The Columbia women’s basketball team showed flashes of greatness during its 2008-2009 campaign, but the Lions were unable to dominate the Ivy League. Columbia (13-15, 6-8 Ivy) opened conference play with a hard-fought 47-44 win over Cornell, but the Light Blue faltered in the rematch, losing to the Big Red by a five-point margin in Ithaca.
Inconsistency defined Columbia during league competition. In their first back-to-back Ivy games of the season, for example, the Lions lost a 63-61 heartbreaker at Yale but followed that performance with a 76-51 win at Brown.
Columbia defeated Harvard, the eventual second-place Ivy squad, by three points on the road to begin a three-game winning streak. Its subsequent 88-57 win over Brown marked Columbia’s greatest margin of victory in a conference game, while its 16-point win over Yale kept Columbia in the race for the league championship. All hopes of winning the Ivy title were dashed, however, when the squad fell by 13 points in its rematch with the Crimson. That defeat marked the start of a four-game skid to close out the season.
“It certainly left a little bit of a bad taste in our mouths as we headed into the offseason,” head coach Paul Nixon said of Columbia’s final four losses. “At the same time, we’re using that disappointment as motivational fuel.”
The Lions finished in a three-way tie for fourth place in the league standings, with sophomore forward Judie Lomax pacing Columbia in her first season of eligibility. Lomax, a transfer from Oregon State, led the nation with 14.3 rebounds per game while ranking third in the league with 14.2 points per game. She ended the year as an all-Ivy first team selection.
“In terms of carrying the load, I thought she did a good job,” Nixon said. “Our goal every season is to win the championship, so the fact that we couldn’t do that with a player of Judie’s caliber was a disappointment ... We just have to be able to take that final step of getting the results that we want and not just always competing.”
Despite the loss of senior starting guard Katrina Cragg, the Lions should once again contend for the conference title next year. In addition to Lomax, Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year Sara Yee and all-Ivy honorable-mention guard Danielle Browne will return to Columbia this fall.