Yale men’s basketball played its first February out-of-conference game since 1957 Monday night.
The result was memorable: an 87-81 overtime defeat of Howard at The Burr in Washington.
Geno Auriemma
Princeton’s Kaitlyn Chen on choosing UConn for grad transfer season
Next week, Kaitlyn Chen will graduate from Princeton University as one of the most decorated basketball players in the history of Old Nassau.
The senior point guard and former Ivy League Player of the Year recently announced she will enroll next fall at the University of Connecticut to play for the legendary Geno Auriemma as a graduate transfer.
Chen told Ivy Hoops Online she will pursue a master’s degree in sports management at UConn.
Q&A with Princeton women’s coach Carla Berube
Ivy Hoops Online caught up with Princeton women’s coach Carla Berube for an in-depth interview:
Princeton mounts near-comeback to remember at No. 6 UConn
Ivy Hoops Online writer George “Toothless Tiger” Clark reports from Storrs on a comeback to remember from the Princeton women that fell just short in a 69-64 loss at No. 6 UConn in a homecoming for Huskies alumna Carla Berube:
Ivy hoops roundup – A new Floor, opened coaching doors and promotions galore
Before commencing with the rest of the Ivy hoops roundup, a note of sorrow about the passing of James “Booney” Salters, the 1980 Penn grad whose dynamic scoring and passing made him one of the best guards in men’s program history.
Salters died July 7. He was 64.
Penn made the NCAA Tournament in all three of Salters’ three seasons with the Red & Blue. The Penn Athletics and Philadelphia Big 5 Hall of Famer captained the often overlooked 1979-80 Penn team that advanced to the second round of the Big Dance, leading the squad in scoring and sinking the game-winning shot to triumph over Princeton, 50-49, in an Ivy League playoff matchup.
Princeton women proved greatness one more time against Indiana
Ivy Hoops Online editor Mike Tony posted an excellent recap of the No. 11 Tigers’ gut-wrenchingly narrow loss at No. 3 Indiana Monday evening, Not much for Old Toothless to add.
One key to the outcome was the early foul trouble for Abby Meyers, sending her to the bench for nearly a quarter. Indiana defended her extremely well, which hasn’t happened often in her stellar career. As a result, she was not the factor she needed to be for the Tiger offense to get rolling. For the evening she shot 4-for-15 from the field. Her lone made three-pointer in seven attempts was a buzzer-beater after the outcome was sealed.
Carla Berube: A name to remember
You know all the top coaches in the women’s game. Actually, you know them all by their first names.
Geno. Kim. Tara. Dawn. Brenda. And the list goes on. Every fan of the game would come up with those names quickly.
But most would struggle to come up with another. And it belongs. Maybe not in November 2021. But it will by March 2022.
The name is Carla. Yes, Princeton’s Carla Berube.
Reporter’s Notebook: What it’s like covering WNBA basketball in a pandemic
Ivy Hoops Online’s Erica Denhoff covered the Dallas Wings’ trip to take on the Connecticut Sun in Uncasville on June 22. Here are her thoughts on the experience:
The last time I covered a sporting event was March 6, 2020. With my cameras and my spot on the baseline, I captured Brown men’s basketball claiming victory against Harvard to keep Bruno’s Ivy Madness hopes alive. Early the next morning, I boarded a plane to go on vacation to watch MLB’s Grapefruit League spring training games in Florida. The plan was to return back to Boston in time to cover Ivy Madness.
How Princeton women’s basketball clawed its way to the top of the Ivy League
The 2019-20 Princeton women’s basketball team was by no means a “one-hit wonder.”
It was the product of a process begun more than a dozen years ago. Successful coaches do more than win games; they build a program, an organization that can produce highly competitive teams year after year. Successful programs are designed to withstand graduations, injuries, and the inevitable clash of egos and personalities in groups of a dozen or more highly competitive and talented individuals. To achieve success in college basketball over time is incredibly difficult. To achieve credibility on the national scene with a mid-major program and no athletic scholarships defies belief. Princeton has done that.
In 1970, the 225th year of Princeton’s existence, school administrators decided to adopt the revolutionary idea of coeducation, not coincidentally, I have always believed, in the year following my graduation. One year later, varsity basketball was introduced as a women’s intercollegiate sport. The Tigers enjoyed early success, winning the first four Ivy titles following the launching of a women’s postseason tournament in 1975. (The women played a postseason tournament until 1982. In 2017, the present tournament format was adopted. The top four men’s and women’s teams compete at the same site over the same weekend to determine the league’s NCAA representatives.)
Bella Alarie: A once-in-a-lifetime Tiger
This has been a week of tumultuous developments in the Ivy League, most of them sad and disappointing.
But there has been some good news from the league as well. Players of the Year have been announced: Paul Atkinson from Yale and AJ Brodeur from Penn on the men’s side, and the incomparable Bella Alarie from Princeton, for the third year in a row, on the women’s.
Alarie is the only Princeton player to have won the POY award three times and to be named a first-team All-Ivy player in all four years of her college career. She has been more than a once-in-a-generation player. She has achieved once-in-a-lifetime status.