W. hoops shows improvement in coach Barron's second season

In its first of two games against Cornell this season, the women's basketball team trailed the Big Red at halftime, 37-26. Already in the midst of a three-game losing streak, it looked as if this game would add another loss to the streak. The team jogged, pokerfaced, into the locker room, knowing that most of the 3,000 fans in Jadwin Gym that day were aspiring young athletes celebrating National Girls and Women in Sports Day who would ask them for their autographs after the game.

The Big Red held their lead for the first six minutes of the second half. At this point the Tigers turned it on. They went on a 13-5 run, with junior guard Kelly Schaeffer pouring in 13 points alone. With two minutes left on the clock, freshman center Becky Brown bulldozed in for a layup that pulled Princeton up by two and handed them the victory. The beaming team spent the next hour signing Princeton T-shirts and programs for their just-as-beaming little fans.

That game was reflective in many ways of the 2002-03 women's basketball season as a whole. There were ups and downs; slumps and slump-breakers; first halves ransacked by one team and second halves that glorified the other.

The Tigers combined spans of brilliant play with other moments of less-than-mediocre ball. In many ways, Princeton could not overcome its inconsistency.

Against Brown on Feb. 14, for example, the Tigers shot a measly 31 percent from the field, so that by the break they trailed by 19 points. But in the next half they outscored the Bears and improved their shooting percentage to 44 percent.

Though it lost that game, Princeton came back the next night to beat Yale in a triple overtime thriller, but only after the Elis pulled off a comeback from a substantial halftime deficit.

Against Dartmouth a week later, the opposite happened. Princeton came out strong in the first half, trailing by only two at halftime, 28-26. But Princeton came out flat in the second half and ended up losing by 16 points.

Head coach Richard Barron had predicted from the beginning that the key to success would be consistency — "not just from one game to the next but from one half to the next." And the key to maintaining that consistency, he said, was "going back to the basics — getting the fundamentals down."

On that track, Barron organized a tough pre-season schedule that pitted the Tigers against some of the biggest and best schools in the country. Beginning with a three-day tournament in Waco, Texas, in mid-November at which they lost the first-round game to Baylor (the host team), the Tigers showed early resilience by winning the next two against Southwest Texas State and the University of Tennessee at Martin.

Princeton had trouble in its following match-ups against Stanford and Temple, but two dominant victories against Centenary (97-69) and Hofstra (89-71) in mid-December gave the Tigers momentum for their first Ivy game against Penn, which they won, 56-51.

Hot hands

As far as shooting goes, the Tigers had some of the best talent in the league. With Schaeffer, seniors Allison Cahill and Maureen Lane, and sophomore Karen Bolster all shooting well above the .300 three-point mark, the Tigers rounded out the season with an average of six baskets from behind the arc per game.

As for ball-handling skills, the two point guards, Cahill and junior Mary Cate Opila, who worked together for three years, were a dominant force both alone and as a tenacious two-part team at the top of the key.

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Brown, who replaced the sole senior, Lauren Rigney '02 from the 2001-02 season, saw the most playing time of the five new freshmen and led the team in both scoring (14.4 points per game) and rebounding (165).

The Tigers finished the year at 9-19 overall and 4-10 in the Ivy League. If unpredictability was something that marked Princeton as a team, the final standings reveal that the plague of inconsistency hit the Ivy League at large. If you asked who came in second place, Brown, Dartmouth and Penn, who each finished with a 9-5 record, would all be correct answers. Even more absurdly, with Columbia, Cornell and Princeton each finishing 4-10, there was technically not a sixth or seventh place either. Harvard, which went undefeated for 14 games, was the single solid force in the roller coaster of a season.

Next year, the Tigers will sorely miss their two graduating co-captains, Cahill and Lane. But with four juniors moving into the senior ranks and their younger teammates along for the ride, the roller coaster is on its way up.