A week after falling short at Princeton, Columbia women’s basketball invaded the Palestra for an emphatic, wire-to-wire win Saturday over Penn, 85-55.
As she so often does, senior Abbey Hsu led the onslaught: 28 points on 10-for-17 shooting, including a deadly 6-for-10 on three-pointers, plus 10 rebounds. With 1,879 career points, she’s just a few games from becoming the first Columbia player — men’s or women’s — to hit 2,000.
Hsu told ESPN+ the focus leading up to the game — in fact, all season — has been on defense.
“We had lapses where, you know, it wasn’t Columbia basketball here, but I think overall we did make a huge step from last week, and that’s all you can ask for, is to get better every week,” Hsu said.
It wasn’t just Hsu.
The Lions hit 48% of their shots to the home team’s 32%, with 45% from deep (versus Penn’s 32%). After Columbia romped to a 20-2 lead in the first quarter, it never went cold enough to allow much of a Penn comeback. Penn sank buzzer-beaters to end each of the first three quarters to give the home crowd a lift, and a Jordan Obi jumper early in the second period cut the lead to nine points. But eight seconds later, Cecilia Collins hit a three for Columbia, and its lead was in double digits for the rest of the afternoon.
Collins, a junior transfer guard from Bucknell who was effective when these teams had their first Ivy match of the season three weeks earlier, was even more so this time, with 22 points on 7-for-13 shooting, seven rebounds and four assists. And first-year guard Riley Weiss came off the bench for 11 points in 16 minutes.
Columbia is a team of guards but dominated in the paint, as Penn had to spread its defense to contest Columbia’s outside shots. As a result, Columbia hauled in 48 rebounds to Penn’s 27, and 14 second-chance points to Penn’s nine.
For Penn, only freshman guard Mataya Gayle broke into double figures, hitting 21 points on 7-for-18 shooting with four assists.
Penn (10-8, 2-3 Ivy) will be at home again for two games next weekend: Friday night against a rising Brown team (13-5, 4-1) and Saturday night against Yale (4-14, 1-4). Columbia (13-5, 4-1) will be back home against Harvard (11-7, 4-1) and Dartmouth (6-11, 0-5).