Penn holds off late Big Red run

For 31 minutes of play, Friday night's game against Cornell seemed like it might be the closest thing to a normal game the Penn women's basketball team had seen in conference play. Up by 18 points with 8:55 to play, the Quakers' lead hadn't been in single digits since the first minute of the second half, and the Big Red had only scored three field goals since then.

But, as has been the case in pretty much all of Penn's other Ancient Eight encounters this season, normalcy hasn't been allowed in the building.

So when Cornell went on a 15-2 run over the next six minutes and 41 seconds, cutting Penn's lead to five points, it seemed just a little bit familiar.

This time, though, the Red and Blue held their ground. Clamping down on defense, the Quakers held the Big Red scoreless in the last 2:14 of play for a 65-54 win.

The game's leading scorer was Penn senior Karen Habrukowich, who scored 13 of her 22 points in the second half. The senior guard shot 5-of-6 from the free throw line and also pulled down seven rebounds.

"I know in the last game it happened and we lost some confidence and got a little frazzled," Habrukowich said, referring to Penn's 51-50 win at Cornell in which the Big Red ran off 15 unanswered points late in the game. "But this time, we knew we didn't want it to happen the second time around."

Penn got off to a somewhat sluggish start, scoring only 12 points in the first 10 minutes. The first six of those came from a somewhat unlikely source -- senior guard Amanda Kammes, normally not much of a shooter. But she nailed three jumpers early on, pumping her fist at the crowd after each basket.

"I only have two games left in the Palestra, and I know [Cornell] coach [Dayna] Smith and I know how she's going to play me," Kammes said. "So I had to step up and shoot, otherwise I was going to make it hard on my other teammates."

Smith's players certainly gave the Wheaton, Ill., native plenty of space to work with, keeping their focus on Penn's other guards and junior center Jennifer Fleischer.

"If you watched my girl, as soon as I touched the ball, or even when I wasn't touching the ball, she was just on Fleisch the entire time," Kammes said.

The extra defense on Fleischer didn't make much of a difference, though. She scored 15 points and pulled down a game-high 16 rebounds, good for her 10th double-double of the season.

"She came out very, very aggressive -- I really liked it," Penn coach Patrick Knapp said. "She was really trying to get inside the defender, and it's really a shame because she probably had three or four where you thought, that's going in, and it didn't go in."

Throughout the game, the Quakers were dominant inside. They outscored Cornell 26-10 in the paint and had 21 second-chance points to the Big Red's 10.

Although the home team only shot 3-of-19 from three-point range, Smith praised the Quakers' entire offense.

"I thought Penn played a great game, balanced, had an inside-outside attack," she said.

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