The Harvard women’s basketball team punched its ticket to Ivy Madness on Friday night with a home win against Penn, 60-46 – but not before the Quakers gave the Crimson a scare.
The stakes were high for both teams. With a loss to Penn (15-10, 5-7 Ivy) and games still to come against league-leading Princeton and Columbia, Harvard (16-9, 9-3) could have fallen from third place to fifth all too quickly. Now Harvard has a chance to drive to a top seed with those two last tough games.
For Penn, the stakes were more stark. The loss, coupled with Brown’s win at Cornell, means no trip to the tournament for the Quakers this year: Princeton, Columbia, Harvard and Brown have the four spots locked up. Saturday’s Penn game at Dartmouth and Senior Day next weekend at the Palestra against Brown are for pride, not for the postseason.
On Friday, Penn misfired from the start, and Harvard looked to be facing an easy night. It wasn’t so much that the Quakers were losing the ball, as they did two weeks ago at Columbia: They couldn’t make their shots.
For the first six minutes, the Penn line was seven missed shots (two from deep), four turnovers, two fouls, five rebounds, one timeout and zero points. Harvard, meanwhile, had two threes in a row from senior guard Saniyah Glenn-Bello – back from an injury that sidelined her for two weeks – to contribute to a 13-0 lead.
Penn did eventually score, but the first quarter was a picture of futility: Even with sophomore forward Katie Collins’ three in the last minute, Penn shot a paltry 18% for the quarter, to Harvard’s 41%, and trailed 17-6.
Harvard pushed the lead to 28-10 a few minutes into the second quarter, but then Penn started to connect. Junior guard Mataya Gayle, the Quakers’ linchpin, scored her first points of the night on a pair of free throws, and senior guard Simone Sawyer and Collins hit threes to keep Penn within sight of Harvard, down 32-20 at the half.
The comeback in the third quarter was for real. Threes by Collins, center Tina Njike and Sawyer pulled Penn to within five points, another Collins three cut the lead to two, and after an Abigail Wright jumper for Harvard, Njike scored a layup through contact and sank the foul shot to cut the Harvard lead to one point, 40-39, with four minutes left in the frame.
But that was the high-water mark for Penn. Harvard ran off a 14-0, five-minute run of its own, and the game wasn’t in doubt again as Penn managed just seven points in the final quarter.
Harvard had four players in double digits. Wright had a double-double with 14 points on 6-for-13 shooting plus 10 rebounds, Glenn-Bello had 12 points on four threes, junior guard Karlee White went 4-for-8 for 10 points, and first-year guard Olivia Jones advanced her Ivy Rookie of the Year case with 10 points on 4-for-5 shooting plus a half-dozen rebounds.
For Penn, Njike was the game’s top scorer with 16 points on 6-for-11 shooting and added seven rebounds. Collins had 12 points, and Sawyer had 11. But Penn can’t win without Gayle, and though she had five assists, she struggled to five points on 1-for-10 shooting from the field.
“It was somewhat of a sloppy game on both sides a little bit, kind of like the first game that we played them,” Harvard coach Carrie Moore told ESPN+. “But really proud of our girls. [Penn] obviously made a run in the second half, and we responded with a big run with some of our bench in, which is exactly what we talked about at halftime.”