W. Hoops Season Opens With Non-League Defeat

A young James Madison squad muscled out a win over the Harvard women’s basketball team on Saturday, pulling away for an 89-73 victory despite trailing the entire first half in the season opener for both teams in Harrisonburg, Va.

“It was a game that we probably shouldn’t have won,” said Crimson head coach Kathy Delaney-Smith. “We weren’t supposed to win this. I would say we were not the favorite. I would say that we had more experience than they had, and they had more athleticism than we had.”

Though plagued by turnovers—Harvard surrendered 18 on the afternoon—rebounding was also a key to the Crimson loss. The Dukes claimed 43 rebounds in total, 28 on the offensive end.

“That’s going to be our nemesis. We are not a good rebounding team,” Delaney-Smith said. “That came back to haunt us. I knew it would—I have probably said that more than 100 times to my team.”

Despite the edge on the boards, James Madison found itself in an early 27-17 hole over midway through the first half.

“I come away from that game saying, ‘Let’s get back on the floor and play them again,’” Delaney-Smith said, “and I think we would find a way to win the second time.”

Harvard had most of its success against the Dukes in the first half, as the Crimson took an early lead and only permitted a tie for a minute of the first half before jumping out to a 16-10 advantage. Harvard shot 65.4 percent in the half, compared to James Madison’s 29.3 percent.

“The first half especially, we really worked together great on offense and on defense,” said co-captain point guard Lindsay Hallion. “And then a natural momentum shift in the game happened, and we couldn’t get back into that same flow.”

The half ended after a Dukes surge that narrowed the Crimson’s lead to 41-38. In the final seven minutes of the half, James Madison outscored Harvard, 19-12, foreshadowing the swing that would take place following the break.

Finelli led the team with 19 points, and junior guard Emily Tay paced the team with six assists, also chipping in 14 points. Both players were 6-for-6 from the line.

After the sluggish first-half shooting, the Dukes got hot in the final 20 minutes, shooting nearly 56 percent from the field after the intermission.

“They could hit shots that no one in the country could stop,” Delaney-Smith said. “It wasn’t a case of us being poor on defense.”

Delaney-Smith noted that James Madison also benefitted from a bit of home-court officiating.

“It was on their own court, so the officiating was as bizarre as it could possibly be,” she said.

Despite the turnover trouble and the problems on the boards, the coach said she was proud of her team for keeping things close for most of the game.

“[The final score] was not indicative of the game,” she said. “We were not only in it in the end, [but] we were up by 10 in the first half, and it was a five- or six-point ballgame in most of the second half.”

The team hopes that its rebounding woes will be solved tonight, when the Crimson plays its first home game against Siena College at 7 p.m.

Delaney-Smith called the inability to rebound “the single glaring statistic” in the loss to the Dukes.

“It’s something that’s in our control, and I think it will dictate a lot of the outcomes of our games this season,” Finelli said.