Penn women's basketball prepares for Big 5 matchup, home opener

Raising a championship banner. The first home game of the season. The first matchup of Big 5 basketball at the Palestra this year.

There are plenty of reasons for Penn women’s basketball to be excited about its matchup against La Salle on Wednesday.

“You’ve got three big, important things in one night, and it should be really special for [the team],” coach Mike McLaughlin said.

Penn (0-1) enters the game following a trip down to Knoxville to face off against No. 4 Tennessee in a matchup the Quakers would lose, 97-52. The Lady Vols brought a level of talent and athleticism unmatched in the Ivy League to the table and led the Quakers to focus their efforts on their transition game.

“We weren’t intimidated, we played right out of the gate, we handled the environment,” McLaughlin said.

“We really talked about the pace of the game, hopefully we can control that a little better ... but that’s going to take a while.”

The road gets easier for the Quakers here on out — there aren’t any other ranked opponents on the docket — though their nonconference schedule still holds its share of challenges.

At the forefront of those challenges is the Big 5, a long-standing tradition among Philadelphia universities. The group has traditionally posed the toughest challenges for the Quakers — Penn has never finished with more than two wins in the round robin — and this year will be no different.

“It’s going to be a significant challenge for us this year, maybe back to where we were a few years ago, it’s a tough hill to climb,” McLaughlin said.

“We need to take [La Salle] out of their comfort zone and we need to string a lot of minutes together, a full 40-minute effort.”

La Salle (0-1) — while certainly not the toughest opponent in the Big Five — is the first among that group to face off with the Quakers. Last season, Penn came away with a 64-54 win behind a 23-point performance from now-graduated Alyssa Baron.

The Explorers already have one Big 5 game under their belt — a 75-72 loss to Temple that ended on a La Salle miss at the buzzer. Just as they did last year, redshirt senior guard Alicia Cropper and sophomore forward Micahya Owens are the leaders for La Salle.

“[Cropper] is one of the better guards we’re going to see [this season], she’s really going to challenge our freshman guards,” McLaughlin said.

“They’re big inside, they have some athletes, we have to find our niche.”

On the Quakers’ side, the team will look to build off of an offensive performance that certainly had its flaws. Against the Lady Vols, freshman guard Beth Brzozowski put up a team-high 11 points, while veteran forwards Kara Bonenberger and Sydney Stipanovich put up nine apiece.

Penn is still without a true scorer on its roster — it’s difficult to run an entire offense through two post scorers in Stipanovich and Bonenberger — and it led to some long stretches without scoring against the Lady Vols.

“Scoring isn’t something that’s going to come as easy as it did a year ago,” McLaughlin said. “We have to manufacture some points and keep things in a winnable area.”

But tomorrow isn’t so much about the past as it is the future. There may be a banner going up representing last year’s season, but this is a young Penn team with its eye on big things to come.

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