Winless Penn heads to Harvard, Dartmouth

As Ivy League action makes its first stop of the year in West Philadelphia this weekend, the Penn women's basketball team will show off its partially revamped starting lineup. With an 0-17 record on the season, a change means giving other people chances with nothing to lose. The Red and Blue (0-17, 0-5 Ivy) will have to face the two best teams in the conference on back-to-back nights. Tonight, the Quakers will take on Dartmouth at 7 p.m., and tomorrow Penn will host Harvard at 7 p.m. Both Dartmouth and Harvard have identical overall records at 11-6. But Harvard shares the Ivy lead with Princeton at 4-1. Dartmouth is mired in Ivy mediocrity at 3-2, after splitting games against Yale and Brown in Hanover, N.H., last weekend. Penn junior Patty Loyack and sophomore Michelle Maldonado stepped into the starting lineup on Tuesday, when the Quakers visited Villanova. Junior Amy Tarr and sophomore Hope Smith went to the bench. Despite coming off the bench, Loyack had already seen significant playing time even before stepping into the starting five. Practicing against since-graduated Shelly Bowers and Katina Banks last year helped prepare Loyack for her starting role. "When you play behind Shelly Bowers and Katina Banks, you adapt to different styles of play," Loyack said. "Now its a matter of being more aggressive -- we have to score more." Four days before the start of the season, Maldonado had a bike accident, which limited her time on the hardwood. Maldonado worked herself into coach Julie Soriero's plans despite the setback, seeing the significant playing time she saw as a freshman last season. "I think Coach was looking for some extra rebounds," Maldonado said. The change was perhaps more a change in roles on the team -- not necessarily a change in time on the floor. Tarr and Smith still see roughly the same minutes as they did before being sent to the bench. In addition, the changes are not necessarily negative either. "We have four roles on this team," Soriero explained. "We have the starters. Then we have the sparker, who comes off the bench to help ignite the team?the sustainer who, if we're in a run and someone gets a foul, is expected to keep the flow going, and the finisher who can make a good pass or make the shot. "We basically moved people off the bench to be starters, which makes someone else a sparker." Loyack, Maldonado, Tarr and Smith will have their work cut out for them. The Big Green and Crimson are big shooters. Harvard has had over 35 percent of their three pointers find the bottom of the net. Leading the Crimson is Amy Reinhard, who has bucketed 60 percent of her treys on 15-of-25 shooting. Dartmouth is also an outside threat, as it showed against Massachusetts, when it set team records for both three-point baskets made and attempted with an 11-of-26 performance on January 9. Defense was the key to practice yesterday for Penn, as Soriero keyed on limiting the number of outside shots. "I want to get better with our defensive slide -- we're allowing too many open shots," Soriero said. "We showed good 'D' up to about a week ago, then we got in a rut."