Star forwards battle in paint

A quarter of the way through its conference contests, Cornell is in a four-way tie for first place in the league with Harvard, Dartmouth and Yale. Like the Tigers, the Big Red has won its conference games on its home court but has faltered on the road. Princeton will need to use its homecourt advantage to throw Cornell off balance.

The Big Red is a formidable foe this season as it returns all five starters from last year’s team, which finished third in the Ivy League, just ahead of Princeton. But after its sweep last weekend, head coach Courtney Banghart knows the threat this year’s team poses.

“[Cornell is] a highly organized team,” Banghart said. “We will have to play a solid team game on the defensive side of the ball to disrupt their rhythm and timing.”

The Tigers and the Big Red have always been rivals, with only three season sweeps in their competitive history. Two of these sweeps came in the past two seasons: Cornell won both games last season, and the Tigers took both games during the 2005-06 season. Princeton leads the all-time series with a 36-18 record against Cornell. In this season’s preseason Ivy League media poll, Cornell and Princeton were predicted to tie for second place.

In the teams’ last matchup, Cornell’s Jeomi Maduka led the Big Red with 18 points and 11 rebounds. Maduka, now a junior, has been key for Cornell this season, leading her team with an average of 14 points per game. She is ranked third in the league for field-goal percentage, shooting 80 percent in her team’s defeat of Columbia earlier this season. Maduka has been the Ivy League Player of the Week twice this season.

Maduka is not the only threat. Teammate Moina Snyder, who ranks second in the Ivy League for blocked shots with 1.12 blocks per game, also earned the Player of the Week title. The Tigers will have to watch out for Cornell’s Lauren Benson, who currently leads the Ivy League both in assists per game with an average of 5.35 and in three-point shooting percentage at 51.2 percent.

On Saturday, Princeton will return to Jadwin to take on Columbia. The Lions are currently in fifth place in the league, behind the four-way tie for first and ahead of the Tigers. Last year, the Lions finished seventh in the league.

Columbia started conference play this year with a loss at Cornell, but the team regrouped to defeat the Big Red a week later on the Lion’s home court. Columbia then split their home games last weekend with a loss to Yale and a win over Brown in overtime.

The Lions’ Sara Yee leads the league with a 1.75 assist-to-turnover ratio, and teammate Chelsea Frazier has the league’s highest shooting percentage, hitting 52.5 percent of her shots.

Frazier is Columbia’s leading scorer with an average of 10.1 points per game, followed closely by Danielle Browne at 10.0 and Lauren Dwyer at 9.9. The Tigers will need to focus on neutralizing these offensive weapons.

“Columbia has struggled from the perimeter this year,” Banghart said. “Protecting the interior and forcing long-range jump shots will be important to our success.”

The Tigers have a three-game home winning streak against the Lions. Last season when the teams faced off in Jadwin, senior forward and co-captain Meagan Cowher led the offense with 31 points. The next day she put up 35 points in the Tigers’ losing effort against the Big Red. Her 66 points were the most scored by a Princeton women’s basketball player in an Ivy League weekend and more points than any Princeton men’s player not named Bill Bradley ’65.

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Last weekend, Cowher had a career-high 15 rebounds against Dartmouth, also adding 17 points for her fifth double-double of the season. Junior guard Jessica Berry also had a good weekend, with five assists at Harvard for her highest total since last February, when she had six assists against Brown. Berry put up 11 points at Harvard after scoring 12 points at Penn, giving her back-to-back double-digit scoring games for the first time since December 2006.

The Tigers have developed a good rhythm on offense with a league-low 16.4 turnovers per game. They will be playing without freshman guard Addie Micir, however, who sat out both games last weekend with an injury. Micir was named Ivy League Rookie of the Week for the second time this season after scoring 22 points in Princeton’s win over Penn.

“As is the case when anyone goes down, we will need everyone to bring a little more than usual,” Banghart said. “This is a very resilient team. We have been battle-tested all year ... but I’m very impressed at how we have stayed committed to getting better every day.”