The words came hard and fast from Patrick Knapp, at once stating the obvious and the profound.
"Let me just tell you something right now," he said. "I don't play this game of 'lose a couple of games and you're out of it.' I don't buy it."
But it's right there. After three months of sunshine and smooth sailing, the Penn women's basketball team has hit its first major storm of the season.
This comes in the form of two losses in two days to the two teams which now stand atop the Ivy League -- the same teams which the Quakers knew would pose the greatest threats to a second consecutive Ancient Eight title. The defeats came by a combined margin of five points, but the battle scars run a lot deeper than that.
It seems easiest to point to the schedule. Five grueling games in eight days, with the first three on the road, and the other two on a home court which Penn had not graced since last year -- literally.
But it's not that, according to senior guard Amanda Kammes.
"Everyone has the same schedule, everyone plays the same amount of games in the end," she said after Friday night's loss to the Crimson. "I don't think today it was a matter of being physically fatigued as much as it was we didn't do the little things when we needed to."
The little things -- leaving a hole on one side of the defense, missing a rebound, playing dice with the referee's whistle and coming up with a reach-in foul that only a snake's eyes could see. You overlook them at your peril, lest the bigger foundations start to crack.
Surprisingly, Harvard and Dartmouth insist that they are not on solid footing, either.
Big Green coach Chris Wielgus, who almost ended up on the wrong side of Penn's manic late rally, responded with an emphatic "no" when asked if her team had won the Ivy League title this weekend.
"The biggest mistake you can make -- and I've been doing this for 20-some odd years -- is that you think this is won here and now," she said.
Wielgus has been at the helm in Hanover, N.H., for 19 years, to be exact, so she knows everything there is to know about how precarious every Ivy League season is until it's over.
Knapp, on the other hand, is going through this for the first time. He has had to learn the hard way how to deal with the Ivy League's trademark back-to-back weekend games, rather than the more spread out schedule of the Big East -- where his previous team, Georgetown, played.
"What's different is, there's not a day to cry in your soup, and then a day to prepare, and then a day to play," he said Friday night.
But he can take consolation from Crimson coach Kathy Delaney-Smith, whose 22 years on the banks of the Charles River make her the dean of Ivy League women's coaches.
"I don't think anyone is going to run away with it in the league," she said. "It's going to go down to the wire; that's my prediction."
I'm not sure anyone's going to run away with the title either this year, although Dartmouth in particular looked very impressive. Perhaps more importantly for Penn, I saw one Quakers player who looks like she may be on the verge of something special.
It wasn't Karen Habrukowich and Cat Makarewich, who are exceptionally good three-point shooters but have struggled to get off shots against tight man-to-man defenses. Junior center Jennifer Fleischer had a great weekend as well, with a combined 31 points and 27 rebounds. But that wasn't enough to put Penn over the top, either.
(So much for my prediction skills.)
The player who I think can really get the job done on offense is sophomore forward Monica Naltner. The 5-foot-11 Cincinnati native can both drive to the basket and hit shots from outside, even with defenders in her face. She also has a tendency to pick up cheap fouls, but Penn needs as much as she can give in order to stay in the Ivy title race.
The last time Penn got swept in an Ivy League weekend was in the 2001-02 season, coincidentally -- or perhaps not -- by Harvard and Dartmouth. That was Jewel Clark's sophomore season, and the first after the graduation of Penn's (and the Ivy League's) all-time leading scorer, Diana Caramanico.
Now Clark has graduated, and Penn must find a player to fill her role. With Caramanico and a number of other former Quakers in the house Saturday night, it was a fine time for an heir to that throne to emerge. Jonathan Tannenwald is a juniorUrban Studies major from Washington, D.C. His e-mail address is jtannenw@sas.upenn.edu.
