Harvard Women's Basketball Snags First Victory

There’s no better way to end a three-game losing streak than with a dominating performance to quiet the critics.

The Harvard women’s basketball team (1-3) cruised to its first victory of the 2011-2012 season Tuesday night in its home opener against Rhode Island (1-4), 69-57, but not without a little trouble to start the second half.

With the intermission score set at 44-22 in the Crimson’s favor, the Rams came out firing, cutting the deficit to 12 with a little over 17 minutes left to play. But in the next five minutes junior guard Elle Hagedorn hit a pair of free throws and a jumper en route to her 14 points—a career-high—on the night.

Sophomore Elise Gordon then entered the game and mimicked her teammate. She was fouled, nailed two free throws, then following it up with a shot from close range. The center recorded a career-high 10 points in 15 minutes of action and helped create separation between the Crimson and the visitors.

“I wish I’d felt the same way about the second half that I did for the first half,” Harvard coach Kathy Delaney-Smith said. “Again, we have a lot to learn. I think we’re a very good team. ... We’re not a young team, but we’re not a totally old team. We have some youthful mistakes in our decision-making, and that happened in the second half.”

After shooting well in the first half, the Crimson did just enough to keep the Rams at bay in the second period, shooting a poor 25.8 percent and failing to make any of its 10 attempts from long distance. Harvard was outscored in the frame, 35-25, but the 22-point cushion from the first period was too much for Rhode Island to overcome.

The Crimson came out strong in the first half, quickly pulling away from the Rams. By 12:14, Harvard had built its first double-digit lead of the game at 18-8, after sophomore guard Christine Clark hit a quick jumper. The Crimson never looked back, finishing the half with a 22-point lead.

“Because we were playing at home, we were just so pumped up [from the start] and ready to get our first win,” Hagedorn said. “We were so hungry for that first win.”

Clark recorded a game-high 18 points, 16 of which were scored in the first frame. The sophomore almost had a double-double with nine rebounds on the night.

“I thought the whole half, our dominance started from our defense,” Clark said. “We were attacking them on defense, and then when we got on offense, we were really composed and looking for one another, seeing the cuts, getting the great shot—not the good shot—which I thought led to my points and the overall team’s performance.”

Rhode Island’s Ashley Rivera also reached double digits in the opening period, scoring 10 points on 4-of-7 shooting. The diminutive guard was particularly effective in the early going, keeping her team competitive every time Harvard tried to pull away. Rivera cut the Crimson’s 12-point lead to nine with a long three-pointer to bring the score to 25-16 with 7:57 to play.

Harvard did not let Rhode Island get any closer, keeping the visitors scoreless in the final 4:52 while putting up 11 unanswered points.

“The fact that we went up by 20 [points] was a testament to our defense,” Delaney-Smith said.

Poor shooting plagued the visitors in the first half, while Harvard was red-hot from the field. Rhode Island shot a measly 27.3 percent, while the Crimson hit 56.7 percent of its attempts. But after a drastically different second half, the shooting percentages evened out more, with the home team making 41.0 percent of its shots compared to the visitors’ 33.9 percent.

“I don’t think we came out with the defense mentality to attack them like we did in the first half, and they went on a little bit of a run offensively,” Clark said. “We then had to get back into a defensive mindset, but our shots weren’t falling on offense, so we needed to crash the boards more.”