Sitting just two games out of first place in the Ivy League, the Columbia women’s basketball team travels to Yale and Brown this weekend looking for revenge and to continue its upward trend in the Ivy standings.
Since dropping their first league game of the season at Cornell, the Lions have lost only twice. One loss came this past weekend to visiting Harvard, while the other was at home three weeks ago to the Yale Bulldogs. Two wins this weekend could position the Lions to make a run at an Ivy crown with a trip to second-place Harvard and third-place Dartmouth looming next weekend.
“One and one is not unacceptable,” head coach Paul Nixon said. “But we’d be in a situation where we’d need more help from other people. It is about controlling the aspects we can control.”
The Lions are coming off a weekend that showed both how close and how far they may be from the top of the league. They failed to control the tempo at any point against Dartmouth, but a furious second half rally helped them come out with their fifth win in six games and third win ever over the Big Green at Levien Gym.
“We have some players that really have adopted a refuse-to-lose mentality,” Nixon said. “If we lose they get bent.”
The next night, Harvard dominated the first half, leading by as much as 27 points, but another Columbia rally tied the game with over six minutes to play. The more experienced Crimson took over again en route to a 73-65 victory, placing Columbia in a tie for third with Dartmouth.
This weekend begins with a match-up against Brown, the team with the Ivy League’s worst record, but the last time the Bears and Lions met, the Bears led most of the way before falling in overtime.
“I hope we can play with the same level of intensity we played with in the last 10 minutes and overtime rather than the first 30 minutes when we were too passive,” Nixon said. “I don’t think we need to spot them 10 points in their gym.”
Brown is a very young team, with only one upperclassman playing significant minutes, but it is coming off a weekend where it picked up its first league win. The Bears turn the ball over nearly 21 times a game, which could help the Lions in their quest to dictate the tempo.
“When we played in the first meeting we had no success,” Nixon said. As for Saturday’s game at Yale, Nixon sees a lot of room for improvement from the 66-59 loss three weeks ago.
“We need to do a better job of taking care of the basketball,” he said. “We really struggled with our offensive flow in the beginning and were out of sync. We need to do a significantly better job on Yale’s Melissa Colborne. She really went off on us.”
Colborne, the league’s second leading scorer, helped Yale overcome a halftime deficit and a late Columbia rally nearly single-handedly. Saddled with early foul trouble, she scored just five first-half points, but poured on 17 in the second half, spoiling a 23-point effort by Columbia’s Danielle Browne.
The Bulldogs come in having won just one of five since the Columbia victory, and Nixon sees their game Friday at Cornell as an indicator of how they’ll play against the Lions.
“Look at it this way,” he said. “We have had three weekends where we’ve played as Cornell’s travel partner. Princeton played tough with Cornell, came close, and came up short. Against us they were a little flat. The other two were blown out at home and then jumped on us.”
Whatever the result of the Yale-Cornell game, Nixon knows that all his team can do is control its destiny when it is on the court. Both games tip-off at 7 p.m.