Women's basketball drops two, falls to last in Ivy League

Friday against Dartmouth, Columbia (2-17, 0-5 Ivy) struggled inside. Saturday against Harvard, Columbia had a strong game inside. Both times, however, the Lions came up empty, falling 59-44 to Dartmouth (3-16, 1-4 Ivy) and 68-56 against Harvard (11-8, 4-1 Ivy) to drop into last place in the Ivy standings.

Freshman center Tia Dawson had 15 points, 11 rebounds, and six blocks to lead the Big Green. Senior forward Sasha Dosenko added 14 points, five rebounds, and four blocks.
“We wanted to start a bigger lineup,” Columbia head coach Paul Nixon said. “We figured out through the course of the game that, even with our size versus their size, they were still exploiting us some, so we switched to a smaller lineup and started pressing them more, and we had some success with that lineup in the second half.”

The Lions picked a bad time to have a poor shooting night. Dartmouth averages nearly five blocks a game, while opponents average barely half that against its big forwards.

Nixon said that prompted his team to take more shots from the outside, but the team made only 20.6 percent of its shots on the night, well below its season average.

“I think the biggest thing we have to do offensively is ... not be surprised when we’re open,” Nixon said.

The following night, the Lions arguably outplayed Harvard inside, but still could not find the offensive consistency or critical stops needed to win. Junior guard/forward Tyler Simpson scored 15 points, bringing her weekend total to 36, and senior guard Melissa Shafer scored all of her 11 points in the second half. However, the most impressive performance came from sophomore center Courtney Bradford, who had a career-high 17 points and 13 rebounds. Bradford credits her success to the team’s pregame shooting competitions as well as a change in mindset.

“The last couple of games, I’ve been trying to think too much about passing—being a team player—and not seeing how scoring helps the team as much as passing up shots,” Bradford said. “I just let the game come to me today, and the team was able to find me.”

However, Harvard’s half-court trap gave the Lions fits in the second half, leading to a stretch of 11 unanswered points for the Crimson in the middle of the second half.

“The fact that we just felt like we couldn’t get it through, get it into our half, it definitely just kind of put us down in our minds for a second,” Simpson said. “We needed to come over that quicker than we did.”

“Up until that point, we were really working hard on offense, really getting a lot of stops, hands in the passing lanes, really passing the ball around, making our open shots,”

Bradford added. “This game was just really heartbreaking because we worked so hard, and we just didn’t come up with the win this time.”

Junior forward Victoria Lippert had 19 points for the Crimson. Sophomore guard Christine Clark, despite hitting the floor twice during the game, apparently injured, had 21 points and shot 12-of-12 from the free throw line. Harvard finished 21-of-21 from the charity stripe as the Lions were whistled for 17 fouls.

“It’s been our biggest problem,” Bradford said. “We play really hard defense for 25 seconds, and you just get so excited because you’re like ‘five more seconds,’ and you want that steal, and you try and reach.”

“I thought we lost this game because we made some very poor decisions in the last four minutes of the first half, and then we did not attack their half-court trap the way we talked about attacking it,” Nixon said.

Nixon added that, at this point in the season, the team cannot focus on the negatives.

“I think we were a more fluid offensive team tonight versus last night’s game,” Nixon said.

The Lions will hope they can pull together complete games next weekend at Brown on Friday night and at Yale on Saturday night.