ITHACA, N.Y. – The Yale women's basketball team came away with a critical 66-59 win against Cornell at Newman Arena Saturday afternoon, moving to within one game of Brown for the fourth and final spot in the Ivy League Tournament. The two teams immediately ahead of Yale in the league standings, Brown and Penn, both lost this weekend as the Bulldogs drew closer. Six games now remain in the regular season.
Dalila Eshe, Yale's Joel E. Smilow, Class of 1954 Head Coach of Women's Basketball, said she and her staff did not shy away from emphasizing the importance of Saturday's game to the team in advance.
"We told the team, when you made the decision to be a Division I athlete, you made the decision to embrace pressure," said Eshe. "We told them this was a must-win game, on the road, which has been a bit of a monkey on our backs."
The Bulldogs have now won back-to-back Ivy road games, with this win coming on the heels of a 74-68 OT win at Penn last Saturday.
The first quarter was evenly played, ending with the score tied 12-12. The Bulldogs began pulling away in the second, opening with a 4-0 run capped by a steal and a layup by sophomore guard
Kiley Capstraw. An 11-2 run later in the quarter included six points from junior guard/forward
Mackenzie Egger. Yale went into halftime up 27-20, having held Cornell to a .308 (8-for-26) shooting performance.
When Yale (6-15, 3-5 Ivy League) opened the third quarter with four straight points to get the lead to 11, Cornell (7-13, 1-7 Ivy League) called time. The Big Red would not get the lead lower than nine points until a run in the final minute. With the Yale lead trimmed to six, senior guard
Jenna Clark found junior guard
Nyla McGill for a buzzer-beating layup that sent the Bulldogs into the fourth quarter up 46-38.
Yale's lead was down to four with 6:56 to play before five straight points from senior forward
Brenna McDonald, set up by McGill, gave the Bulldogs some breathing room. When the lead later got down to five, senior guard
Klara Astrom hit a jumper and McGill came up with a steal in the final two minutes, forcing Cornell to foul. The Bulldogs made nine free throws in the final 64 seconds to seal the win.
Clark led Yale in scoring with 18 points, followed by McDonald (14) and Capstraw (12). McGill had seven assists, six steals, six rebounds and the best plus-minus on the team (+12). McDonald added three blocks.
Notes
- Yale had a 25-11 advantage in points off turnovers.
- Cornell led for a total of just 95 seconds, all in the first quarter.
- Yale has now won seven in a row in the series vs. Cornell, including four in Ithaca.
Quotes from Coach Eshe
- On Nyla McGill: "In general, the way she sacrifices her body and plays at 1,000% every game, is huge for us. She was hurting, but she found her heart in the gym. She came up with a number of important steals and did a great job of finding her teammates when she needed to."
- On Jenna Clark: "She did a really good job of gauging when we needed her to score and when we needed her to default to setting up her teammates. She made some big shots and did an excellent job controlling the tone for this game."
- On holding Cornell to just over 30 percent shooting in the first half, but allowing the Big Red to shoot better than 50 percent in the second half: "There were a couple stints in the third and fourth quarters where we gave up some open lanes defensively. That is something we will have to clean up. In the first half we did a really good job of keeping them in front of us."
Elsewhere in the Ivy League
- Columbia 90, Brown 73 (Friday)
- Harvard 68, Dartmouth 50
- No. 24 Princeton 67, Penn 54
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