W. Hoops falls from second place in Ivy League

The Penn women's basketball team came up short at Dartmouth, then got blown away at Harvard Saturday. As if they were hit by a vicious New England Nor'easter, the Penn women's basketball team fell from second to sixth place in the span of 24 hours. The ride home was a long one for the Quakers (11-12, 6-5 Ivy League). The 75-73 setback at Dartmouth (13-10, 7-4) and the 98-63 rout at the hands of Harvard (20-3, 10-1) suddenly left the Red and Blue one win behind four teams in the race for second place. "We we're just pretty down after the Harvard game," Penn center Jessica Allen said. "Having two losses in one weekend made it tough." The weekend started off on the right foot for a while in Hanover, N.H. Penn had the lead for all but 1:08 of the first half against the Big Green, with Quakers forward Diana Caramanico scoring six points on the way to an early 9-0 lead. The Big Green came back from the early gap to knot the game at 35-35 entering halftime. Despite a sluggish start in the first minute of the second half, Penn steadily built a lead as high as 12 with 9:35 to go. Penn's lead shrunk to one with two minutes to go. A three-point basket by Quakers co-captain Colleen Kelly extended the lead to four before Penn called time out. From there, the game slid away at the charity stripe. The Quakers missed eight of 10 free throws. Nevertheless, their two-point lead hung by a thread with 21 seconds to go, until Dartmouth guard Jackie Lippe chucked in a three-pointer with nine seconds remaining. According to Penn coach Julie Soriero, Lippe barely broke the trap by one step and threw the game-winning desperation shot from the left side. Big Green forward Bess Tortolani followed up with a steal off Kelly to seal up Dartmouth's come from behind effort. Lippe, the unlikely hero, made 9-of-10 shots and finished with 20 points. The loss is perplexing since Penn led in almost every statistical category. The Quakers outshot and out rebounded their opponents. The game, however, was won at the free throw line. Dartmouth made 57 percent of their free throws, while Penn only made 42 percent including two out of their final 10. Caramanico's 27 points, Kelly's 24 and Penn co-captain Michelle Maldonado's 10 rebounds provided little consolation in light of the result. Also, according to Penn guard Erin Ladley, many calls by the officials were questionable. Soriero and Kelly did not disagree, but Soriero did not consider the referees to be the difference in the outcome. "You need to learn to adjust to the officiating, and maybe as a young team we haven't done it as well as we can," Soriero said. The Quakers could not worry about bad calls for long as the Crimson awaited them the following night in Cambridge, Mass. Penn trailed Harvard early, but kept the deficit away from double-digit territory for the first 15 minutes. Then, the beginning of a very quick end arrived. The Crimson began with an 11-4 run to end the half with a 40-25 lead. "Our offense was terrible in the first half," Allen said. "We weren't scoring, but they were scoring almost every time they had the ball." Unlike Harvard's visit to the Palestra where the Qukaers hung close in the second half, this time there was no comeback. "All of a sudden, they just picked up the pace in transition, knocked down the shot they're famous for [the three-point shot] and the next thing we know we're looking at a 16 to 20-point deficit," Soriero said. Harvard took it to the Quakers after seeing its lead cut to seven. The Crimson went on a 45-12 run in the span of 12:08 to ice the game. Most of the rout was courtesy of standout forward Allison Feaster. The nation's leading scorer contributed 24 points and 16 rebounds. Fourteen of those boards came off the defensive end of the court, preventing Penn from having many second chances. "Harvard simply intimidated us. I think the in tensity and emotion with which they played forced us to change our shots, and we started to run our offenses really deep," Soriero said. With the game out of reach, both teams gave their bench players court time before the final buzzer sounded on the Crimson victory. Maldonado led the Quakers in scoring with 13 points in only 16 minutes of action. The Fair Lawn, N.J.-forward ran into foul trouble early, picking up two in the first five minutes. On the flipside, Caramanico was shut down with eight points despite tallying eight rebounds. Maldonado and Ladley (10 points) were the only players to log double-figures while three Crimson players combined for 52 points. Penn now needs to win two of its last three if they want to finish the season over .500 for the first time since 1990-91.