Rollins' High Scoring Keeps Crimson On Top

The Harvard women’s basketball team had a great year in 2007. The Crimson rebounded from a poor start to the season to win the Ivy League in what seemed an impossible turnaround.

And like her teammates, the then-sophomore Katie Rollins could not have been happier with the team’s success.

But after being named to the Ivy League All-Rookie team the year before, Rollins had expected more out of herself in her sophomore season. Despite showing flashes of excellence, she was never able to put all of the pieces together consistently.

“I wanted my college career to be a little more than it was last year for me individually,” Rollins said.

So she decided to talk her coaches about future goals and set a plan of action. Together, they decided that staying around over the summer was the best option for Rollins.

A native of Augusta, ME, Rollins spent her summer training with some of her teammates in Cambridge. They played four nights a week and worked hard in the gym to get into shape for 2008.

The benefits for Rollins have been striking. This season, and the past few weeks in particular, has seen Rollins become the dominant force that she had been hoping to become.

Rollins has now scored at least 20 points in three straight games. She set a career-high with 23 points against Columbia on Feb. 16, and then followed that performance with 20 and 22-point displays against Princeton and Penn last weekend. She now leads the team in scoring.

“She’s pretty much unstoppable in there right now,” said senior co-captain Lindsay Hallion, who also spent the summer in Cambridge.

What makes Rollins’ form even more impressive is the fact that it is coming at a time when the team needs this sort of play from her the most. Following a blowout loss to Cornell, Harvard finds itself in second-place in the Ivy standings, and most likely will have to run the table in order to retain its title.

As usual, when asked about her impressive numbers of late, Rollins defers the attention and credit to her teammates.

But she is willing to attribute at least part of her recent form to the hard work she and some of her teammates put in over the summer.

“[Staying in Cambridge] made all the difference this year, especially going into the last part of the season,” Rollins said.

Rollins is clearly happy with her decision to stick around over the summer, and it is unlikely that her teammates or coach would disagree.

“I think she’s really come into her own as a low-post power player,” coach Kathy Delaney-Smith said. “She has a very explosive first step. She used to try to use that quickness without really reading the defense, but now she’s taking her time and she’s way more balanced. Now she’s grown into reading the defenses, so she’s drawing a double and then kicking it out and then creating an opening for a teammate.”

Currently, everything Rollins tries appears to be working, but this season was not without a major setback. This came in the form of a high ankle sprain just a couple weeks before the start of school, and the injury threw off Rollins’ schedule. After training all summer, she was put into a boot for about a month and then a cast, keeping her out of most of the team’s preseason workouts.

And while Rollins was back in time for the start of the season, it is really only in the past few games that she has been able to show the sort of form that she had been looking for on a consistent basis.

“She’s doing some amazing things,” Delaney-Smith said. “There are times when there is a double-team and she still finds a way to put the ball in the basket. And she’s not forcing it and taking bad shots—she’s making the right decisions on top of everything.”

“It shows how strong she is that even though she got injured at an inopportune time she really bounced back from it,” Hallion said.

For Rollins, the disappointment of last season still remains in her head and keeps her pushing for more.

“Last season for our team was an unbelievably successful season,” Rollins said. “But for me personally, I had a very frustrating season. I wasn’t playing the way I wanted to play. I didn’t come back to school in the kind of shape I needed to be in.”

For Rollins, everything always comes back to the team.

“I felt I let my teammates down,” she said. “I knew I needed to change that this season.”

Rollins’ displays over the course of the season have been vital to the Crimson’s challenge for the Ivy League crown. In the past few games she has been utterly dominant down low.

Keeping in mind just how strong she’s been recently, it is almost scary to hear her coach discuss her potential as a player.

“She’s nowhere near as good as she can be,” Delaney-Smith said. “She has great hands, she has great court instincts and she really is an unselfish player. She’s a power player but she’s extremely agile for a post player. But she’s not quite there yet.”

With the massive strides that Rollins has taken in the second half of this year, who would bet against her becoming even better? It helps that Katie Rollins is committed to fulfilling that vision.

—Staff writer Jay M. Cohen can be reached at jaycohen@fas.harvard.edu.