W. basketball travels to Yale, Brown

When it rains, it pours. At least that's been the case for the women's basketball team lately. As the team takes to a stormy road this weekend to play Yale (4-17 overall, 1-7 Ivy League) and Brown (11-10, 4-4), a string of losses and a season-ending injury are leaving many Princeton fans wondering if the Tigers will yet again be caught without an umbrella.

Princeton (6-14, 3-4) is coming off a weekend that, on paper, looks a bit overcast, but in reality was nothing less than a monsoon of disappointments. The Tigers did indeed beat Cornell, but in the process lost one of their best players, freshman Casey Lockwood, to a knee injury. To make matters worse, Princeton lost a nail-biter to Columbia in overtime the very next day.

"We definitely beat ourselves," head coach Richard Barron said. "That's the one thing we can take away from it. We know that if we had made our shots and layups against Columbia, we could easily have won that game in double digits."

Facing bottom-feeding Yale and third-place Brown, two teams Princeton has already beaten this season, the Tigers will try to gain at least a momentary reprieve from the downpour of misfortune they have recently suffered and, in the words of Ella Fitzgerald, "just walk in that sun once more."

"We haven't won a game on the road all year," Barron said. "If we have a good weekend, it will give us at least some momentum heading into the last five games of the season."

While Princeton does hold wins over both of these teams from their previous days in the sun, neither match is expected to be easy. Having struggled on the road since the beginning of the season, the Tigers will look to find the consistency they have lacked in the past and avoid additional losses that would leave them more soaked and bedraggled than Holly Golightly's no-name cat. "These teams will hardly be easy competition, and this weekend will be much harder than the one we just had," Barron said. "Brown is a very good team, and Yale is coming off a win over Harvard, the most talented team in the league. At this point, there is no weekend that we can afford to take for granted."

Aside from facing staunch competition, the hardest aspect of this weekend may be trying to fill the gaping hole that Lockwood's absence has left in Princeton's proverbial parasol.

"We're having to adjust to playing without one of our best players," Barron said. "Clearly her loss removes our best rebounder and maybe our best defender. It takes one of best scorers out of the game. We also lose depth and we need everybody to fill in."

Princeton, however, has never been about one particular player.

"Because there hasn't been a focus on any one individual on the team, it's easy for anyone else to assume a role and step up," Barron said. "We want to play as a team."

Bottom line: The Tigers' failures have come down to a lack of consistent performance from every player on the team - a lack that, in the past few weeks, has been as conspicuous as Stanley yelling "Stella!"

"We haven't had every player play well in one game all season," Barron said. "We can really accomplish a lot this weekend if we can get every player we have playing well at the same time. If we do that we can win any game this season and overcome any loss we've had."

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On that note, the Tigers will again find themselves in the eye of the storm this weekend, with another chance to determine whether they'll continue skulking under storm clouds or find themselves singing in the rain.