NOTEBOOK: W. Hoops hopes to rekindle win streak

The Penn women's basketball team will try to start another winning streak this weekend after seeing its four-game string come to an end last weekend in losses to both Dartmouth and Harvard. The Quakers' opponents -- Yale and Brown -- are familiar, as Penn has already faced both teams this season. The Red and Blue beat the Elis 70-64 and lost to the Bears 77-72 in these previous meetings, both of which came on the road. · Yale and Brown have both been streaky this season. The Elis won their first four games of the season and proceeded to go on a 10-game losing streak that included the loss to Penn. Yale won its next three before losing to Columbia and then beating Cornell in double overtime last weekend. Brown has won its last three, including wins over Columbia and Cornell last weekend. The Bears have also beaten Harvard, which Penn lost to over the weekend, 70-68. But Penn has also been streaky. Its four-game winning streak equaled last year's high. The Quakers began 1998-99 by losing their first four games. Last season, Penn never dropped four games in a row. · Like this year, Penn spent last Valentine's Day weekend playing Yale and Brown. The Quakers lost to the Elis 66-43 and defeated the Bears 73-70 in 1998. Penn's '97-98 season record against Yale was 0-2, while the team ran up a 2-0 mark against Brown. This year, the Quakers can sweep the season series against Yale, and, at best, split the series with Brown. · One player who welcomes Brown and Yale into the Palestra is Diana Caramanico. Caramanico scored a career-high 37 points at Brown on January 9 after netting 30 against Yale the night before. "Against Yale, I wanted to go strong to the basket because I knew they had good post players," Caramanico said. "I just took the same philosophy with Brown." Caramanico, however, expects Brown to make adjustments. She believes that the Bears probably will not press as frequently as they did and that she will be forced to pass the ball more. · Caramanico is the leading scorer in the Ivy League, with Mandy West right behind her in second. Together they have scored a large chunk of the Quakers' points in all of Penn's games. In Ivy contests, they have scored over 50 percent of the points in every game. Against Yale and Brown they accounted for 79 percent and 71 percent of the points, respectively. This weekend, in the contest versus Dartmouth, the dynamic duo put in 80 percent of Penn's points. The statistics show, however, that an equal or unequal distribution of scoring does not really determine whether Penn wins or loses. For example, in wins against Columbia and Cornell, the two scored 56 and 61 percent of the points, respectively. But they had one of their biggest scoring games in the Yale win. In addition, in the loss to Harvard, West and Caramonico only scored 59 percent of the team's points. But the Quakers also lost to Dartmouth when they scored 50 of 62 total points.

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