After splitting its last two games at home against Yale and Brown, the women’s basketball team struggled on the road this weekend — falling 67-40 at Penn and 59-34 at Princeton.Penn (14-9, 7-2 Ivy League), which has won five out of its last six games entering the contest on Friday, continued its hot shooting against the Red (11-12, 3-6), going 46 percent from the field and 38 percent from three-point range.Cornell did not live up to those standards.While senior forward Clare Fitzpatrick scored 15 points and junior guard Allyson DiMagno scored 12, the team as a whole connected on just 27 percent of its shots and went zero-for-10 from three.“Their defense was exactly what we prepared for. We just couldn’t hit easy shots [and] couldn’t hit any threes,” Fitzpatrick said.After nearly 15 minutes of strong defense from both teams in the beginning of the first half, the Quakers led the Red by just five points. However, a pair of free throws by Brianna Bradford propelled Penn on a 9-0 run, and Cornell scored just six more points in the rest of the half. According to head coach Dayna Smith, the Red had scoring opportunities all game long, but was unable to capitalize. “Penn was playing an aggressive defense but we had open shots,” Smith said. “We couldn’t knock them down, quite honestly.”The Red returned to the court Saturday night at Princeton (18-5, 9-0) with another drought of offensive production. At the end of the first half, Cornell had only put up 14 points to Princeton’s 34.After allowing Princeton to shoot more than 50 percent from the field in the first half, Cornell came out of the locker room with more energy, holding the Tigers to just 25 and ultimately their lowest scoring game in the Ivy League since Feb. 3rd of the 2011-12 campaign. The Red also allowed just one of Princeton’s players, senior Niveen Rasheed, to score in double figures.“We played excellent defense,” Fitzpatrick said. “We limited them to under 60 points, which is a feat in itself.”According to Smith, the team’s performance on the defensive end was influenced by its poise on offense.“I thought we did a really good job of slowing the tempo down [on offense],” Smith said. Although the Red scored 20 points in the second half — compared to just 14 in the first — the team needs to improve on its offensive game after its difficulty scoring this weekend, according to Smith.“Our goal right now is to win, but right now we just have to get better as a basketball team,” Smith said. “We need to clean up our offense.” The Red will take on Yale and Brown on the road this weekend — concluding its four game road-trip — before finishing the season at home against Harvard and Dartmouth.
Original Author: Skyler Dale