Crimson Heads to New York To Decide Ivy League Champ

It was supposed to all be over.

Ivy League play should have been a thing of the past: the Harvard women’s basketball team should have been biding its time as the conference’s champion and automatic bid-winner, waiting for the NCAA Tournament committee to announce its place in the 64-team bracket that will be unveiled next week. It should have had its eye on the nation’s powerhouses, wondering if it would get the chance to play an LSU or a North Carolina.

Instead, the Crimson is right back where it’s been for the past two months: facing yet another do-or-die weekend in the Ivy League. After clinching a share of the Ancient Eight championship last Friday at Brown, Harvard couldn’t close the deal and take the title outright, dropping a 64-58 loss at Yale en route to a three-way share of the Ivy crown with Dartmouth and Cornell.

The league could not use a tiebreaker to name its representative to the NCAA tourney—the three teams each split two games with each other—so Plan B, a two-game, three-team playoff begins tomorrow night in New York. The Crimson will face the Big Green tomorrow night at 7 p.m. at Columbia’s Levien Gym, with the winner taking on Cornell—who received a randomly-picked bye—Sunday at 2 p.m.

“This is an opportunity to play as hard as we can and show the NCAA that we’re the strongest team in the league and deserve to be in the tournament and called the champions of the league,” co-captain Jessica Knox said.

But this week in practice, coach Kathy Delaney-Smith and her staff have put a new spin on the shocking turn of events: the playoffs begin now, and this is what the team has wanted all along.

“We are more positive than negative about this,” Delaney-Smith said. “This is a tournament atmosphere, so why not experience it now?”

While the intense atmosphere will make for exciting basketball, some postseason intrigue is lost by virtue of the fact that these three teams know each other quite well. Just 13 days ago Harvard catapulted over then-first-place Cornell in the Ivy standings with a thrilling three-point victory in front of a raucous Lavietes Pavilion crowd.

That night in Cambridge, the Big Red was without star forward and Ivy Player of the Year Jeomi Maduka, who was competing in the league championships in track and field. Cornell will have her back this time around, and Maduka gave the Crimson forwards fits en route to a double-double in the Big Red’s blowout win in Ithaca last month.

Of course, Harvard won’t have the privilege of worrying about Sunday’s matchup with Cornell unless it takes care of business against Dartmouth tomorrow night. The Big Green and the Crimson are perennial rivals, as these two teams have dominated Ancient Eight women’s hoops over the last decade. This season, Dartmouth jumped out to a 10-point halftime lead and held off the home team in the 2008 Ivy opener at Lavietes. Harvard got its revenge in Hanover just three weeks later, but this time around, the matchup will be about far more than bragging rights.

Frontcourt play takes center stage in any of the three potential matchups: Cornell, Dartmouth, and Harvard boast talented forwards in Maduka, Brittany Smith, and Katie Rollins, respectively. Yet the Crimson knows all too well that doubling down low means leaving shooters open. Big Green sharpshooters Koren Schram and Kristen Craft combined for six three-pointers in Dartmouth’s upset in Cambridge, while Big Red guard Lauren Benson slipped in 15 points while all eyes were on Maduka in Harvard’s loss in Ithaca.

“These are teams we’ve played and we know who they are—we’ve done the work we’re going to do for them,” Knox said. “In practice, we haven’t done a lot of technical things, we’re just trying to get loose and get ready to compete. We need to outwork them.”

“It’s great to see who we are right now, what we’re made of,” Delaney-Smith added. “We got ourselves here, and we may have our best basketball left to play.”

For Knox—and, undoubtedly, for her teammates along with her—putting last weekend’s loss in the past and focusing on the excitement of a postseason “tournament” has taken a little time.

“I’ve accepted the coaches’ view of making the best out of a bad situation,” Knox said. “This weekend’s games are so big that I’m trying to look at it as the exciting culmination to our season.”

Last weekend’s loss to Yale marked a low point—but in an Ivy season with its peaks and valleys, the Crimson now has a chance to peak at just the right time.

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