For 10 minutes Saturday in New York, the Penn and Columbia women’s basketball teams had a real game going, with no evidence of which was undefeated in Ivy play and which had just one Ivy win.
But basketball games are 40 minutes long, and after the first quarter, the Lions roared past the Quakers for a 79-54 romp that kept Columbia atop the league standings and Penn near the bottom.
The Quakers were able to challenge the Lions — scoring the first seven points and maintaining a 16-15 advantage at the end of the first quarter — with 43% shooting for that first period, including four of nine on threes. The rest of the way, the visitors hit just 20% of their threes (three of 15) and 32% on their shots overall. That’s never going to be enough to challenge this year’s Lions.
The second quarter offered a dramatic contrast between Penn’s collapse and Columbia’s ascendance.
After a Penn miss, Cecelia Collins knocked down a three-pointer to put Columbia up by two points. Simone Sawyer responded with a layup one minute into the quarter to tie the score. And Penn proceeded to miss every one of its shots for the next 11-plus minutes, into the second half, as Columbia went on a 26-point run to essentially put the game out of reach at halftime.
“We just realized that the first quarter wasn’t good enough, and we were able to just step on the gas and, you know, give it to them,” Columbia sophomore guard Riley Weiss told ESPN+ after the game.
Weiss had the hottest hand on the day with 25 points, mostly on her six threes, on 8-for-11 shooting. But Columbia as a whole shot a nearly unbeatable 28-for-58 from the floor (48%).
Collins, Columbia’s 6-foot senior guard, finished the afternoon with a double-double: 10 rebounds and 19 points on 6-for-9 shooting, including three treys in six tries. She also had five assists, contributing substantially to Columbia’s remarkable total for the day: 24 assists for 28 baskets. Kitty Henderson was one of the few Lions with an off scoring day, but she contributed seven assists and eight rebounds.
Columbia beat Penn badly on the boards, with 44 rebounds to 28 for the Quakers.
“Our team has so many weapons … Everyone can score. Everyone can defend,” Weiss said.
Two Penn players hit double figures, each with 14 points: sophomore point guard Mataya Gayle, who also collected six rebounds, and junior guard Simone Sawyer, a defensive specialist who scored some of those points off the six steals she notched.
Columbia (14-4, 5-0 Ivy) goes back on the road Friday night to face Harvard (15-2, 4-1) in the struggle for the top spot in the conference. Penn (10-8, 1-4), meanwhile, heads to Brown (9-9, 3-2) for what could be a crucial game — the fight for the fourth slot in Ivy Madness behind Columbia, Harvard and Princeton. Penn edged Brown for that honor last season and nearly upset Princeton in the tournament.