Main Menu · Search · Current Issue · Contact · Archives · Centennial · Letters to the Editor · FAQs

Photograph by Jim Harrison

Achieving Women

First, the women's basketball team wound up its Ivy League season with record-breaking distinction. Then, on April Fools' Day, another record fell, hard, broken by Mother Nature.

Not since the Ivy League began double round-robin play, in 1982-83, had a women's basketball team recorded an undefeated season. Harvard (20-7 overall, 14-0 Ivy) mowed down all League opponents, and also set a record with 26 straight Ivy victories, snapping Brown's 21-win mark. For the first time in history, Harvard won back-to-back Ivy titles.

Such success earned another trip to the NCAA tournament's first round, where the women were seeded sixteenth in the East and drew the number-one seed, the University of North Carolina. Harvard hoped to become the first number-16 seed to knock off the favorites, as well as the first Ivy women's squad ever to win a first-round game at the NCAAs. But the Tar Heels frustrated those dreams with a 78-53 trouncing of the Crimson hoopsters in Chapel Hill.

It was a different story in the Ivies, where Harvard had only one scare, a 70-62 win over Columbia in early January. By February, team members were hitting their stride, womanhandling opponents with 20- and 30-point margins of victory. Junior forward Allison Feaster repeated as Ivy League Player of the Year and was a First Team All-Ivy selection, as was senior co-captain Jessica Gelman, a guard who will graduate as Harvard's all-time assist leader (485).

Team members pictured above are (foreground, from left) Gelman, Megan Basil '98, Feaster; (second row) Kelly Kinneen '99, Karun Grossman '98, Sarah Russell '99, head coach Kathy Delaney-Smith, Rose Janowski '99; and (in back) Suzie Miller '99, assistant coach Liz Cranmer, Laela Sturdy '00, Alison Seanor '98, Sarah Brandt '98, assistant coach Trisha Brown '87, Courtney Egelhoff '00, and co-captain Kelly Black '97.

The meteorological action in Cambridge and Boston went like this. Easter Sunday, March 30, gave one faith in the futureŃ63 degrees and sunny. Rain came next morning. It changed to snow, which quickly buried the crocuses. By the time the sky cleared on the afternoon of April 1, 25.4 inches of snow had fallen. It revealed ice-blue, glacier-tinted depths when shoveled. The snowfall was the third biggest in Boston history, just shy of 1978 and 1969 offerings, both of which had the decency to dump in February. It was by far the biggest spring snowstorm in Boston history.

The snow, wet and weighty, came with winds of blizzard strength. Throughout the night and Massachusetts the combination tore limbs from trees or shattered them entirely. More than 100 trees at the Arnold Arboretum were destroyed and many damaged. Phase three of Harvard's reforestation of the Yard had begun the week before, and the storm roughed up some of the newcomers along with venerable inhabitants of the place. The penalty for Mother Nature's unsportswomanlike conduct was a badly pruned landscape and the sound of chain saws and chippers whining in spring.

Main Menu · Search · Current Issue · Contact · Archives · Centennial · Letters to the Editor · FAQs