Women's Basketball: Tigers await March Madness

After playing three games in five days, the Ivy League-champion women’s basketball team now has almost two weeks to rest. The NCAA tournament does not start until March 20, and the team will not even know its first-round opponent or location until Monday. But that hasn’t stopped the Tigers from working hard, as they have all year.

“There’s not one practice, not one game that we would take back,” senior center and co-captain Cheryl Stevens said. “Now that our eyes are set on the tournament, having an upset would be great. They call it March Madness for a reason — you never know what’s going to happen — so we have to continue to get better.”

Princeton finished the season with a 26-2 record, including a perfect 14-0 in the Ivy League. The 2009-10 season marks the most successful year in program history and represents the Tigers’ first trip to the NCAA tournament. The last Ivy League team to run the table in conference play was Harvard in 2002-03.

ESPN.com bracketologist Charlie Creme predicted that the Tigers will be given a No. 12 seed, a forecast that has held steady for several weeks. No women’s team from the Ivy League has ever been seeded higher than No. 13. Only once has an Ancient Eight squad reached the second round, when No. 16 Harvard famously defeated top-seeded Stanford in 1998.

Though none of the players have any postseason experience, head coach Courtney Banghart has been to the tournament four times as a player and coach at Dartmouth. The third-year coach has been a steadying force to guide her young team through the season.

“You can’t deny the fact that she’s a great recruiter; obviously, our freshman class has contributed in huge proportions,” said Stevens, who is one of two players on the team who played for Banghart’s predecessor, Richard Barron. “Also, she has made it fun again, which helps. She’s a great coach, and our assistant coaches are great — they know the game really well and have passed knowledge on to us.”

Few outside the Orange Bubble believed that the young Tigers were capable of making such a run this year. Princeton was seen as an enigma entering the season, with two freshmen in the starting lineup and a number of other underclassmen in key spots. The preseason media poll ranked the Tigers third, well behind traditional powers Dartmouth and Harvard and only a hair above Columbia.

But the Tigers and their young talent took the league by storm. Freshman forward Niveen Rasheed led the team in scoring, rebounding and assists, and she was unanimously named Ivy League Rookie of the Year, while freshman guard Lauren Polansky averaged 6.1 assists to just 2.6 turnovers per 40 minutes. Sophomore center Devona Allgood improved tremendously, leading the conference by shooting 57 percent, while sophomore guard Lauren Edwards was one of the top three Tigers in every major category.

Rasheed and Edwards were voted first team All-Ivy, while Allgood and junior guard Addie Micir were named to the second team.

The Tigers’ only losses of the season came in non-conference play. Princeton lost 69-59 at UCLA and fell to Rutgers, 60-50, at home the following week. Both the Bruins and the Scarlet Knights are expected to also receive bids to the NCAA tournament. And Princeton proved it could play with the big girls: the Orange and Black led UCLA at halftime and trailed Rutgers by just one point.

Since the loss to their New Jersey rival, the Tigers have been unstoppable. They have reeled off 21 consecutive victories, winning each game by double digits and trailing only once at halftime. Princeton finished its season in impressive fashion, pulling away in the second half to beat Dartmouth and Harvard on the road to clinch the Ivy League title. Two days later, the Tigers dominated Penn at home to cap an undefeated conference season.

“[Dartmouth and Harvard] are the two best teams in the league, and they’re always good,” Micir said. “Both teams put up a fight — Dartmouth was beating us at halftime, and Harvard was knocking down shots all game — so it was definitely nice being able to beat those two teams to clinch.”

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There is a good chance that the Tigers will have to do some traveling next weekend. Creme currently projects that Princeton will face Virginia in Norfolk, Va. Previous brackets, however, had the Tigers traveling to Austin, Texas, and other remote locales such as Seattle, Wash., Tempe, Ariz., and Ames, Iowa, are also possibilities. But the Tigers have experience with traveling far — Princeton played a pair of games in California over the Thanksgiving recess — and will not be intimidated if they end up in a different time zone.

But in typical Ivy League fashion, Stevens has concerns beyond what will happen on the court.

“It’s always exciting to travel, to have the opportunity to play in front of families and friends that may live in the area,” Stevens said. “It’s a little stressful right now — with my thesis looming over my head, it would be nice to be close by, to be near the library — but we’ll take it in stride no matter where we end up.”