Women’s basketball senior tri-captain Do Stevens had a weekend worth writing home about and she can now add an impressive P.S. to her message. Stevens was named Ivy League Player of the Week yesterday, allowing the guard to further relish in her fantastic homecourt efforts.
Stevens played the largest role in a weekend that saw Cornell (11-8, 5-1 Ivy) maintain a slim half-game lead over Harvard at the top of the Ivies. In Friday’s game against Penn, the veteran guard had a career high eight assists, to accompany her 19 points, seven rebounds, and five steals. She matched that point total in Saturday’s Princeton contest and also added six boards, five assists, and two steals.
Stevens’s leadership and near .500 shooting catapulted the Red to its largest combined margin of victory ever for a single league weekend: Penn, last year’s Ivy champs, fell to a late offensive barrage 77-61 while the Tigers, who have struggled of late in league play, were simply dominated on both ends of the floor and succumbed 77-52.
It was Cornell’s finest team performance in most fans’ recent memories and Stevens, as has come to be expected, stands as the most important element of that success.
Stevens’s fellow captains, senior Breean Walas and sophomore Karen Force, have also received Ivy Player of the Week honors this season to complete the trifecta of Red excellence.
The three seem to work together like parts of a machine, yet every now and then one of those parts shoulders the brunt of the load. This past weekend was Stevens’s turn to shine and she responded masterfully, as seems to be the case with this year’s team in general.
The Red will continue its attempt at the first Ivy title in Cornell’s history next weekend when it heads to Dartmouth and Harvard.
Archived article by Scott Jones