Convincing Win Over Brown Sets Up Battle With Cornell

In its Saturday night contest against Brown, the Harvard women’s basketball team entered the locker room at halftime with a little hop in its step. Freshman Claire Wheeler had just connected on a baseline jumper as the first-half buzzer sounded, and the players exchanged high-fives as they jogged off the court.

They knew, though, that coach Kathy Delaney-Smith would have some more serious words for them in the locker room.

Describing the first half with “a word I can’t use in print,” the 25-year veteran coach sent out a second-half team humbled and ready to establish itself as the team to beat in the Ivy League. Harvard (12-8, 5-1 Ivy) led the sorry Bears (1-19, 0-6) by only four at halftime before pulling away in the second half, turning an initially sloppy effort into a 70-49 laugher at Lavietes Pavilion.

“I did not like anything going on out there,” Delaney-Smith said of the first half. “As a team, we’re better than that, and we showed that.”

One fine showing lasted both halves at Lavietes Pavilion, as fans dressed in pink came out in great numbers for “Think Pink,” an event taking place across the country to raise breast cancer awareness on college campuses. Last year, Delaney-Smith won the Gilda Radner award, annually presented to individuals who have inspired hope in the battle against cancer.

“We have to remind everyone that we can all fight cancer together,” Delaney-Smith said. “I am a breast cancer survivor, so this is doubly meaningful for me. Pink’s not my favorite color, but it is fun to see the big wave of pink out there.”

The “big wave of pink” cheered ever louder in the second half, when the Crimson used sharp shooting and a lockdown defense—the Bears made just eight shots from the field after halftime—to pull away from the league’s weakest team. With just one senior and two juniors on its roster, Brown proved unable to hang with a veteran Harvard team for 40 minutes.

Guard Niki Finelli (14 points) got the scoring started with a three-pointer just a minute into the second frame, and consecutive layups from forwards Adrian Budischak and Katie Rollins and Finelli extended the Crimson’s lead to 10 with 14:57 to play.

Junior guard Emily Tay continued her fine play for Harvard, this time taking a back seat in the scoring department (eight points), but dishing out seven assists. Last week’s Ivy League Player of the Week added to her ongoing highlight reel with several no-look passes that found teammates under the basket.

But it wasn’t all fast breaks and layups for the first-place Crimson early Saturday night. Realizing its own height disadvantage, Brown started four guards against Harvard’s traditional three-guard set. While Rollins had her way against the undersized Bears—she had nine first-frame points en route to a game-high 15-point performance—the Crimson, eager to create mismatches in the low post, committed nine turnovers by halftime.

“In the first half we tried so hard to thread the needle and make those quick shots that we didn’t really run much of an offense,” Rollins said. “In the second half we started getting it in and out of the post, and we were more successful with that kind of mentality.”

“We were scared to death of that matchup, quite honestly,” Delaney-Smith added. “In the first half, we should have moved the ball more and worked it inside more. When we made the change, it was because we didn’t make quick decisions and didn’t try to rush things.”

Even as Brown’s Annesley O’Neal hit a jumper to tie the game at 27 with 2:22 to play in the first half, Harvard looked in control of the game. Co-captain Lindsay Hallion responded with a jumper of her own just over a minute before halftime, and Wheeler collected the rebound from a Hallion miss and drained a baseline shot as the period expired.

Wheeler’s jumper enlivened the crowd and the Crimson, and the slim halftime lead served as a wakeup call for the defending league champions. After Cornell kept pace with Harvard’s two wins with a Princeton-Penn sweep on the road, the two teams are tied atop the Ancient Eight standings with matching 5-1 records. The Crimson now faces a key stretch of Ivy games on the road, with a showdown in Ithaca coming Friday night before a trip to New York City to face Columbia.

“We realized that we can’t play the way we played the first 20 minutes and expect to be Ivy League champions—it just doesn’t work that way,” Rollins said. “We have bigger goals for ourselves this season, and we realized that if we’re going to get that done, we need to start playing like a team. We don’t ever freak out too much.”

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