W. Hoops | Ivy League Hopes Dashed

Women's basketball coach Pat Knapp's scouting report warned that Harvard sophomore Christine Matera was a deadly shooter, but going into Friday's game against Penn she had shot only 15-for-63 from behind the arc, a 23.8 percent clip.

Matera found her shooting stroke against the Quakers, as she shot 5-for-5 on three-pointers, several of them from well behind the line. With the game tied at 47 about midway through the second half, she scored 11 of the team's next 15 points to help Harvard secure a 72-63 victory at the Palestra.

"I'll take responsibility for it, since I was guarding her half the time," junior guard Caitlin Slover said. "She took shots probably further out than NBA range. But it's my fault, I should have been out on her."

Penn fared no better against Dartmouth Saturday, losing 56-39. The loss was the Quakers' seventh in a row and pushed their record to 3-14 overall and 0-3 in the Ivy League.

In both losses, the story was Penn's inability to contain their opponents' best players.

In Penn's first matchup with Harvard last season, guard Emily Tay scored 21 points - including a game-winning jumper with 14 seconds left - to lead the Crimson to a 63-62 comeback win.

Now a senior, Tay tried to eliminate the need for such late-game heroics, scoring 16 points in only 17 minutes in the first half. Tay - who Knapp said is "going to kill everybody in the league" - penetrated to the basket with ease and finished with 22 points, including 8-for-8 from the line.

Harvard also got contributions from its youth, as freshman Brogan Berry shot 5-for-6 in the first half and scored 19 points in the game.

Although Penn was able to essentially eliminate Harvard's interior threats, the deadly trio of Tay, Matera and Brogan combined for 58 of Harvard's 72 points. And they did it without relying heavily on the trifecta, as the Crimson attempted a total of only seven three-pointers compared to the Quakers' 27.

"I think stopping guards has kind of been our Achilles' heel all year," senior Carrie Biemer said. "We held [Harvard's] post to 10 points, but we need to continue to make perimeter defense a priority."

The Quakers were apparently able to do that against the Big Green, as they limited guard Koren Schram - Dartmouth's best perimeter threat - to only six points.

But that came at the expense of interior defense, as Penn was torched by forward Brittney Smith, who scored 28 of Dartmouth's 56 points on 10-for-16 shooting from the field.

"She does so many things, you never know which [move] to guard," said sophomore Jerin Smith, just one of several Quakers who struggled to contain Dartmouth's Smith. "It's kind of hard to figure out where she's going to go. She's really quick and very long."

Brittney's sister Margaret tallied another seven points, and Jerin - who is unrelated - scored a team-high 13 for Penn. In all, the three Smiths accounted for 50.5 percent of the game's scoring.

Biemer was plagued by early foul trouble in both games, and Knapp called Harvard's 25-to-11 free-throw advantage "horrendous."

The captain still managed to keep Penn in the game with 22 points Friday, but she was held to two points and 0-for-3 shooting from the field in only 17 minutes left against the Big Green.

With the Haddonfield, N.J., native contained against Dartmouth, Penn's offense struggled mightily, managing only 15 points in the first half. The Quakers planned to pound the ball inside to get Brittney Smith in foul trouble, but they didn't distribute into the post with any regularity until after halftime.

Outside of Jerin Smith's 5-for-7 shooting, the Quakers managed an atrocious 9-for-36 line.

After once again falling out of Ivy League title contention, the reeling Quakers will now look to prepare for Columbia and Cornell - which should be more manageable opponents - this weekend.