BASKETBALL '07: Local Legends

As a high school senior at Westwood High School—a public high school in a quiet Boston suburb just 30 minutes from Cambridge—Lindsay Hallion faced a choice.

Where would she play her college ball?

Her decision came down to two head coaches, pitting Harvard’s Kathy Delaney-Smith, who had already coached in the Ivy League for 20 seasons and earned legendary status in women’s college basketball, against Jennifer Rizzotti, an up-and-coming young coach at Hartford.

The catch? Rizzotti had been a former star—at point guard, no less—in the not-too-distant past, as a national champion and Player of the Year during her four years at Connecticut. The two-time All-American followed up her collegiate success with five seasons in the WNBA.

“When Rizzotti was recruiting me, I was pretty wowed by her,” Hallion remembers, chuckling. “I really did want to play for her.”

What’s more, Hallion felt little local allegiance to Harvard. Growing up in Westwood, she had followed the success of the team across the river: Boston College.

“I went to BC games religiously, had their schedule, had their poster,” Hallion admits. “Kathy’s going to kill me, but I never went to a Harvard game until I was recruited there. So I didn’t have a strong impression of it, but I knew it was a good program.”

“I was very excited to recruit her,” Delaney-Smith recalls. “But against Jen Rizzotti, All-American, studly point guard? If you’re a 17-year-old Lindsay Hallion, who do you want to play for? Your grandmother or a WNBA point guard?”

But Hallion needed only to look up at the banners hanging from the rafters in the Westwood gymnasium to answer that question.

Before coaching the Crimson to 10 Ivy League titles in 26 seasons, Delaney-Smith was a legend in Massachusetts high school basketball, making a name for herself at Westwood—the same school where Hallion proved her mettle nearly 20 years after Delaney-Smith’s departure. The coach led Westwood to a state title, six undefeated regular seasons, and the record for most consecutive wins (96) before taking the head coaching job at Harvard in 1982.

Delaney-Smith was an emblem of progress in girls’ athletics at the high school level, demanding changes like better gym times and uniforms for female athletes at Westwood and beyond.

“I didn’t know Kathy until she began to recruit me here,” Hallion says. “But I knew about her because every day I’m at practice and I see her name up there. She’s a legend in our game.”

Hallion is a Westwood legend in her own right—she holds the school’s all-time scoring mark and led her team to two state titles.

More than four years later, after the two Westwood greats have teamed up for at least one league title, Hallion has to be pretty sure she made the right choice. She’s the starting point guard of the defending Ivy champions, and is set to captain the squad in her senior season. She’s also the emotional leader of a Harvard team that needed some heroics last season to set it on its run to the championship.

Entering its Ivy League opener at Dartmouth, the Crimson, with a 2-11 non-conference mark, faced the prospect of another disappointing year. The game also brought two more immediate challenges: the two-time defending Ancient Eight champion Big Green, and a stomach bug plaguing its star point guard.

But Hallion shook off her illness in Hanover to record a career-high 22 points, including 18 after the break, to will Harvard to a 71-68 victory that started its stunning Ivy League run. After the game, Hallion disregarded her poor health, saying “I knew that I would play, no matter what.”

On that same floor, Delaney-Smith called her point guard “the heart and soul of this team.”

Hallion’s teammates tend to agree.

“Lindsay is one of my favorite people in the world,” junior center Emma Moretzsohn says. “She’s the nicest, funniest, most dedicated person to play with. As the captain, she’s the one I go to to talk about anything.”

It hasn’t always been easy for Hallion since she committed to Harvard and Delaney-Smith over four years ago. She sat out her entire freshman season with a torn ACL, but started 21 games as a sophomore on her way to a breakout junior year. She received All-Ivy League Second Team honors last season and was the team’s second-leading scorer with 12 points per contest, but it’s her passion for the game that earned her the Crimson captaincy.

“Lindsay is such a hard worker and such a great leader,” freshman guard Christina Matera. “We just try to follow her example and be as intelligent as she is when we play.”

“She competes at everything,” Delaney-Smith says. “She just wants to beat you at everything. We do stupid running drills and she dives across the line because she just wants to win. She doesn’t save herself for anything.”

And now that she’s a senior, Hallion has nothing left to save. While much has changed for the captain in the last three years, the strength of her relationship with the woman who recruited her has been a constant.

“I think a lot of coaches, when they recruit, will tell you this, tell you that, and then when you get there it’s just a shock,” Hallion says. “That’s something that Kathy does differently: she doesn’t change. She’s consistent in what she tells people and how she acts with them. She’s the same to me as she was four years ago when I wasn’t on her team.”

“She’s one of the purest student-athletes I’ve ever coached,” Delaney-Smith says of her prize recruit. “She has surpassed all my expectations. She’s a dream come true.”

As the season tips off, the Crimson is dreaming of another Ivy League title. And with Hallion at the helm, its dreams may just come true.

—Staff writer Emily W. Cunningham can be reached at ecunning@fas.harvard.edu.