Crimson Seeks Road Wins

Tonight, for the first time all year, the Harvard women’s basketball team will find itself in the neighborhood of instant validation.

If Harvard beats league heavyweight Princeton (13-5, 4-1 Ivy) to continue an upward trend that began with a pair of wins last weekend, it will have affirmed its position in a four-team championship hunt.

If it loses, the Crimson (7-11, 3-2) will return from its road trip, which also includes a tilt tomorrow with league doormat Penn (3-15, 1-4), without any real hope for its fourth title of the 21st century.

According to head coach Kathy Delaney-Smith, though, no one contest is that crucial.

“We can’t think in terms of that,” she said. “My team’s too young for that. From our standpoint, I don’t build any game up.”

Just three weeks ago, Harvard entered its reading period break in a funk. It had lost convincingly to Dartmouth, a team of vast experience and superior efficiency on both sides of the ball.

It had opened its season 4-10 and suffered an eight-game losing streak,?its longest stretch of futility in more than twenty years. And it had entrusted its season to a company of talented but inconsistent rookies.

In the absence of regular competition, it all came together for the Crimson during late-January intra-squad scrimmages.

“We’re definitely on the upswing,” junior forward Christiana Lackner said of the team, which has gone 3-1 with only a two-point loss to second-place Brown since the Dartmouth defeat. “In the first half, we were still figuring out all of our roles. Now we’ve figured out our roles. We’re gelling. Our offense is together. Our defense is together.

“The week off helped,” she said.

So did the emergence of freshman Katie Rollins, who bounced back from injury after the winter break to recently manhandle Ivy League low-post defenses. Rollins has twice earned Ivy League Rookie of the Week honors while averaging 14.2 points in five starts. In those games, she has shot 62 percent from the field. Last weekend, she averaged nearly a point per minute.

“She’s been a great addition,” Lackner said. “I don’t know what the coaches expected. But when she came off her injury, she did her thing.”

Lackner will team with Rollins in the post, complimenting the picture with her productive rebounding (an average of 7.7 rebounds in four post-exam games) and strong defensive play.

Matched with Lackner, Rollins, and bruisers like 6’7 freshman Emma Moretzsohn and 6’1 sophomore Adrian Budischak will be Princeton’s frontcourt duo of Becky Brown (15.3 ppg) and Meagan Cowher (14.4 ppg), the league’s leading and fifth-leading scorers.

“They have a lot of nice frontcourt players,” Delaney-Smith said. “But we have nice frontcourt players. And we have enough of them that we can see who does the job. And if they don’t, we can try to see who can.”

The Crimson might find it hard, similarly, to do battle within range of the menacing glare of one of the NFL’s most famous head coaches.

Super Bowl champion Bill Cowher will likely be watching the game from the bleachers of Princeton’s Jadwin Gym to cheer on his daughter Meagan, the Ivy League’s reigning Rookie of the Year.

“I’m kind of expecting him to come,” said Lackner, a lifelong Steelers fan who regularly faced Cowher in high school at Pittsburgh’s Oakland Catholic. “He’s actually a really nice guy. But it doesn’t matter.”

Once again, senior Jessica Holsey will miss the weekend with the lingering effects of a concussion. She has not played since January 7.

Tonight’s and tomorrow’s games begin at 7 p.m.

—Staff writer Alex McPhillips can be reached at rmcphill@fas.harvard.edu.