W. Hoops wants to avenge earlier losses

This weekend the Penn women's basketball team will take on Cornell and Columbia at the Palestra in games that will contain all the usual elements of season-ending matchups between teams whose hopes for a successful year vanished a long time ago. There will be a near-vacant arena and nothing on the line except pride, and perhaps momentum heading into next season. Yet for the Quakers (8-16, 4-8 Ivy League), there is something more involved. Tomorrow night they are going to bid farewell to two seniors who have contributed mightily to the program over the past four years. And when co-captains Julie Gabriel and Katarina Poulsen take the floor for their final game against Columbia (4-20, 2-10), they and the rest of the team will be looking to make sure they go out on a positive note. "Both [seniors] have had tremendous careers here and we will be very sorry to see them go," Penn assistant coach Tina Costello said. "But we'll be focused on the task at hand." The task at hand tomorrow at 7 p.m. for the final game of the season is a Columbia team whose performance in 1993-94 has been nothing less than miserable. The Lions haven't just been losing night in and night out, they've been losing big -- their 10 league defeats have been by an average of 19 points. But the Quakers aren't focused on Columbia's losses. Rather, they remember one of the Lions' two league wins, a stunning 67-60 defeat of Penn back on February 4 in New York that basically shattered the Quakers' dreams of contending for the Ivy League championship. Penn was plagued by rotten outside shooting and never really developed a rhythm on offense. But now, coming off a first half against Princeton Tuesday in which they shot 60 percent to lift themselves to a confidence-boosting 69-54 win, the Quakers feel there is no doubt they are the better team. And they aim to prove it. "It's more pride than anything else because they really broke our back last time," Gabriel said. "It's important that we play tough and show them what we can do because we sure didn't do that when we were up there." Tonight's game against Cornell at 7 p.m. figures to be the tougher of the two contests. After the Big Red (8-16, 5-7) handed Penn a tough 58-56 loss in Ithaca a month ago, it went into a tailspin, losing its next four games. Last weekend, however, Cornell rebounded in a big way with easy victories over Harvard and Dartmouth, two of the better teams in the Ivies. "They shoot the ball very well, but now they're coming into our house, so to speak," Costello said. "We'll just try to give them a good game, to come out aggressively and work to put pressure on their shooters." Cornell's best shooter and leading scorer is forward Keri Farley, who poured in 23 points and grabbed 12 rebounds against the Quakers in February. She also sank the two free throws with 30 seconds remaining that provided the margin of victory. The Big Red, however, may have a harder time dealing with the 6-foot-3 Poulsen than Penn will with Farley. No one taller than 6-0 sees significant action for Cornell, which should give Poulsen as well as junior forward Shelly Dieterle an opportunity to pick up where they left off at the end of the first half against Princeton, when the two inside players combined to hit 10 of 13 shots. "We have to play with more desire than we did when we played [Cornell] before," Poulsen said. "All we can do is put it all out there, because there's nothing to lose now." With that attitude in mind, Penn plans to play these games with an eye toward the future. As they say goodbye to their two seniors, the Quakers would also like to get a glimpse of what next year may hold. "Losing Kat and Julie to graduation," Costello said, "it's a good opportunity for some of our players in their junior year to see who's going to step up and be a leader next year." But the team can't lose sight of the fact that before next year comes, this season must be concluded. And for Gabriel and Poulsen, for whom there is no next year, their concentration is on making this last weekend one they can remember fondly. Only after it is all over will they be able to look back on the past four years. "I just had my last practice but it still hasn't really hit me that this is it," Gabriel said. "I don't really feel like that. I probably will after the last game -- that's probably when it will all hit me."