BOOMER SOONER: Youth, Slow Starts Sully Ivy Title Run

On a night dedicated to seniors, it was Harvard’s youth that was front and center—and not in a way beneficial to the up-and-down women’s basketball team.

What came out on Saturday in a humbling 69-57 loss to second-place Princeton was but the continuation of a disturbing year-long trend: the Crimson stumbles out of the gate more often than not, burying itself in a first-half hole that even sustained second-half runs cannot fill.

That frustrating inconsistency—untimely droughts followed by offensive outbursts and stalwart defense—is a mark of the youth that has kept Harvard out of the Ivy title hunt since the fourth weekend of the season.

“We’ve tried to iron [the slow starts] out,” said Harvard head coach Kathy Delaney-Smith. “I guess people would say that’s what an inexperienced team does. If you open up any sports psychology books, they’re going to say that’s what you get with young players. And I have an exceptional amount of young players.”

Youth is the double-edged sword for this Harvard squad, as four different freshmen have led the team in scoring at various times this year. Nobody can question the talent of this year’s rookie class, which Delaney-Smith openly calls her best ever. But freshmen Katie Rollins and Niki Finelli were out until January with injury, and a season’s worth of injuries to co-captain Jess Holsey have forced Delaney-Smith to shuffle her hand.

The result? A lot of untested, inexperienced players asked to take over in crunch time, and a lot of frustrating losses that can be attributed to untimely lapses or meltdowns in the final minutes.

And on Saturday night, the Crimson found itself in an exceptionally large hole. With 7:00 remaining in the first half, Harvard stared at a 30-4 deficit. The Crimson began the game 2-of-15 from the floor and committed 11 turnovers in the first 13 minutes.

As for the Tigers? They nailed four three-pointers over that stretch—twice Harvard’s total for the game—and buried 13 of their first 16 shots.

If it were an anomaly, one might chalk up the sluggish effort to the emotions of Senior Night, to a hot-shooting and deep Princeton team, or to a stubborn rim that denied the Crimson the bottom of the net.

But this, the worst case of the first half drought, must be evaluated within the context of Harvard’s first halves all season long. In the season opener against DePaul, Harvard faced a 37-4 deficit with 6:14 to go. Against Dartmouth in January, the Big Green raced out to a 21-8 start, and Brown built up a 14-6 advantage within six minutes at Laivetes Pavilion. Twice against Penn—a poor outside shooting team that, at 4-20, is one of the Ivy League’s worst—the Crimson fell into near-double digit deficits in the game’s opening minutes.

“It’s always hard to have to chase a team, even if you know you’re better than them,” sophomore guard Lindsay Hallion said. “If you come out hitting shots right away, that gives you confidence for the rest of the game.”

These slow starts are the plague of this young team, on which nine of its 15 players are freshmen or sophomores. The pep talks and the focus on getting out of the gate fast have rarely produced the fiery start of which this team is capable.

The lackadaisical first minutes against the Tigers on Saturday just showed further why this team, for all its offensive firepower in sharpshooters Maureen McCaffery and Laura Robinson and slicers like Hallion and Tay, is four games out of the Ivy Title hunt.

It is genuinely too young to be in the race. The bursts of offensive productivity—most prominent late in the second half against Dartmouth, again in the second half in a home stand with Brown, and on Saturday against Princeton in the late first half—reveal what this team can and will do in the future.

But for every 10-2 run in Harvard’s favor, there’s a more fatal drought that makes the game of catch-up that much harder. Against Princeton, the game was over in 10 minutes. Against Dartmouth and its outside arsenal, a 10-point first half deficit was a death sentence. And even in the comeback wins against Penn, coach Delaney-Smith was all too vocal about her team’s struggle to get things started at the first horn.

“We don’t need to go down eight or 10—we should be playing defense that hard from the start.” Delaney-Smith said after the Penn game. “I thought we were tight offensively, took too long to connect with each other, took too long to see each other, were too robotic in the beginning.”

She might have used the same analysis on Saturday night. Harvard outscored Princeton 50-39 after that initial 30-4 deficit.

It was too little, too late—an adage too frequently applied to the losses incurred by this young Crimson team.

—Staff writer Aidan E. Tait can be reached at atait@fas.harvard.edu.