Taking stock of the big three at the midway point of the Ivy League women’s basketball season

With seven conference games in the books for every Ivy League women’s basketball team, the race for the regular season conference title has reached the halfway mark. 

The three teams picked in the preseason to contend for an Ivy League title – Princeton, Columbia and Harvard – have lived up to their billing, racking up big wins in the nonconference season and largely dominating the other five Ivy teams in league play.

Here’s where each of the big three stands as we head into the final five weeks of the Ivy League regular season:

The Columbia Lions look like a juggernaut

At the midway point of the Ivy League season, no team has looked more dominant than the Columbia Lions. 

At 7-0 in league play, Columbia stands alone in first place of the Ivy standings after sweeping the first round of games against Princeton and Harvard.

Coming into the season, two questions loomed over coach Megan Griffith’s squad. First, how would Columbia replace the scoring, leadership and overall outstanding play of Abbey Hsu, who graduated last year after setting the all-time scoring record at Columbia? 

Second, could Columbia contend with bigger teams given the Lions’ relative lack of size in the forward and center positions?

So far, Griffith and her staff have not only found answers to these questions, they’ve lifted the Lions to new heights.  

The Light Blue have moved past the loss of Hsu’s scoring production through the combined play of a trio of star guards: senior stalwarts Kitty Henderson and Cecelia Collins and super sophomore Riley Weiss.  

Weiss, the second-leading scorer in the Ivy League at 18 points per game, has performed brilliantly in recent weeks, scoring a career-high 26 points in a massive road win last weekend over Harvard and earning Ivy League Player of the Week honors two weeks in a row.

Kitty Henderson, considered by many to be the heart of soul of the Light Blue, has emerged as a Player of the Year candidate by providing leadership and high-volume production in nearly every category. The 5-foot-10 guard from Australia leads the Lions in rebounding, assists, and steals and contributes 13.9 points per game, second-best on the team.

Collins, in her second year in Morningside Heights since transferring from Bucknell, has put up big numbers akin to Henderson’s, averaging 13.5 points, 5.1 rebounds, 4.2 assists and 2.1 steals per game.  

Weiss, Henderson and Collins have combined to win Ivy League Player of the Week honors a whopping six times in the first 14 weeks of the season. No other team has had more than one player earn the honor so far.

Crucially, the Lions have also gotten solid post play from junior forwards Perri Page and Susie Rafiu. Though neither Page at 5-foot-11 nor Rafiu at 6-foot-1 towers over their counterparts in the paint, they have used superior athleticism, positioning and hard work to largely neutralize the height advantage of teams like Princeton, who can throw a tandem of 6-foot-4 centers at every opponent.

In fact, Columbia leads the Ivy League in rebounding, hauling in an average of 39.2 caroms per game. 

The Lions have proven to be especially adept at earning second-chance opportunities by fighting for offensive boards. Columbia has brought down 305 offensive rebounds so far this season, 53 more than second-place Harvard in this category.

With wins at home over Princeton and on the road over Harvard already in the bank, Columbia looks like a lock to win at least a share of the Ivy League regular season title for the third year in a row.

But Griffith isn’t resting on her team’s laurels just yet. Asked about her team’s mentality going into the second half of the Ivy season, Griffith sounded upbeat but determined:

“I sum it up, like, gas pedal, you know,” Griffith told reporters at her Tuesday press conference. “It’s like [we] can’t let our foot off of it. We got to push it. We got to hold it down. You got [to be] driving forward, you know? And, you know, I think that’s on me and my staff.”

2.  Princeton’s resilience has kept the Tigers in the thick of the race

The one word that best describes the Princeton Tigers this season is ‘resilient.’ 

After losing Madison St. Rose, Princeton’s star guard and leading scorer and rebounder, to a season-ending injury in only the fourth game of the season, the already youthful Tigers were assured of becoming notably younger and were likely to become less potent on offense.

But coach Carla Berube and her staff have done an incredible job in the absence of St. Rose of preparing a young group of talented players to compete and prevail.  At 6-1 in Ivy League play, the Tigers sit alone in second place, one game behind Columbia.

Berube has relied on a completely different formula for winning compared to her past five seasons at Old Nassau. In previous years, Berube could rely on gifted playmakers like former Ivy League Player of the Year Kaitlyn Chen to drive the action for Princeton. 

This season, however, Princeton is playing through post players like 6-foot-4 centers Parker Hill and Tabitha Amanze, who have considerable size advantages over their Ivy League counterparts.

Hill has especially stood out for Princeton in recent weeks. The senior from Bethesda, Md. is fully healthy this season for the first time in a couple of years and has displayed dazzling proficiency in the paint when fed the ball by her teammates.  

Hill leads the Ivy League by a mile in shooting percentage, converting an astounding 67% of her shots. Two weeks ago, she scored a career high 20 points and grabbed 12 rebounds in Princeton’s gritty win over a motivated Cornell squad in Ithaca. 

But Princeton doesn’t rely solely on its inside play to score. Berube has created sets in the half-court designed to generate high quality looks from the perimeter, where the Tigers have excelled this season. Princeton leads the Ivy League in three-point shooting percentage, converting 34.5% of its shots from beyond the arc. 

The presence of twin towers like Hill and Amanze have helped immensely with Princeton’s outside shooting as the Tigers consistently use inside-outside play and ball screens from their bigs to generate open looks for sharpshooters like Ashley Chea and Skye Belker.

On the defensive end, the Tigers are where you would expect them to be – at or near the top of the League. It took some time for Princeton’s young group of players to gel defensively, but since the beginning of Ivy League play, Berube’s club has come together to do what Berube-coached teams do – tenaciously contest every play and shut down the other team’s best players. 

In seven Ivy contests so far, Princeton has allowed only 46.4 points per game, best in the Ivy League. 

