Five weeks ago in this space, Harry Berezin put out a classified ad on behalf of the Penn women's basketball team.
"Wanted: Glass Cleaners," he said as the title of a column the day after a 78-70 Penn loss at Drexel, in which the Dragons had a 33-30 rebounding edge -- including a 17-7 margin on the offensive end.
Unfortunately for the Bush administration, Penn coach Kelly Greenberg did not have to decrease the nation's unemployment rate in order to fill arguably the team's biggest weak spot coming back from winter break. Over the last two weeks, sophomore Jennifer Fleischer has established herself not only as the team's go-to player in the post but as arguably the Ivy League's premier center.
And although Jewel Clark has been the team's backbone on offense this season, I would say that Fleischer is the real reason why the Quakers are on a fast track to the Ivy League title.
The numbers speak for themselves: an average of 9.8 points and 3.3 rebounds in 25.7 minutes per game against Harvard, Dartmouth, Columbia and Cornell -- including a career-high 18 boards against the Lions -- and 17-21 shooting from the free-throw line. Against Dartmouth, Fleischer effectively shut down odds-on Ivy League Rookie of the Year Elise Morrison, who, like Fleischer, is 6-foot-3.
On top of that, Fleischer has been playing with a stress fracture in her leg that forced her to sit out of practice all of last week and has her walking around campus on crutches.
That alone is worth a column, I'd say.
"I don't know how any paper in the country doesn't do an article about her -- just unbelievable," Greenberg said after the Cornell game Saturday night, in which Fleischer had 18 points and 15 rebounds. After the Columbia game the night before, Greenberg called the New Hartford, N.Y., native, "the lion in The Wizard of Oz."
It helps that Fleischer is a center and not a point guard; so the amount of running and directing traffic she has to do isn't as high as that of someone like Saint Joseph's star Jameer Nelson. Heaven knows what kind of hue and cry this city would put up if he was dealing with a stress fracture at this point in the season -- not to mention the number of column inches the daily updates on his health would get.
We've known all along that Penn can get the ball down the court and score. Jewel Clark, Karen Habrukowich, Mikaelyn Austin, Amanda Kammes, Joey Rhoads ... the list goes on and on. But good teams have answers when the ball doesn't go in the basket every time, which is usually the case. Clark gets a lot of rebounds herself -- third-best in the league with 8.7 per game -- but anybody who knows anything about Ivy League women's basketball knows she's the Quakers' star, and opposing teams treat her accordingly.
Then again, when the predominant sound in a game is 'clang' instead of 'swish', "that means there's more shots to get," Fleischer said, after Penn shot 33.9 percent from the field against Columbia.
There's also the small matter of her being taller than just about everyone else on the court most of the time.
"I'm sure that helps somewhere along the lines," she said jokingly.
With the Ivy League season half over, I can't see how Fleischer shouldn't be a first-team All-Ivy selection if the Quakers continue at this pace. The rest of my team -- for which I have no official vote -- would be Clark, Harvard's Hana Peljto and Reka Cserny and Dartmouth's Jeannie Cullen. It's a tall lineup, but Tim Duncan and David Robinson shared the floor last season for the San Antonio Spurs, and they won a championship. Morrison would get my vote for Rookie of the Year, and Clark for Player of the Year.
Lastly, the public address announcements at the Palestra for Temple's Liacouras Center being a first and second-round venue for this year's women's NCAA tournament were hard to miss over the weekend.
Quakers fans might be well-served to put a few subway tokens aside for a trip to North Broad Street come March.
