AT COURTSIDE: W. Hoops is inconsistent

For sheer parity, nothing beats Ivy League women's basketball. If you want to see games in which there's no telling who is going to beat whom on a given night, this is the conference. No team better exemplifies the Ivies than Penn. This is a team that went to New York and dropped consecutive games to Columbia and Cornell, two of the poorest teams in the country, then turned around the next weekend, thumped second-place Yale and took league-leading Brown right down to the wire before losing by only one point. Last night's game against Princeton, then, was the Quakers' entire league season wrapped into one 40-minute package. The 69-54 lopsided score not withstanding, Penn still went through its Jekyll-and-Hyde routine yet another time, especially on the offensive end of the floor. For a team that entered the game shooting a horrid 35 percent from the field, the first 20 minutes were nothing less than a dream. Junior forward Shelly Dieterle started the game on fire, hitting 5 of 6 mid-range shots to give the Quakers a 19-12 lead. For Dieterle, who usually sees substantially fewer shots than the rest of the starting five yet leads the group in shooting percentage, the key to her fast start was creating open shots for herself. "We've been talking the last couple of days about making good cuts and coming off screens and wanting the ball and so on," Penn coach Julie Soriero said. "She just did what she needed to do." After Princeton scored seven straight points to tie the game, it was time for the rest of the team to step up. The Tigers had wanted to concentrate defensively on Penn senior center Katarina Poulsen, but Dieterle's hot shooting prevented them from doing that. The result was that Poulsen was faced with much less defensive pressure, and the 6-foot-3 center used her height advantage to knock in easy shot after easy shot. She finished the half with 11 points on 5-for-7 shooting, and scored seven of the Quakers' final nine points to increase a 26-21 lead to 35-21. As it turned out, that run finished the Tigers. The sharpshooting inside players were complemented by junior guards Katina Banks and Shelly Bowers, who combined for 10 points on 50-percent shooting. When all was said and done, Penn shot 60 percent from the floor, excellent numbers for anyone, astounding ones for the Quakers. The best part about it was the balance -- everyone was contributing and virtually everyone was shooting well. "A lot of times [Poulsen] gets triple-teamed, which is really tough on her," Dieterle said. "So today it was great that we were able to balance it all out. Sometimes that's what we lack." But Penn lacked much more than that offensively during the second half. It quickly became apparent Princeton was not going to allow the Quakers any more shots without a huge fight. The Tigers refused to give Dieterle any more decent looks at the basket, and hounded her into several turnovers and no points from the field in the second half. Meanwhile, the Quakers as a whole were having a far more difficult time working the ball around in the second half. The crisp passes and open shots that had come so easily during the first 20 minutes were now nowhere to be found, as Princeton was effective in stifling Penn's ball movement and collapsing inside to prevent easy shots. "Princeton really made us work on offense [in the second half]," Soriero said. "The shot clock ticked way down a number of times. There's being patient and being too patient, and we were too patient." Having to scramble to launch last second shots as the shot clock neared expiration, Penn shot miserably, even by its standards. Only 5 of 22 shots (23 percent) went in from the field in the second half. As the sloppiness increased, reminding everyone of games gone by, so did the frustration. Senior forward Julie Gabriel was whistled for an intentional foul, allowing Princeton to pull within eight with seven minutes remaining. Moments later she committed an offensive foul and Soriero pulled her from the game for a few moments. But in spite of Penn's shooting woes, Princeton could pull no closer, as the Tigers' aggressiveness on defense began to backfire. Fouls piled up in massive amounts as Penn went to the line no less than 20 times in the last 10 minutes. Gabriel and Dieterle combined to hit all 17 of their free throws during this time span, and the issue was decided. So in the end, Penn's incredible first half created a hump Princeton never really came close to getting over. Last night's game showed when the Quakers are at their best, they can be unstoppable. But the season would have been a far more pleasant affair if they could have avoided performances such as the one they turned in during the second half. Asked to explain the whole thing, Soriero couldn't. "If I could explain it, our shooting percentage would not be as abysmal as it's been all year," she said. "But thank God?we started out having one of those nights, because look at the second half."