NEW HAVEN, Conn. – The Yale women's basketball team hosts local rival Fairfield Monday night in the home opener (7:00 p.m.,
ESPN+,
International Stream,
Live Stats). The Bulldogs went 7-3 at home last season and are 56-28 (.667) at Lee Amphitheater since the start of the 2014-15 season.
Last Game
Yale (0-2, 0-0 Ivy League) rallied from a 12 point deficit to tie the game at Saint Joseph's 39-39 heading into the fourth quarter Friday night, but the Hawks outscored the Bulldogs 20-15 in the fourth for a 59-54 win. Yale got double-doubles from a pair of sophomores – guard
Nyla McGill (Charlotte, N.C.) (19 points, 13 rebounds) and forward
Grace Thybulle (Irvington, N.Y.) (16 points, 13 rebounds).
Cleaning Up the Glass
Yale outrebounded Saint Joseph's by 18 on Friday, 47-29. That was the Bulldogs' biggest rebounding advantage since outrebounding Harvard by 20 (53-33) on Feb. 5, 2022.
Bench Strength
Yale's bench has outscored its opponents by more than 20 points in each of the first two games – 29-5 in the Fordham game and 27-7 in the Saint Joseph's game.
Busy Bulldogs
Monday marks the start of a stretch of three games in six days for Yale. This is one of only two times this season the Bulldogs are scheduled to play that many games in a six-day span (the other is Nov. 25-30). They will travel approximately 940 miles, including road trips to Army (Wednesday) and Maine (Saturday).
Clark Eyes Another Record
En route to breaking the Yale single-season assist record with 160 last year, junior guard
Jenna Clark (Pittsburgh, Pa.) averaged 5.9 assists per game. Through two games this season, she is averaging 6.0 assists per game. Clark is on the Watch List for the Nancy Lieberman Award as the top point guard in the country.
Start of the Dalila Eshe Era
This marks Yale's first season under
Dalila Eshe, the team's Joel E. Smilow, Class of 1954 Head Coach. Eshe comes to Yale from Princeton, where she spent three seasons as an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator. She helped the Tigers to a No. 24 national ranking, an Ivy League title and a win over then-No. 15 Kentucky in the 2022 NCAA Tournament. A star player at Florida, Eshe earned first team All-SEC honors as a senior in 2006 and was selected 25
th overall in the WNBA Draft by the Seattle Storm.
Scouting Fairfield
Fairfield (1-1, 0-0 MAAC) beat Brown 62-52 in the season opener, knocking off one of Yale's Ivy League rivals. The Stags lost 77-29 at Penn State last Friday. They are in their first season under head coach Carly Thibault-Dudonis, and will open their new arena, Maloney Arena, this Friday with a game vs. Stonehill. The Bulldogs won the last meeting between these two teams, rallying for a
71-64 win last season after trailing by as many as 10 in the third quarter.
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