Home of the Roundball Poets
The slew of top-flight talent leaving the Ivy League just keep gets bigger.
Together again as Tar Heels
Princeton women’s senior guard Carlie Littlefield delivered the news on Twitter Monday that she’ll be reuniting with Courtney Banghart, the coach she played for at Princeton as a rookie and sophomore, at North Carolina. An Economics major at Princeton, Littlefield will play at UNC as a graduate transfer and earn a Master of Business Administration degree there.
A team that’s talented, deep, disciplined and versatile will usually find a way to beat you. And a team that has Eleah Parker is well on its way to beating you in any case.
The Penn junior center from Charlotte, N.C., is 6-4 and powerful, with a nice shooting touch from almost everywhere but the foul line. She can go around you, over you and through you. Though she seemed tentative and fatigued for much of the first half of the season, she has returned to form the past few games, and she has rarely been better than Friday night in Providence, where Penn (14-5, 4-2) stopped Brown (7-13, 1-6), 85-73. The win was Mike McLaughlin’s 600th as a head coach.
Cornell used a gritty defensive effort to take down Brown at Newman Arena Friday, 74-63.
“We grinded out the win,” said coach Dayna Smith. “We found a way to make key baskets at key times and get some big stops.”
The Big Red (9-6, 2-1 Ivy) took the lead just 98 seconds into the game and held onto it for good. They held a 38-31 halftime lead over the Bears (6-10, 0-3) behind 23 first-stanza points from senior Samantha Widmann, who was honored before the game for surpassing 1,000 career points against Columbia last time out.
It’s Thanksgiving weekend, which means it’s time to take stock of what followers of each Ivy women’s team should be thankful for at this point of the season:
While November 5 was Election Day for statewide offices in Kentucky, Mississippi, New Jersey and Virginia, it was Opening Day for college basketball across the entire nation.
For the Ivies, Harvard tipped things off at noon, picking up the Ancient Eight’s first “W” of the 2019-20 campaign with a road win at Northern Illinois. Princeton’s “pretty great machine” dominated Rider to give Carla Berube her first victory as the Tigers’ head coach. Dartmouth used a balanced attack to take down neighboring Vermont.
Columbia gave Albany all it could handle, but came up just short in an overtime defeat at the SEFCU Arena. Brown, playing without its biggest offensive weapon, had several chances in the last minute but fell by one to crosstown rival Bryant.
Princeton (0-2 This week; 1-3 overall)
vs Seton Hall 66-70
at Penn State 71-79 (OT)
Even with their starting lineup absences, the Tigers just missed sweeping two major conference foes this week. Against Seton Hall, Princeton came back from an 18 point third quarter deficit to hold a 66-59 point advantage with 2:15 left in the game. Unfortunately, the Orange & Black went scoreless the rest of the way, as the Pirates finished on an 11-0 run. The Tigers were also up 7 against Penn State with 2:42 left in regulation, but the Nittany Lions went on a 9-2 run to tie the game at 63. In the extra session, Princeton could only manage 1 field goal in 10 attempts as they went down to their third straight defeat.
Despite the losses, Princeton received improved play from first-year starters Grace Stone (13 points and 7 rebounds in 36 minutes vs PSU), and Kira Emsbo (6 points, 3 rebounds, 3 blocks in 12 minutes vs PSU), a 6′ 5″ forward who missed her senior season due to a ACL tear. A Thanksgiving tournament in Cancun against DePaul (#15), Syracuse (#18) and Kansas State should continue to give the younger Tigers more experience and make the whole team stronger by the time Bella Alarie, Taylor Baur and Qalea Ismail return from the DL.
In case you missed it, Yale women’s basketball assistant coach and Play BOLD co-founder Melissa D’Amico encapsulated the noble endeavor that is Play BOLD into a telling blog post last week.
A nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering communities by mobilizing people and resources on international missions to the most disadvantaged areas of the world, Play BOLD was the vehicle for Ivy women’s basketball players Alexandra Maund (Yale), McKenna Dale (Brown), Melissa Heath (Brown), Dominique Leonidas (Brown), and Eleah Parker (Penn) and 11 others to teach and learn in Eldoret, Kenya, where they taught hoops to underprivileged pupils on grass courts with no nets.
“I have learned that joy transcends material possessions, clean water and full stomachs,” Maund wrote.
Read more of D’Amico’s post here and learn more about the Play BOLD mission at playbold.org.
Wed., Jan. 24
Penn 74 at Temple 59
Fri., Jan. 26
Harvard 97 vs Yale 73
Dartmouth 78 vs Brown 73
Sat., Jan. 27
Columbia 72 at Cornell 54
Harvard 87 vs Brown 85
Yale 57 at Dartmouth 39
Sun., Jan. 28
Penn 89 vs Gwynedd Mercy (Division III) 25
Standings