and centers.

“The passes were great,” Moretzsohn said. “When they get me the ball where I want it, it’s easy for me to make the shots. If I don’t get the ball I can’t score, so it’s all credited to my teammates.”

When told about the assist output, Delaney-Smith said she was pleased.

“That’s where we should be,” she said. “That comes from ball reversal. We’ve been working on it, so I was pretty pleased with it tonight.”

The Crimson held a 39-22 halftime advantage that shrunk to 14 on Columbia’s first bucket of the second half, but the lead ballooned back to 24 in the second half en route to the 23-point margin of victory. Rollins had 6 points in the second frame and led all Harvard scorers with 16 for the game, while Tay chipped in 12—10 in the second half—while also handing out four assists.

The fact that the team’s three leading scorers were all freshmen was no surprise for the coach.

“That’s our schtick,” Delaney-Smith said. “We have a very, very, very talented freshman class, who are getting a lot of minutes. They have enormous potential.”

“It just all fell together tonight,” Moretzsohn said.

The Crimson cooled down a bit after a hot first half. Harvard shot 51.9 percent from the field, 80 percent from three-point land, and didn’t miss a single free-throw in the opening frame. And although its final numbers—48.4 percent field goal shooting, 54.3 percent from beyond the arc, and 77.3 percent from the free-throw line—faltered, it remained the kind of consistent output that will help the Crimson continue to compete as it progresses deeper into the Ivy season.

“It’s funny,” Delaney-Smith said, “everyone who comes and is not familiar with us says, ‘Oh, all you need is a shooter.’ And I’m like, ‘The funny thing is, that’s not true.’ This is hands down as good as any team I’ve ever had as far as shooting­—they just haven’t been able to do it in a game.”

For at least one night against Columbia, they did.

—Staff writer Malcom A. Glenn can be reached at mglenn@fas.harvard.edu.