Home of the Roundball Poets
Yale senior Matt Knowling, from Ellington, Conn. recently announced his decision to continue his basketball career as a graduate transfer at USC. Knowling was a First Team All-Ivy selection is 2022-23.
While most of the nation’s attention was focused on Caitlin Clark being selected by the Indiana Fever at the top of the WNBA Draft, Ivy League fans celebrated the selection of Columbia’s Abbey Hsu and Kaitlyn Davis and Harvard’s McKenzie Forbes in the third round of Monday night’s event.
Hsu was a senior guard for two-time regular-season champion Columbia and the 2023-24 Ivy League Player of the Year, while Davis, who played with Hsu at Columbia for three seasons and was a two-time First-Team All-Ivy forward, spent her graduate transfer season as a starter for Southern California. Forbes, a 2021-22 Second Team All-Ivy guard/forward who started her career at California before transferring to Harvard for her final three undergraduate years, joined Davis in the starting lineup for the Trojans.
Danny Wolf, a 2023-24 First-Team All-Ivy selection as a sophomore forward for Yale, has become the latest top-shelf Ivy talent to enter the transfer portal, extending a string of standouts leaving or poised to leave the Ivy League.
Columbia women’s basketball twice cut a 10-point second-half deficit to two, but the Lions couldn’t make that final push to get ahead of Vanderbilt and lost the program’s first-ever NCAA Tournament game, 72-68, at the Cassell Coliseum in Blacksburg, Va. Wednesday evening.
Winning the First Four matchup between two No. 12 seeds, the Commodores move on to face No. 5 seed Baylor on Friday, while the historic Columbia season comes to a close.
The final day of the 2024 Ivy League Tournament was an incredibly chaotic one, which started hours before the noon tipoff of the thrilling men’s championship and ended with a near-midnight zoom celebratory conference call with Columbia women’s basketball coach Megan Griffith.
For the second day in a row, the tournament provided its fair share of emotional highs and lows. There may still be people who haven’t taken to the thought of Ivy Madness, after eight years and six events, but it is an amazing weekend to celebrate the talented players and coaches and showcase this shouldn’t-be-under-the-radar conference to the nation.
I’m still in a bit of a stupor from the last few days, but I’ll try my best to recount scenes from a lengthy final day:
Following Princeton’s victory over Columbia in Saturday night’s Ivy League championship, the thought of two conference teams making into the field of 68 seemed improbable. However, Sunday night’s selection show provided a pleasant surprise for everyone connected to the Ancient Eight, with the announcement of an automatic qualifier spot for the Tigers and an at-large bid for the Lions.
This year’s decision marks the second time the Ivies have sent two teams to the Big Dance, with Princeton claiming the second bid and Penn taking the automatic spot in 2016.
Yale men’s basketball is headed west to play in the East.
The Bulldogs’ fourth NCAA Tournament appearance since 2016 will begin in Spokane, Wash., where Yale will face No. 4 Auburn as a No. 13 seed in the East Region. Tip-off time has yet to be released.
NEW YORK – With 27 seconds to go and a 60-54 lead, Brown appeared destined to punch its first NCAA Tournament ticket since 1986.
But Yale finished the game on an 8-1 run, punctuated by a short jumper by senior forward Matt Knowling at the buzzer, to end Brown’s season and claim the Bulldogs’ third Ivy League Tournament championship since the tourney was installed for the 2016-17 season.
While the future is bright for a team that returns its entire starting lineup in 2024-25, it doesn’t remove the pain felt by the coaches, players and fans.
“Obviously, there is a lot in front of our people, but not this team, so that’s really hard,” the Brown alum and 12th-year head coach told the media immediately following the hard-fought battle “I felt like I let them down in the last minute of the game.”
THE WINNING BASKET#ThisIsYale pic.twitter.com/o9eLNHo7qR
— Yale Men’s Basketball (@YaleMBasketball) March 17, 2024
NEW YORK – In the immortal words of Ron Burgundy, “That escalated quickly.”
Two-plus hours into Saturday’s Ivy League Tournament tripleheader, the No. 4 Brown Bears shocked No. 1 Princeton, sending the regular-season champions on their way back to Old Nassau and a probable date with the NIT. The Tigers’ faithful, which certainly left the afternoon’s game with great disappointment, could take comfort in the fifth straight Ivy tournament championship for the women’s team.
Some thoughts from a long and exciting day at Levien Gymnasium.