dHA/dR^2: Beating the Green in January--An Annual Crimson Tradition

HANOVER--The Harvard women's basketball team that has won two consecutive games this past week in convincing fashion bears scant resemblance to the team that went 1-10 to start the season before winter break. Although the Crimson's recent start was its worst in years, there was reason to hope that this team could do some soul-searching over break and turn the season around. It had been done before.

Last year's Crimson team closed out its non-conference slate with its season-worst offensive performance at Northeastern and a weak second-half effort at New Hampshire. But when Dartmouth came to town for the Ivy opener, the Crimson dealt the eventual league champions their most humiliating loss of the season.

On Saturday at Leede Arena, Harvard's 70-58 win made it six straight wins over Dartmouth in the teams' first annual meeting.

Harvard and Dartmouth are unquestionably the two most consistent programs in the Ivies. Harvard vs. Dartmouth has been both the first and last game of the entire conference slate for two years now.

The heated rivalry makes it the perfect time for Harvard to begin playing at its highest level--all it takes is some solid veteran play and rapid development from the freshmen.

"We're a totally different team now," said freshman forward Hana Peljto, the game's high scorer who, along with fellow freshman forward Tricia Tubridy, also led the team in rebounding.. "After Christmas, we had a great week of practice. We know the Ivy League is more important than the games we've played and we're just going to go after everyone else."

On Saturday, junior point guard Jenn Monti and junior forward Katie Gates added some more pages to their history of coming up big in the Dartmouth opener.

Gates knows all about hitting big threes at Leede Arena--in her freshman year, she threw up a prayer from just beyond half-court that found that net and gave Harvard a 65-63 win. No such heroics were necessary at game's end on Saturday, because Gates made a clutch three to open Harvard's scoring this time around.

In fact, Gates scored the Crimson's first five points against Dartmouth to pace a game-opening 7-0 run. Gates also scored five points in Harvard's 10-0 opening run that buried Boston University on Tuesday.

The opening minutes of a game may not always be as important as the closing minutes, but this weekend, Gates's early scoring against B.U. and Dartmouth allowed Harvard to gain breathing room that it never relinquished--thus reducing the final minutes of each game to garbage time.

If Gates keeps this up, she may never need to make a buzzer-beating winner for the rest of her life.

Monti played one of the best all-around halves of her career against Dartmouth last year when she had four field goals and four assists in the first period. This year, she had five assists to just one turnover--far and away her best ratio of the season.

Twice in the second half, Monti proved herself to be the only player in the league capable--in one swift motion--of maneuvering across the top of the key, throwing up a perfectly accurate shot and then pumping her fist in celebration. Her final score put Harvard up 12 with under two minutes to play and signaled a certain end to the Big Green comeback chances.

That Unhappy March Tradition

Harvard has failed to win the Dartmouth rematch each of the past three years, including last year's 96-74 thrashing at Dartmouth. Even the universally acclaimed '97-98 Harvard team fell, 87-76, at Leede in its final game before the Stanford upset.

Each of the past two years, Dartmouth has improved over the season's second half and garnered at least a share of the Ivy title while Harvard--mainly due to injuries--has fallen off significantly by the end of the season.

"I'm not going to let it [a loss in the Dartmouth rematch] happen this time," said Harvard Coach Kathy Delaney-Smith defiantly on Saturday. "If I can do anything to prevent that I will."

Last year, Dartmouth staged one of the most dramatic season turnarounds in Ivy history. The Big Green started just 6-6, but finished the year 20-7 overall, and earned a No. 13 seed in the NCAA Tournament--the highest seeding ever for an Ivy team. The season culminated with the team falling just short of an upset against defending national champion Purdue.

After the victory over Harvard that closed out the regular season, Courtney Banghart--Dartmouth's nationally-recognized three-point superstar who graduated last year--attributed the Big Green's amazing turnaround entirely to the rippling effect that the Harvard loss in January had on the team.

"As much as losing to Harvard is always a bad thing, it was the best thing that could have ever happened to our team," said Banghart, surrounded by a massive crowd of adoring grade-school girls while towing a bouquet of flowers for every record she had broken that night. "We changed everything. Everyone stepped up. We're just a whole different team now."

The graduation of Banghart, however, will make it difficult for Dartmouth to repeat its dramatic turnaround.

"I think [Dartmouth] is young, and they miss Courtney Banghart--not only for her ability to score, but she's an emotional leader for them," Delaney-Smith said. "I'm not sure who their emotional leader is."

The Harvard coach does, however, hope that the Big Green improves enough to deal some losses to the Crimson's rival opponents.

"Harvard and Dartmouth played the toughest non-conference schedules," Delaney-Smith said. "Hopefully that will be a learning situation and we'll both knock Penn out of it."

This year's Ivy standings are as unpredictable as ever, as each of the league's top teams has lost a first-team player to graduation. The league's upcoming first full weekend of games should be fairly telling. The Crimson is at Yale and Brown, both up-and-coming teams with sophomore stars--Maria Smear for the Bulldogs and Barbara Maloni for the Bears.

Harvard's ability to carry its momentum from beating Dartmouth through the course of this season will depend largely on its health and what its youth can learn day in and day out.

"The league is up for grabs," Delaney-Smith said. "This win doesn't necessarily mean anything. The league is young, including us."