SOONER OR TAITER: Harvard Proves Mettle With Win Over BC

It’s just very improbable.

That’s how Harvard women’s basketball coach Kathy Delaney-Smith described her squad’s 68-58 Dec. 28 road win over Boston College, the city’s finest college team and a formidable opponent in the ACC—without a doubt the most murderous conference in women’s college basketball.

Delaney-Smith, always a dead-on analytical observer of her own team, needed just four words to sum up one of Harvard’s finest wins in school history.

And given the Crimson’s non-conference woes prior to its cross-town showdown with the Eagles, ‘improbable’ hit the bullseye.

Harvard entered the game at 1-10, the team’s lone win coming against San Jose State, then 0-7, in a tournament game in Berkeley, Calif. The Crimson had been spanked by then-No. 16 Cal, downed by streaking Wisconsin, and had lost a hard-fought home game to No. 23 BYU.

And the Eagles? BC was 9-3 and had won five of its last six. Just a month earlier, the Eagles dropped a double-overtime thriller to then-No. 6 Ohio State in an 80-72 loss.

Improbable it was—both that Harvard got to play the game, and that the Crimson won it. Though Harvard frequently squares off against BU and Northeastern, the Crimson had not faced BC since 2002, when the Eagles scorched Harvard 88-49.

Before that game, however, Delaney-Smith’s Crimson squad had claimed three consecutive wins over the Eagles, those coming in 1987, 1994 and 1995. BC, formerly a member of the Big East Conference—home to UConn—often used its non-conference schedule to pick up the valuable RPI points needed for an at-large NCAA bid, and Harvard didn’t always make the cut for the Eagles’ non-conference slate.

And after the Crimson’s statement win on Dec. 28, I doubt BC head coach Cathy Inglese will be asking Delaney-Smith for a rematch in the near future. The loss for BC could become as big as the win was for Harvard. BC shares the ACC label with powerhouses Maryland, North Carolina, and Duke, and a home loss to Harvard could leave the NCAA selection committee in doubt if the Eagles are on the bubble come tournament time.

But for Harvard, a reeling team in need of confidence, the post-Christmas shocker in Chestnut Hill could right the Crimson’s ship both this year and in the seasons to come.

“We have to learn that we’re good and understand that we’re good,” Delaney-Smith said of her young team, which starts three sophomores and one junior, three of whom missed part or all of their freshman seasons due to injury. “The fastest way to getting there is to get wins, and a BC win might count for more than one win.”

Perhaps more than any coach save George Mason’s Jim Larranaga, Delaney-Smith knows the weight of such non-conference triumphs against nationally recognized opponents. In 1998, her 16th-seeded Crimson team did the impossible, stunning No. 1-seeded Stanford in the NCAA Tournament with a 71-67 win in Palo Alto. Harvard was then led by First-Team All-American Allison Feaster, and the Crimson’s victory marked the first—and perhaps last—time a 16-seed downed a No. 1 in the NCAA Tournament.

Since then, the Crimson has won or split three Ivy titles, had three 20-win seasons, and has sent two of its finest players off to professional careers in Europe. Hana Peljto ’04 and Reka Cserny ’05 combined for three Ivy Player of the Year awards; both were Ivy Rookie of the Year as freshmen and four-time first team All-Ivy performers.

Peljto was a freshman just two years after the win over Stanford, and Cserny came a year later. The adage “Harvard sells itself” has some truth to it, but a big-time win over a women’s basketball powerhouse doesn’t hurt, either.

The Crimson’s win over BC did not carry the same weight—or, perhaps more importantly, come at the same time—as did the win over Stanford, but Harvard’s toppling of the Eagles will become the benchmark of an as yet lukewarm 2006-2007 season and a tool of great import in the future.

The improbable and impossible wins, like those over Stanford and BC, make more probable the same results once big games roll around again. National exposure and impressive performances against top-25 opponents help smaller Division 1 programs land recruits who might have been snatched up by bigger programs.

Ask junior guard Lindsay Hallion, who led all scorers with 18 in the win over BC. She grew up in Westwood, Mass., and sent letters to the BC point guard every week when she was a middle schooler. BC carries the pedigree in Boston, and the Eagles have the recruits and the NCAA history to back it up.

“Around here people don’t really respect Harvard,” Hallion said. “We get respect, but in comparison to BC, people don’t see us as on the same level. It’s pretty cool that on the one chance I ever had to play BC, we beat them.”

The shake-up in the Boston area will likely be small, as Harvard doesn’t count solely upon local recruits to fill its roster. But it does take the spotlight off of Chestnut Hill for the briefest of moments and shines it instead on Harvard.

“You know, Lindsay was the girl with the posters who was looking for autographs at BC games,” co-captain Christiana Lackner said. “Maybe we’ll have more little girl fans at our games and they’ll know that there are more college basketball options for young girls in the Boston area.”

For now, however, the BC victory gives the Crimson an indispensable—if improbable—boost going into the Ivy schedule, where Harvard is after its fourth Ivy title in six seasons. And if BC goes on to get an NCAA tournament berth and Harvard wins an Ivy League title, the Dec. 28th win over the Eagles could become the Crimson’s holiday gift that keeps on giving.

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