Philadelphia Big 5 play is over for the Quakers, but Ivy League play is just heating up.
The Penn women (6-10, 1-2 Ivy) are gearing up for the bulk of in-conference hoops, which begins tonight when the Red and Blue host Brown (3-15, 1-3) at the Palestra, and continues on Saturday as Yale (10-8, 3-1) visits the Quakers at 7 p.m.
More than two home games are at stake this weekend. In a league where the current frontrunner, Cornell, boasts an 8-9 overall record, Penn stands in the middle of the pack and almost any team could pull ahead in the next five weekends of Ivy play.
"The winner of this league could be 10-4, even 9-5," head coach Pat Knapp said. "This league is way up for grabs."
"We are 1-2 [in the league] right now," senior co-captain Monica Naltner said, "but we feel like if we sweep this weekend we will be right back in it . We have nothing to lose, just an Ivy League championship to go for."
The Quakers' chance to move toward the top of the Ivies begins Friday, when Penn hopes to correct its mistakes from last Wednesday when it fell 62-51 at Saint Joseph's. At practice this week, the team has focused on skills like rebounding and shooting - as they "get back to basics," Naltner said.
"We are trying to make sure that everyone is what the coach calls getting 'into the mix'," the senior co-captain answered. "If we can win the rebound differential then we have a good chance of winning the game."
Against St. Joe's, the Quakers offense played a sluggish first half, hitting just 21.4 percent of their field goals. But by the second half, the Red and Blue had begun to correct their own errors, improving their field goal percentage to almost 40 percent.
The mid-game improvement wasn't enough to lift the Quakers over their Philly rivals, but the team is hoping that the upward trend will carry over to Friday's match.
With this in mind, Knapp has been encouraging his team to focus on taking the "lessons of playing [non-conference] teams that we play and transferring them to the Ivy League."
"We need to take the mental and physical toughness that you have to bring to beat a Temple, or a Xavier, or a St. Joe's," Knapp said, "and [carry] that over to the Ivy League."
Penn intends to use the lessons it has learned from tough losses to teams like Delaware, Temple, and Xavier on Friday against Brown, which, though currently seventh in the league, threatens to overtake the fifth-ranked Quakers. The roles will reverse on Saturday night, when Penn will look to take down Yale, ranked second in the league. But as the league stands, the Quakers know that anything can happen.
"Brown is a quick team, probably more guard-oriented, maybe not physical but aggressive in their own right," Knapp said. "They can turn up the heat quickly."
As for advantages like toughness, quickness, size and strength - whether they show up in Brown and White on Friday or Blue and White on Saturday- - Knapp isn't worried.
"All of those things can be overcome with aggressiveness, and a will to win," he said.
