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After nearly spoiling its undefeated Ivy League season at Brown on Friday night, the Princeton women’s basketball team rode into New Haven on Saturday looking to make a statement as it closed out a back-to-back road weekend in the Ivy League.
Statement made.
The Princeton women’s basketball team held off a determined Yale squad on Friday night at Jadwin Gymnasium, 79-59, to stay undefeated in Ivy League play.
Princeton (16-3, 6-0 Ivy) entered the first back-to-back weekend of the Ivy League campaign sporting a shiny, new No. 25 ranking in both the AP Top 25 and Coaches polls, but that honor appeared to hang like a lead weight around the Tigers’ neck early in this contest.
In a contest featuring two of the nation’s top point guards, Yale’s Jenna Clark bested Stony Brook’s Gigi Gonzalez on the stat sheet, but the Bulldogs came out on the losing end to the Seawolves in a Wednesday matinee at Long Island’s Island Federal Credit Union Arena.
The senior from Pittsburgh finished the day with 26 points, five rebounds, five assists and two steals for Yale, while Gonzalez totaled 19 points, five rebounds, two assists and one steal.
Ivy Hoops Online caught up with Yale women’s coach Dalila Eshe, who is entering her second season at the helm in New Haven. The Bulldogs went 13-14 overall and 7-7 in Ivy League play in 2022-23, a fifth-place finish that wasn’t enough to qualify for the conference tournament. Yale was picked to again finish fifth in the conference in the Ivy League Women’s Basketball Preseason Media Poll released Oct. 12.
With the season a few weeks away, the Ivy League hosted Women’s Basketball Media Day on Monday, the first of two media availabilities this week. The event was hosted over Zoom for media members and is available on the conference’s YouTube channel.
The preseason media poll was released last Thursday with Princeton earning all 16 first-place votes. Last year’s Ivy Tournament winner and regular season co-champions are the sixth unanimous pick in league history and the first since Penn in 2016-2017.
Heading into the last two days of the regular season, Columbia and Princeton were tied for first, while Penn held a one-game lead over Harvard for third place. After the Lions, Tigers and Crimson each grabbed a win, the Ivy League Tournament semifinal matchups of Columbia against Harvard and Princeton versus Penn had been set. What needed to be determined was the seeding of the four teams and the timing of the two matchups.
When the updated NCAA NET rankings were posted on Sunday morning, Princeton’s convincing road victory over upper division Penn combined with Columbia’s narrow escape at home against seventh-place Cornell resulted in the Tigers overcoming an 11-position difference from last week and taking the No. 1 seed away from the Lions.
Yale won’t be making an Ivy League Tournament appearance in coach Dalila Eshe’s first season at the helm after finishing fifth in the conference, but the Bulldogs came through on Senior Day with a 63-53 victory over Brown before many program alumni Saturday at John J. Lee Amphitheater.
The only senior captain for Yale (13-14, 7-7 Ivy), Camilla Emsbo, was honored before the game. Emsbo was injured all season and will compete at Duke next year as a graduate student.
Following Saturday afternoon’s action, the upper division pulled away from the bottom half, while the Brown rebuild took a positive step forward.
Columbia bounced back from a disappointing result against Princeton by taking it out on Yale in front of 1,485 fans at Levien Gymnasium. The Lions jumped out to a 32-17 halftime lead on the strength of a 14-0 second quarter run. The Light Blue made it a 20-point game after three and widen it to a game-high 28 points with just under four minutes to go in the contest. Defensively, they limited the Bulldogs to 32% shooting and only 49 points, the first time they held an Ivy opponent under 50 this season.
Yale women’s basketball gave up 97 points to high-octane Columbia when the teams met at John J. Lee Amphitheater on New Year’s Eve.
So giving up 74 points to the Lions showed a modicum of progress for the Bulldogs at Levien Gym Saturday.
The problem was that Columbia stymied Yale’s offense in a 74-46 clinic controlled by the home team.