W. Hoops Notebook: Cserny Helps Peljto Do Her One Better

After Saturday’s 88-77 victory over Dartmouth, the Harvard women’s basketball team’s players and coaches universally agreed that sophomore forward Hana Peljto owed much of her 36-point performance to the complementary presence of freshman center Reka Cserny. Senior point guard Jenn Monti, who dished out 10 assists on Saturday, believed that Cserny’s 33-point performance against Manhattan opened things up for Peljto against Dartmouth.

“I think Reka has been attracting a lot of attention, especially after scoring 33 in the last game,” Monti said. “That’s a tough combination to guard because you can’t pick one.”

Dartmouth was leaving Peljto with wide-open looks at the basket for much of the late first half and early second half, and Peljto did not miss, earning 17 of her team’s points in a row during a 10-minute stretch.

The Big Green finally gave Peljto more attention in the last 15 minutes, when she scored just eight and fell into foul trouble. But Harvard still came through because Monti and junior center Sarah Johnson each stepped up with seven second-half points, while sophomore forward Tricia Tubridy added five.

This past week was not the first time that two different Harvard players had scored 30 points in back-to-back games. On Feb. 6, 1998, current Eliot House tutor Suzie Miller ’98 scored 33 points—including a school-record eight three-pointers—in a 90-74 win against Penn. The next day, current Charlotte Sting forward Allison Feaster ’98 scored 34 points in a 56-53 loss to Princeton.

Sweet Charity

This year’s Crimson club is on pace to be the greatest free-throw shooting team in school history. Thirteen games into the season, Harvard is shooting 77.6 percent. The school record is 76.2 percent, set in the ’91-’92 season.

Leading the way for the Crimson are Cserny and Peljto, who are shooting 88.9 percent and 85.0 percent from the line, respectively. Naturally, the two have taken twice as many free throws as anyone else on the team.

Harvard’s free-throw percentage is easily the best in the Ivies. Dartmouth came into Saturday’s game shooting 73.0 percent for the season, and made 4-of-5 free throws in the first half but just 6-of-11 in the second.

Harvard was 5-for-7 from the line in the second half. But thanks to Cserny and then Tubridy, the Crimson earned the offensive rebounds on both free-throw misses.

The NCAA has not released national statistics since Dec. 17, so it is difficult to tell precisely how Harvard’s free-throw shooting stands nationally. But assuming that other teams’ percentages remain relatively constant, the Crimson will be in the top ten nationally once the current rankings are tabulated.

Glass Ceiling

The Crimson led Dartmouth 44-32 at the halftime, but the teams’ field-goal percentages weren’t even close—just not the way one would expect. The Big Green shot 56.5 percent from the floor while only 39.0 percent of Harvard’s shots fell through.

The difference was the offensive glass, where Harvard beat out Dartmouth by an absurd margin of 16-3 in the first half. Peljto, Tubridy and Cserny each had as many or more offensive rebounds than the entire Dartmouth team.

“Just try to box out Hana, Reka, and Tricia Tubridy,” Harvard Coach Kathy Delaney-Smith said. “They’re just relentless. They don’t stop.”

Saturday’s performance was a far cry from Wednesday’s against Manhattan, when the Crimson had just one offensive rebound in the first half. Harvard believed it had the rebounding edge against Dartmouth and exploited it to near-perfection.

“We knew they were vulnerable. We knew their zone offered a lot of weak-side rebounding,” Peljto said.

Downs, But Not Out

Dartmouth junior co-captain Keri Downs entered Saturday’s game averaging 17.7 points per game. In the first half, though, she was held scoreless and had accounted for half of the Big Green’s 10 first-half misses including one air ball.

Then she finished the game as Dartmouth’s leading scorer with 18 points and five threes in the second half.

Monti and Delaney-Smith both said that Harvard didn’t take Downs any lighter in the second half after her abysmal first half.

“In the scouting report we saw that she had 18 per game, and we said at halftime, players like that usually don’t go away,” Monti said.

Downs helped keep Dartmouth in a game that easily could have devolved into a Harvard romp. The Crimson acknowledged that it had defensive breakdowns that it simply needed to improve on.

“You won’t beat certain teams if one kid has five threes in the second half,” Monti said.

The Full Monti

Monti had easily one of the most complete games of her career on Saturday, scoring 15 points—one short of her career-high—and dishing out 10 assists.

“Jenn Monti was a tremendous leader on the floor tonight and every time we needed an extra rebound or run, we got it,” Delaney-Smith said.

Monti had just five three-pointers in her first eight games, but has since lit up opponents for 13 in Harvard’s last five contests, including three against the Big Green. Monti’s improved shooting has been critical to the recent improvement in Peljto’s and Cserny’s production, giving defenses one more threat to worry about.

“I think I got less perfectionist in the past,” Monti said. “I was like, ‘I’m a point guard, that’s not my job.’ But I’ve got a little more liberal and that’s helped opening up the posts.”

Another Fantastic Victory

Saturday’s game drew a spirited crowd of 1,727, far and away the highest total for the Crimson at Lavietes this season. That number was a bit down from the Ivy opener two years ago when the team drew over 2,000, but that game was televised on DirectTV—a fact that was heavily advertised by the team before the game and may have been a cause for the slight increase in support.

Doug Flutie, the current San Diego Chargers quarterback and former Natick High and Boston College star, was among those in attendance. Flutie, whose team lost its last nine games to close out the season at 5-11, was cheering for Harvard throughout the evening.

Also making an appearance on Saturday was Laela Sturdy ’00, Harvard’s leading scorer during the first two post-Feaster years. After graduation, Sturdy—a Mitchell Scholar—attended Trinity College in Dublin where she earned a masters in multimedia systems, before working as a consultant for the World Bank in Kenya in recent months. Sturdy said that throughout the game, she had to fight the urge to throw on a jersey, jump on the court and get in the game.