The Penn women's basketball team knows it has a target on its back. But that is the price it pays for having the Ivy League's only unbeaten record.
Tonight, the Quakers (13-7, 7-0 Ivy) start a five-game road trip with a trip to Providence, R.I., to take on a Brown team which beat Penn, 83-72, at the Pizzitola center last year.
"Everybody in the Ivy League is out to beat us," senior guard Mikaelyn Austin said. "When there's a team out there and it's undefeated, the biggest accomplishment for anyone to do is to give them a loss."
The Bears (11-10, 4-4) are led this season by senior forward Nyema Mitchell, who is averaging 15.6 points per game on 46.8 percent shooting from the field, including 42.9 percent shooting from three-point range.
She shares the frontcourt with junior Holly Robertson who scored 20 points in the Bears' upset of second-place Dartmouth in Providence last weekend -- a result which has given Penn a two-game cushion atop the Ancient Eight.
"We know that they're big, we know that they both have really stepped it up since they played us" at the Palestra, Penn coach Kelly Greenberg said of Mitchell and Robertson.
Tomorrow, Penn will face a Yale team which won its first Ivy League game of the season last weekend over Harvard. The Elis (4-17, 1-7) have taken the Quakers to overtime at John J. Lee Amphitheater in two of the last three meetings.
"We just never seem to play our game there," Greenberg said. "They come out with a lot of energy and take it to us."
Austin was on the floor for all those games and knows that good teams have to get the job done against lesser opponents.
"We take Yale and Brown as seriously as we would Harvard-Dartmouth," she said. "If anything it's a bigger weekend because to lose to a team that you may feel you're better than is almost a worse feeling than losing to a team that we might feel has a better matchup, like Harvard or Dartmouth would."
Senior forward Jewel Clark feels that the trap that the Elis and Bears will try to set could be useful for a team that is trying hard not to let its guard down.
"Somebody can call us the best right now, but you can't live on labels -- you've got to live on action," she said. "At the end of the season you get to put labels on a team if you choose to."
As two of the team's three captains, Austin and Clark have worked this week to keep the team's energy and focus high despite this being a particularly midterm-heavy time of year. They met with Maria DiDonato, the team's third captain, earlier in the week for this reason.
"We've just been trying to stay together, keep everybody focused," Austin said. "Just little things like people coming to practice on time, people staying together, nobody trailing off or letting school get them too psycho."
Greenberg also acknowledged the effects a heavy workload can have on her team.
"People were up late studying and had a lot of papers so there wasn't a lot of sleep this week with a majority of our team," she said. "So that worries you a little bit but I think our depth will help with that."
Greenberg gave the team the day off on Tuesday to help ease some of those fears.
"I think it was a good resting day for us," she said.
Notes: Sophomore center Jennifer Fleischer should be fit to play this weekend despite her continuing recovery from a stress fracture in her lower leg.
Greenberg said that the 6-foot-3 New Hartford, N.Y., native practiced "probably about the same" amount as last week, in which she spent a lot of time watching from the sidelines. Fleischer combined for 37 points and 33 rebounds in weekend games against Columbia and Cornell.
