Harvard Just Going Through Growing Pains

If there was ever a time to be young, now’s the time.

That slogan is bound to be applied to nearly every generation, but rarely is it applied to a basketball team.

It was youth, after all, that soiled Michigan’s chances at an NCAA basketball title in 1993, what with then-freshman Chris Webber calling the timeout that wasn’t. And this year’s Duke team, for all of J.J. Redick’s heroics and Coach K’s cult following in Durham, starts two freshmen in need of postseason seasoning.

But if the Harvard women’s basketball team had to pick a time, the 2005-2006 season was the prime year to be young and inexperienced.

As the Crimson fell in a heartbreaker in Providence and got embarrassed at Princeton, Harvard coach Kathy Delaney-Smith’s rag-tag rookie bunch got a season’s worth of lessons.

The Crimson gave up a buzzer-beater to Brown at home, got pummeled by Dartmouth in the Ivy opener and the Ivy Finale, threw a game away against the Tigers and came out sluggish against Penn twice. Only two times did Harvard sweep an Ivy weekend, a rare up-and-down for any Delaney-Smith-coached team.

But each time, a group of four freshmen earned valuable minutes against the Ivy League’s best. Freshman Katie Rollins learned well what happens when you come out sluggish defensively against the league’s premiere post player, as Princeton’s Becky Brown buried 24 first-half points in the teams’ first meeting.

Sophomore Lindsay Hallion, who missed all of her freshman season with a torn ACL, logged serious time in the point guard spot. And Emily Tay, who began the season trying to make a play with every touch, finally put it all together in a 24-point performance at Cornell.

“I’ve never in my 24 years here played this many young kids this much,” said Delaney-Smith after a win over Penn in February. “And that’s why I think Dartmouth [Ivy champ in 2004 and 2005] is who they are. Three years, four years ago, they were in the middle of the pack and struggling to be .500 because they played young kids so much.”

Despite the mediocrity of 2005-2006, with its slow starts and sporadic offensive outbursts, this Crimson team should be the Ivy’s best by the time league play rolls around next winter.

“The difference between freshmen and sophomores is black and white,” said Delaney-Smith following a disappointing 69-57 loss to Princeton at Lavietes Pavilion in February. “This will be an entirely different team next year just because they played.”

When Delaney-Smith won her first Ivy League title in 1986, her freshman-laden squad had finished an abominable 3-22 two seasons before and just 8-18 the previous year.

This year’s 12-15 record is no 3-23, but next year’s team will inherit an Ivy League whose premier players are on the way out. Brown’s Sarah Hayes, Dartmouth’s Angie Soriaga and Jeannie Cullen, and Princeton’s Becky Brown and Katy O’Brien all graduate this spring. Penn loses senior forward Jennifer Fleischer.

Harvard is young and learning just as other teams are losing their cores, experienced nuclei that put them in contention for the title this season.

The Crimson will return three of its top four scorers next year, with Hallion and freshmen Rollins and Tay all primed for breakout seasons. Reserves Niki Finelli and Emma Moretzsohn, as well as Liz Tindal, who sat all year with a torn meniscus, round out a potent sophomore contingent for next year.

Moreover, Harvard brings back the most in a perpetually cyclical league, one that gives rise to great teams for a few years and then sees another team take over the top spot as others reload.

Consider this: in the 32 years of Ivy League women’s basketball, one team has captured three or four consecutive titles four different times in league history.

The shake-up of this year’s hierarchy leaves the Crimson—perched at 8-6 this season—as an all-too-dangerous dark horse in next year’s title hunt.

And the previous times Harvard has strung together a series of titles—three straight from 1996-1998 and a pair in 2002 and 2003—the streak began after a vaunted freshman class had a year to grow up. Allison Feaster ‘98 led the Crimson to three straight titles and a shocking upset of No. 1 seed Stanford in the 1998 NCAA Tournament. Hana Peljto ‘04 and company came back after their freshman year to guide Harvard to back-to-back titles in their sophomore and junior seasons.

The growing pains—two sloppy performances against Yale, a slow first half at lowly Columbia—are almost over.

And as the bannered rafters in Lavietes Pavilion can attest, youth is not the only thing worth having.

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