Women's Basketball Looks To Compete With Young Core

Last year’s Harvard women’s basketball season can be summed up by two home Ivy League games.

The first was a blowout—a 50-point loss to Princeton. The Crimson allowed 96 points, the most given up to a conference opponent since 2000.

The second, just a week later, was a hard-fought, organized 65-55 victory that snapped a surging Yale team’s seven-game win streak. Eight Harvard players got on the board, handing the Bulldogs their first conference loss of the season.

The 2014-2015 team was, in a word, inconsistent. The Crimson, which split its Ancient Eight record, winning seven and losing seven, lost in its first meetings with Dartmouth, Columbia, and Brown, only to decisively top all three teams later in the season. The team made just 18 percent of its three-pointers one game and 60 percent the next—the outcome of every game was unpredictable.

“Last year we had high points and low points, but I don’t think we were ever as consistent as we needed to be in any regard and in any statistic,” Harvard coach Kathy Delaney-Smith said.

However, according to the team, the past is completely irrelevant to this season. As they tell it, Harvard women’s basketball is reinventing itself.

A change is perhaps unavoidable, because the Crimson lost two of its top three scorers, Temi Fagbenle ’15 and Erin McDonnell ’15, to graduation, as well as sophomore center Anna Lachenauer, who left the team earlier this year.

Because crucial spots have opened up, Harvard will be forced to look to a number of new faces, including seven freshmen, to make their mark this season. Although Delaney-Smith is confident in the abilities of her less experienced players, she also acknowledges that the transition to college basketball may take time.

The phrase the coach uses again and again is “learning curve.” It is inevitable that it may take a few games for players to to get comfortable in unfamiliar roles. But it won’t be only the rookies who will need to adjust to an altered game plan, because the Crimson will be completely changing the way that it plays.

“As a team, we are not even comparable to last year,” co-captain AnnMarie Healy said. “Everything is new. What we’ve been doing in the past hasn’t been working, so we’re really excited about our new system.”

The key to this squad’s strategy is a change of focus.

Last year, the Harvard front line ranked in the top three in the Ancient Eight for scoring, rebounding, and assists, but the team wasn’t able to bolster its offensive production at the other end of the court. The Crimson had the worst scoring defense in the league last year, allowing an average of 69.7 points per game.

A stronger defense will be key to this year’s new system, something that Delaney-Smith attributed to the fact that five of the seven incoming freshmen are guards.

“We’re very athletic, and we’re very deep in the guard spot,” Delaney-Smith said. “I think we’re going to be able to run the floor very well, and defensively I think that allows us a lot of versatility.

With the bevy of young talent this season, Harvard will look to win its first Ivy title since 2008. The Crimson’s new playbook will likely feature a movement away from last year’s attack-driven strategy towards a team that finds its strength in a guard-heavy backcourt.

The attempt to integrate both a new offense and new players could lead to some of the inconsistency that plagued Harvard last season. However, the fact that many of the players come in with a clean slate is a double-edged sword; it means they have a lot to learn, but little to override.

This is not to say that the freshmen will have to reshape the team all on their own. Harvard’s co-captains, Healy and Kit Metoyer, have a wealth of experience between them. Healy remained consistent throughout last season, shooting 52 percent from the floor, which was second best in the Ivy League, and averaging 13.4 points a game. Metoyer, meanwhile, will be responsible for mentoring the group of new point guards as the most veteran player at the point on the team.

Harvard hopes to combine this abundance of leadership with the raw ability of its rookies to find consistency in their performance. If the Crimson can avoid the all-too-familiar specter of injury, it may be in a position to make noise in the Ivies.

Though Harvard is a team confronted with the challenge of finding a new identity, it is certainly not alone in the Ancient Eight.

Last year’s conference champion, No. 25 Princeton, lost its top performer and the catalyst to its offense in Blake Dietrick, who led the Ancient Eight in total points and assists in 2014-2015 and was unanimously named Ivy League Player of the Year.

Penn, which finished second in the conference last year, will face a similar problem. The Quakers graduated four seniors, all of whom appeared in every game last season. Yale lost only one player to graduation, but the Bulldogs took on a new head coach in Allison Guth, and adjusting to her style of coaching may take time.

In a league in flux, with a roster packed with new faces, Harvard will look to an overhauled system in hopes of finding its footing faster than its rivals. But even in the midst of change, the Crimson is grounded by an unchanging objective.

“Our goal is always to win the Ivy title,” Delaney-Smith said. “That stays constant year in and year out. We did lose some incredibly talented players, so it looks like the hill that we have to climb is a little higher, but I think the league is going to be full of surprises.”