Women's Basketball Travels to Hofstra for WNIT First Round Matchup

“We’re trying to make history,” said senior guard/forward Shilpa Tummala. Making history is part of Harvard women’s basketball’s DNA; Harvard became the only team in men’s or women’s NCAA Tournament history to defeat a No. 1 seed as a No. 16 seed in 1998 after defeating Stanford.

The Crimson then became the first Ivy League team to record a victory in the Women’s National Invitational Tournament (WNIT) in 2012 before registering the fourth-largest comeback in Division I history this season against Yale.

Harvard (14-13, 9-5 Ivy) will look to continue that trend this Thursday as it begins its WNIT campaign on the road against Hofstra (22-8, 13-5 CAA). The Crimson has been invited to the country’s secondary postseason tournament for the sixth time in program history. No Harvard team, however, has ever progressed beyond the second round of any postseason competition.

VCU, Rutgers, and Georgia Tech join potential round two opponent Villanova as top 70 RPI opponents in the same quarterfinal bracket as the Crimson, which earned an automatic bid to the tournament by virtue of being the top-ranked Ancient Eight squad not in the NCAA Tournament—Penn got in via the conference title while second-placed Princeton grabbed an at-large bid.

“The WNIT is getting better and better and better every year,” Harvard coach Kathy Delaney-Smith said. “The tournament is a pretty darn good tournament now, and anything can happen. I look at the four teams in our little bracket and I feel good against all of them.

In order to get a shot at the tournament’s elite, Harvard will first have to see off the Pride, who it defeated just four years ago in this round of the WNIT. The Crimson leads the overall head-to-head series, 5-3.

Harvard enters the tournament on the back of defeats to the Quakers and Tigers on the regular season’s last weekend but are buoyed by the return of freshman guard Nani Redford, who missed those games due to illness.

Hofstra relies heavily on the play of its front court, with forwards Kelly Loftus and Ashunae Durant leading the team with 12.6 and 11.6 points per game respectively. 6’2” center Anjie White, who averaged over 13 rebounds per 40 minutes, also figures to feature heavily against the undersized Crimson.

“I think our challenge is keeping them off the boards,” Delaney-Smith said. “They’re a very good rebounding team, particularly [Durant], she’s very athletic and does a lot of early rebounding work… AnnMarie isn’t known for her box out, we’re not powerful and they are.”

This is not the first time Harvard has come up against a “forest” of formidable forwards, however, with Penn’s duo of Sydney Stipanovich and Michelle Nwokedi garnering much of the team’s attention in both matchups with the Quakers.

“The inside strength of the Ivy League is really good and we played against some of the best frontcourt duos in the country,” Tummala said, “so I think that we’re pretty much as prepared as we can get to play against Hofstra’s interior post players.”

The Crimson will look to captain and leading scorer AnnMarie Healy to lead the way once again; the Minnesota native finished the season with 16.3 points per game while shooting an impressive 51.0 percent from the field, ranked 61st in the nation. She faces a tough Pride interior that blocks 4.5 shots a game while allowing opponents to shoot just 36.2% from the field.

“We have AnnMarie on the inside,” Tummala said, “whose turnaround is nearly unstoppable across the country. I think that she’s going to continue to do what she does and we need to keep getting her the ball.”

Harvard also has a slight edge on the perimeter, with Tummala, captain Kit Metoyer, and the rest of the team shooting 31.5% from the beyond the arc compared to Hofstra’s 30.8%. While the Crimson’s projected starting lineup is smaller than the Pride’s, size isn’t of much concern for the team.

“I think Shilpa is going to be at the 4, and is going to be a matchup consideration for them,” Delaney-Smith said. “I think their big running the floor with AnnMarie is going to be a consideration for them…. If they get us to play at a fast, frenetic pace, that’s where we won’t be at our best. If we trust each other and the system, then they’re going to be in trouble.”

–Staff writer Manav Khandelwal can be reached at manavkhandelwal@thecrimson.com.