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Columbia wasn’t going to let lightning strike twice.
Two weeks after the women’s basketball team lost to Penn in West Philly, it put on a showcase of smothering defense, consistently found the open shooter in the lane or on the perimeter, withstood a Penn comeback and won comfortably at home Saturday, 69-56, at Levien Gym.
The No. 23 Princeton women’s basketball team rediscovered its identity en route to victory in the second half of Friday night’s clash with arch-rival Penn.
In this least predictable of Ivy women’s basketball seasons, it only makes sense that a fired-up Penn team would bounce back from a loss to Cornell to topple Columbia, 64-55, on Saturday in West Philly.
The Cornell women’s red-hot-shooting Big Red built a big lead over Penn and held on for a 62-58 win Friday night at the Palestra – breaking a 16-game losing streak to the Quakers, climbing to 3-3 in league play and taking another step on the road to relevance in the Ivies.
Two teams desperate for consecutive Ivy League wins after both starting 0-3 met at John J. Lee Amphitheater Saturday. Penn easily downed Yale, 64-37.
The Penn women’s basketball team, which lost its first three Ivy League games of the season, finally came away with a win over Dartmouth on Monday at the Palestra, 67-59.
The Penn women’s basketball visit to Brown didn’t figure on being easy for either team. After all, they spent the past two seasons clawing at each other for the fourth slot in the Ivy League Tournament, with Penn claiming the honor both times.
What they produced Saturday was a classic, a double-overtime win for the Bears that looked easy at the start and easy at the finish but was brilliant and exhausting basketball in between. If this is the sort of thing we can expect for the rest of the season, we’ll have a lot of exciting games to watch, and both Brown and Penn will go to the tournament in March.
After all those nonconference games, it was time to find out what was real.
Princeton was real. Well, we knew that before the Princeton women’s game Saturday at Penn: The Tigers were 12-1, the only loss — a close one — coming against a mighty Maryland team. And now the Tigers are nationally ranked themselves, the ultimate imprimatur of the sport.
The ups and downs of the Penn women’s basketball season brought it Sunday to the Big 5 Classic at Finneran Pavilion — not to play for the title but to avoid the odd fate of taking sixth place in the Big 5. And avoid it Penn did, beating La Salle 65-52 behind a 20-point afternoon for Katie Collins.
(The addition of Drexel threw off the numbers of the Big 5 but saved Philly’s treasured rivalry, as even the Villanova men’s team can devote three games instead of the traditional four in playing Big 5 games. Besides, do you know how many schools are in the Big Ten these days? Of course not — nobody does, but estimates range as high as 30.)
HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. – Simone Sawyer dominated both sides of the ball on Saturday afternoon, leading the Penn women’s team to a methodical 67-55 defeat of Hofstra at the David S. Mack Sports and Exhibition Complex.
The senior guard from Lincolnshire, Ill. led the offense with a 21-point, nine rebound performance and spearheaded a tenacious Quakers defense that shut down the Pride’s top three scorers in the second half.
“This was the best basketball game we’ve seen a guard at Penn play in a long time. Simone Sawyer was that good,” Penn coach Mike McLaughlin told Ivy Hoops Online immediately after the game. “She defended 94 feet almost the entire time, she guarded their point of attack. A great effort.”
The victory was a solid return to form, following a tough loss at Drexel earlier in the week, and puts Penn at 3-1 on the young season. Hofstra, meanwhile, moves to 1-2.