NEW YORK – The No. 1 Princeton women’s basketball team withstood a furious rally by the No. 4 Penn Quakers on Friday evening to advance to the championship game of the Ivy League Tournament in a 59-54 victory.
The Tigers entered the contest with an 11-game winning streak against their rivals from Philadelphia. The 12th win was anything but easy. The Tigers were led by sophomore Madison St. Rose, who tallied 19 points, all but three of them coming in the second half.
The Ivy League Tournament kicks off on Friday night at Levien Gym with an exciting slate of semifinal games in the women’s competition.
The bracket this year has a familiar look as the same four teams from last year’s tournament will face off against each other in this year’s edition of Ivy Madness.
The No. 1 Princeton Tigers, co-champions during the regular season, will take on the No. 4 Penn Quakers, while the No. 2 and co-champion Columbia Lions will seek to avenge a disappointing loss in last year’s semifinal against the No. 3 Harvard Crimson.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these semifinal matchups:
Two days after Cornell women’s basketball ended its season in a blowout loss to Columbia, Cornell athletic director Nicki Moore announced that Dayna Smith would no longer be the program’s head coach.
“Dayna Smith has led the Big Red women’s basketball program for more than two decades with integrity and drive, dedicating herself to developing successful student-athletes on and off the court,” Moore said in a statement released by Cornell Athletics on Monday morning. “She is a well-respected coach, a well-liked colleague and a true ambassador for the game of basketball. I thank her for her service to Cornell athletics, and wish her the very best. Coach Smith will always be an important part of this program’s history.”
Smith, the dean of Ivy women’s basketball coaches following the 2022 retirement of Harvard’s Kathy Delaney-Smith, finishes her 22-year career on East Hill with 32 All-Ivy players, an overall record of 224-345 record and an Ancient Eight championship in 2007-08.
Penn women’s basketball has punched a ticket to Ivy Madness.
The Quakers clinched a slot in the Ivy League Tournament Saturday with a wild and crazy 69-67 win over Harvard at the Palestra. They’ll join the third-place Crimson, Princeton and Columbia in the tourney at Columbia’s Levien Gym March 15-16 to compete for a berth (or maybe two) in the NCAA Tournament.
Pity the Dartmouth women’s basketball team. It rolled into the Palestra against a bigger, faster Penn team that needed the win for a chance at the postseason, and it got flattened.
The Penn women’s basketball team averted disaster Saturday and came from behind to escape from Cornell with a 61-54 win and keep its Ivy Madness hopes alive.
There was no mystery about the Penn women’s basketball mission this weekend: Travel to New England and beat their two rivals for the last spot in Ivy Madness. And they accomplished half of that mission Friday night in New Haven, never trailing in a convincing victory over Yale, 66-52.