W. Hoops Faces Final Test Before Tourney

The Harvard women’s basketball team may already be the Ivy League champions, but that doesn’t make tonight’s game at Dartmouth any less important. On the line tonight for the Crimson are seeding, redemption and pride.

The main practical implication for tonight’s game is that a victory will keep Harvard in solid position for a 13th or 14th seed in the NCAA field.

But the game is about much more than seeding.

After clinching the Ivy title on Friday, Harvard Coach Kathy Delaney-Smith made it clear that any post-celebratory letdown would be unacceptable.

“We cannot lose to Brown or Dartmouth,” she said. “It’s about pride. Period.”

One of the less celebrated achievements of the 1998 Harvard team that upset top-seeded Stanford in the NCAA tournament is that it lost its final game of the regular season, 78-67, at Dartmouth.

“It was one of the most painful losses of my life,” Delaney-Smith said.

The juniors and seniors on this year’s team weren’t around for that defeat, but they do have painful memories from traveling to Dartmouth to close out the 1999-2000 season. That year, Harvard beat Dartmouth to open its Ivy schedule, but by the time it came to Hanover at season’s end, Dartmouth had already clinched the Ivy title.

Harvard hoped to redeem itself with an upset, but instead it became the victim of a Dartmouth tournament send-off party in a circus-like atmosphere. The Big Green blew the Crimson away, 96-74, led by eight threes by then-senior Courtney Banghart and a near-perfect shooting night from then-freshman Katharine Hanks.

“I have no doubt about our memory on that one,” said senior guard Jenn Monti.

Two years later, Harvard (21-5, 12-1 Ivy) and Dartmouth (11-15, 7-6) have switched roles as champion and spoiler. Dartmouth enters the game having won four straight Ivy games over Columbia, Cornell, Brown and Yale, and will no doubt be highly motivated to close out its season by topping the league champ.

Hanks, now a junior, enters the day as the Ivy League’s leading scorer at 20.8 points per game. A minor subplot for the evening will be whether sophomore Hana Peljto—second in the league at 20.4 ppg—can come back to win the league scoring title today. Each player has played 24 games, and Peljto trails Hanks in total points, 498-489. Both rank in the top 20 nationally in scoring.

Making up nine points is certainly within Peljto’s ability. She netted a career high and outscored Hanks, 36-16, in Harvard’s 88-77 victory over Dartmouth in January. Other than her exceptional performance against Harvard at Hanover two years ago, Hanks has struggled against the Crimson’s height. The addition of 6’3 freshman Reka Cserny to the Crimson’s lineup this year hasn’t made things any easier for Hanks.

Junior Keri Downs has emerged as Dartmouth’s second go-to scorer behind Hanks this season. She leads the Ivies in three-point shooting, having made 45-of-104 (43.3 percent) this season, with five of those threes coming in one half against the Crimson in January. Three-point defense has not been one of the Crimson’s strengths this season, though the team has improved over the course of the season and now stands fifth in the Ivies at 33.5 percent.

Downs and Hanks may be Dartmouth’s statistical leaders, but Harvard won’t be taking anyone lightly, given what’s at stake tonight. In the last Harvard-Dartmouth game, the Big Green’s Courtney Lewis and Katie Skelly both surprised the Crimson, scoring 28 points combined in a season in which each has averaged below 10.

But it will take more depth than that to top a Harvard program that has won 12 games in a row and three straight against Dartmouth. To make matters worse for the Big Green, it will be the Crimson seniors’ last Ivy game—one they fully expect to win.