Penn and La Salle were playing a perfectly good women’s basketball Friday afternoon when the Quakers’ Sarah Miller turned it into a sharpshooting match, leading to a Penn win, 74-63.
The 5-foot-10 guard from Phoenix scored a bucket in the first quarter, but she really took off in the second with four straight threes, then added a fifth in the third quarter before her first miss of the day. All in all, she went 6-for-7 plus 4-for-4 on foul shots for a game-high 21 points. Fellow freshman Katie Collins also had a 6-for-7 day, though closer to the basket and in less spectacular fashion, finishing with 12 points and 11 rebounds.
The win was coach Mike McLaughlin’s 250th at Penn.
The game at Villanova’s Finneran Pavilion was for negative bragging rights of sorts: to determine who would avoid becoming the first sixth-place team in women’s Big 5 history, now that Drexel has joined the club. The teams play in subgroups of three – Penn lost to Saint Joseph’s and Nova last month – and then the bottom, middle and top teams in the two pods face off in a tripleheader, the Big 5 Classic.
Once Penn and La Salle were off the court, Saint Joseph’s cruised past Drexel for third place, and Temple beat Villanova for the title.
Collins and Miller already had earned spots in this young Penn team’s starting lineup. They both could be in the running for Ivy Rookie of the Year. Collins, the sole forward in the starting five, blocked La Salle’s first shot and two others to give her 21 blocks for the season, twice as many as anyone else in the Ivies. She’s also the Ivies’ fifth-leading rebounder and can shoot from outside and at the foul line as well as in the paint.
The two freshmen’s strong shooting made up for some careless Penn ballhandling and the Explorers’ knack for jumping into passing lanes for steals – 13 in the game. Penn had a deplorable 21 turnovers, to La Salle’s 11. But La Salle failed to take advantage of its chances, scoring on just a third of its shots and just under a quarter of its attempted threes. Penn hit on 48% of its shots, 33% from deep and 88% from the foul line. And Penn won on the boards, with 48 rebounds to La Salle’s 34.
The two teams played a back-and-forth first half. The Explorers ran an 11-point streak early in the second quarter to build an eight-point lead. But then Miller caught fire, sinking three threes in 95 seconds. The lead bounced back and forth, with the Quakers finishing the half with four Miller free throws and a layup by Stina Almqvist to lead by four. They never trailed again, building a lead of as much as 19 points in the fourth quarter.
Almqvist, the Ivies’ second-leading scorer, finished with a double-double: 18 points and 11 rebounds. And point guard Mataya Gayle came within shouting distance of a triple-double: 11 points, seven rebounds and nine assists, including highlight-reel feeds in quick succession to Simone Sawyer and Almqvist. Sawyer, who two years ago was a freshman scoring phenom herself, had her best game of the young season, with nine points on 4-for-8 shooting – just shy of giving the Quakers five players in double figures.
La Salle was led by Ashleigh Connor’s 13 points and Aryss Macktoon’s 12. The Explorers fell to 5-5.
Penn (7-3) now starts a two-week break for finals. It returns to the Palestra to face Delaware State on Dec. 20.