Post Players Dictate Columbia's Weekend

If anything can be said for the Columbia women’s basketball team in terms of consistency this season, it is that their fate depends on the play of their post players.

It is not on the offensive end, however, that players like Adia Revell, Edytte Key, and Erin Jaschik make their largest contributions—even though Revell and Key have considerably stepped up their scoring lately. Instead, it is their ability to stop the opponents’ post players that makes these three Lions so important.

Women’s Ivy League basketball has come to be dominated by post players, and one quick glance at the standings will reveal that trend. Three of the top teams—Dartmouth, Brown, and Harvard—are led by big centers who can score in the post. Against the Lions, those teams took care of business; Elise Morrison dominated for Dartmouth, Holly Robertson for Brown, and Reka Cserny for Harvard. It was the inability of Columbia’s frontline to contain those players that cost the Light Blue those games, and the pattern continued this past weekend against Penn and Princeton when, despite the play of Sue Kern on Friday and Sue Altman on Saturday, the real story was the Lions’ post defense.

Going into Friday night’s game against Penn, acting head coach Tory Verdi knew that his team would need to control Penn center Jennifer Fleischer in order to win the game. And despite Penn’s relatively solid outside shooting game, he felt that a zone defense would be the best way to crowd the big center.

“One of our keys and one of our goals was to jump down and double down on their [post players],” Verdi said. “We were in a 3-2 zone and whoever was in the middle in the top of the zone was doubling down on their bigs so whenever the ball was in the paint, we would drop down.”

The problem with this defensive scheme, however, was that whenever a Lion player went to double-team Fleischer, who finished with a career high 25 points and 19 rebounds in the Penn victory, a teammate was automatically left open and complementary scorers such as Karen Habrukowich and Joey Rhoads were able to take advantage by knocking down three-pointers.

“But obviously when [Fleischer’s] dropping down and she’s turning and throwing the ball to the opposite side, our guards need to rotate and that’s where we’re getting caught,” Verdi said.

Poor communication between the Lions’ guards led to seven Penn three-pointers Friday night, which allowed the Quakers to shoot 48 percent from the field and effectively put the game away.

“I think in our zone we kind of had miscommunication,” Jaschik said, “so we’d go out on the wing and then [Fleischer] would be open and then if we didn’t go out on the wing they were hitting threes.”

The Lions were forced into this complicated defense because of injuries that kept Key out of this weekend’s contests and limited Jaschik to just 20 minutes of play on Friday night and kept her out altogether on Saturday. The Lions were left with only one post player, the 5’11” Revell, who was unable to match up to the taller Fleischer.

“We didn’t know how many minutes Erin would play tonight; she wasn’t 100 percent,” Verdi said. “So we felt that with their size we needed to be around the basket and we needed to get rebounds. Obviously match-up with man and they have an advantage.”

Against Princeton on Saturday night it seemed as if the Lions would again be burned by a low post scorer. The Tigers’ 6’2” post player Rebecca Brown began the game by scoring four of her team’s first six points, and she looked like she was having her way against Columbia’s undersized frontline. With 17:10 to go in the game, the Lions finally caught a break when Brown picked up her third personal foul and was forced to go to the bench, where she remained for vast majority of the rest of the game. When Brown finally reentered with about five minutes left and her team down by six, she provided one last scare as she made two layups, including one to tie the game with 28 seconds remaining.

It was not meant to be for Princeton that night, as Revell made a layup 20 seconds later to break the tie, and then effectively denied Brown the ball on Princeton’s final opportunity. Aided by Brown’s foul trouble and by a strong performance from the resurgent Altman, the Lions were able to pull out the victory. Due in large part to the offense and defense of Revell, who played most of the final 10 minutes with four fouls herself, the Lions kept their hopes of finishing above .500 alive.