The Tigers persevered through a rigorous nonconference schedule and emerged with an impressive 9-4 record. Their current NET ranking of 45 has them squarely on the bubble, which means the Tigers can’t afford to drop any games against Quad 3 or Quad 4 opponents, such as Penn or Brown, in the event they need to campaign for an at-large berth in the NCAA Tournament.  

Overcoming a halftime deficit last Saturday to win at Brown, 60-47, on the back end of a back-to-back road weekend was a big step in the direction of remaining viable for an at-large berth and a good example of how Princeton has overcome challenges all year to stay on a winning track.

Princeton has struggled at times this season to handle full-court pressure, a big reason the Tigers crumbled in the second half at Columbia, where 24 turnovers ultimately did in the Orange and Black.

Berube and company will face relentless pressure in the return matchups against Harvard and Columbia in the coming weeks. If the Tigers hope to repeat as Ivy League regular season champions for a sixth time in a row, they’ll have to find a way to handle pressure better than they have so far this season.

3.  At Harvard, high expectations have not yet quite been met 

Harvard entered the season with arguably the best tandem of players in the Ivy League in senior guard Harmoni Turner and senior guard/forward Elena Rodriguez.

During the nonconference season, the Crimson caught fire, winning 11 of 12 games and collecting the League’s only Quad 1 win, a scintillating overtime triumph over then-No. 25 Indiana, 72-68, in overtime.

Led by Turner, the Crimson garnered national attention, registering votes in the Associated Press Top 25 poll starting in the fourth week of the season. Now in week 14, they’re still getting votes – five in the most recent poll released on Monday. (Columbia also tallied two votes). 

But the shine has come off the rose to a degree in Cambridge, primarily due to Harvard losing the two biggest games of the season so far, a 52-50 road loss at Princeton, and an 80-71 home loss to Columbia.  Overall, Harvard sits in third place in the Ivy League standings with a 5-2 conference record.

The loss to Princeton could be explained away. The Crimson were on the road, playing at Jadwin Gymnasium where the Tigers haven’t lost in 26 games, the third-longest home-winning streak in the nation. 

Plus, the Crimson could take solace in the anomaly that they simply did not shoot the ball well at Princeton, making only 37.3% of their shots and going 1-for-15 from deep. Finally, despite everything, the Tigers needed a buzzer-beater from Ashley Chea to get over the finish line, meaning that Harvard was only one play away from snapping Princeton’s vaunted home-floor winning streak.

The loss to Columbia, however, is harder to explain away. Playing before a national television audience and a packed house at Lavietes Pavilion, the Crimson were mauled by a disciplined, hard-working and hot-shooting Lions squad.  

Although a late run got the margin to under 10 points, Harvard never seriously challenged the Lions as Columbia got out to an early double-digit lead and led by as many as 19 points before settling for an 80-71 road win.

The loss continued a disturbing trend for coach Carrie Moore’s club of losing big games to Columbia and Princeton. 

Since Harvard’s stunning triumph over Columbia in the semifinals of the 2023 Ivy League Tournament, the Crimson have lost seven of their last eight combined clashes with the Lions and the Tigers.

What will it take for Harvard to get over the hump and defeat the duopoly of Princeton and Columbia?  

For starters, Turner has to rise to the occasion when the spotlight is burning brightest. 

At Princeton, Turner was largely held in check by Princeton’s best defender, Olivia Hutcherson. In fact, with a chance to win the game in its dying seconds, Moore opted to go to Rodriquez on Harvard’s final possession rather than Turner, who leads the Ivy League in scoring with 21.2 points per game.

In the Columbia game, Turner led her team with 21 points, but much of that production came late in the second half when the game was largely out of reach. 

In her weekly media availability prior to the Columbia game, Moore acknowledged how hard she’s rooting for Turner to succeed in the biggest moments.

“I just want so much for her, and she’s worked so hard,” Moore said. “She’s been overlooked so many times. She’s come up short, so many times, like, you know, I just want the best for [her] and this is a great opportunity at home . . .  So . . . I want the best for her, man, so I hope she meets the moment for sure.”

Though Turner didn’t quite meet the moment last weekend against Columbia, she’ll have more opportunities in the upcoming weeks and especially in the Ivy League Tournament in Providence six weeks from now.

Another factor limiting Harvard’s ability to contend for a league title is the team’s lack of depth, at least compared to Columbia and Princeton.

Turner and Rodriguez have been prolific scorers all year, averaging a combined 33.3 points per game. But after this dynamic duo, no other player on Harvard averages more than seven points per game.

With Columbia and Princeton able to deploy elite defenders against Turner and Rodriguez, Moore and her staff may have to find a way to diversify their attack and get more consistent production from juniors Saniyah Glenn-Bello, who’s scoring has picked up steam in recent weeks, and Katie Krupa, whose minutes and points are way down from a year ago.

Finally, a key part of Harvard’s success this year has been using pressure to turn defense into offense. But that dynamic didn’t pan out against Columbia; instead, it was the Lions who turned the Crimson over 18 times and converted those miscues into 19 points. Harvard, in contrast, only forced nine Columbia turnovers.  

For Harvard to regain its footing against its Ivy rivals, the Crimson will need to rediscover their identity as the marquee defensive squad that just a couple of weeks ago was ranked first in the nation in team defense.

Overall, with three teams in the top 45 of the NET rankings, the Ivy League may be experiencing its most competitive season in recent memory.

The league has defied gravity by remaining competitive on the national landscape despite not offering scholarships or lucrative NIL deals. And coaches like Griffith, Berube and Moore are shining examples of the high quality of leadership, mentoring, and development that players are able to experience in the Ivy League today.  

With all of this talent and superior coaching, there’s never been a better time to be a fan of Ivy League women’s basketball.