With two weeks to go till the Ivy women’s tournament begins, Yale moved into a second-place tie with Penn in the conference standings, 71-54.
Since Columbia kept pace with Yale and Penn at 7-4 in league play by winning at Harvard, the odds seem good that those three will join Princeton in the tournament in Boston.
Roxy Barahman had a stellar night for Yale (17-7 overall), and the defensive-minded Penn team (17-8) had no answer for her. The senior guard scored 29 points on 10-for-21 shooting, including 4-for-7 from beyond the arc, and served up five assists as the Bulldogs won at the Palestra for the first time in seven years.
Neither team looked like a winner for most of the first half: For one stretch, the two teams combined went 2-for-20. Penn, coming off a drubbing three nights earlier at Princeton, still looked a bit shellshocked and shot just 22% in the first quarter and 25% in the second. Yale did marginally better generally, and markedly better from three, for a 29-23 lead. But it seemed like whichever team could get out of its funk after halftime would take the game — and that’s what Yale did.
In the third quarter, Yale couldn’t miss, shooting 71% from the field and putting the contest away.
Penn’s main weapons misfired all night. The Red & Blue’s game relies on junior center Eleah Parker, and though her teammates had some success feeding the ball to her (especially in the first half), she managed just four points on 2-for-12 shooting. Freshman guard Kayla Padilla, who usually lights up the scoreboard, did even worse: 1-for-12 from the field, three points total.
For the first time this season, no Penn player managed double figures; Phoebe Sterba and Michae Jones led with nine points apiece, and backup center Emily Anderson had seven.
Though Barahman had the big numbers for Yale, as she usually does, she didn’t do it alone: Forward Alex Cade came off the bench for eight points on 4-for-7 shooting, and Camilla Emsbo collected 10 points along with seven rebounds.
Yale will have just short time to celebrate before going to Princeton, which will celebrate Senior Night and Bella Alarie’s last home game. Penn will have its own Senior Night, hosting Brown.