Lions split final weekend

A season of ups and downs ended with a weekend of ups and downs for the Columbia women’s basketball team. The Lions earned a 48-42 win at Yale on Friday before dropping a 65-55 decision at Brown on Saturday. Columbia finished the year in fourth place in the Ivy League standings.

With the victory at Yale, Columbia (7-21, 6-8 Ivy) achieved a sweep of the Bulldogs and also earned their first road win.

“It’s not about style when you’re on the road­­—it’s about results,” head coach Paul Nixon said in a postgame interview. “We were fortunate enough that Yale missed enough shots—and we made just enough—to come out with a low-scoring win.”

Columbia’s defense suffocated a Yale team that was coming off a 78-64 road win against Harvard. The Lions held sophomore point guard Megan Vasquez, who had 23 points at Harvard, to just eight points on 3-for-12 shooting.

“We did a really great job of working together as a unit defensively,” Nixon said. “We just never really wanted them to be able to feel comfortable, that they could just attack us one-on-one and beat us to the basket for any easy scores.”

Columbia opened the game with a 12-2 run, and Yale (14-14, 10-4) responded with an 11-1 run. After that, the contest was a back-and-forth affair. With the last seconds of the first half winding down, freshman guard Brianna Orlich drove to the hoop. She forced a wild layup over a Yale player and missed, and the Lions entered halftime down 24-21.

With 1:24 left in the second half, Orlich drove for another transition layup. This time, she had a clearer path to the basket, and this time, she made her shot. That layup gave Columbia a 43-42 advantage, the Lions’ first lead in more than nine minutes.

Orlich’s shot was part of the 12-2 run with which the Lions finished the contest. That run began when junior guard Melissa Shafer hit a three-pointer with three minutes left, putting Columbia within one point of Yale.

After Vasquez answered with a jumper for the Bulldogs, freshman point guard Taylor Ward hit a contested layup for Columbia with 2:23 left. Her shot made the score 42-41 in Yale’s favor, setting the stage for Orlich’s lead-changing layup.

Orlich ended the night with a game-high 11 points, going 4-for-9 from the field and 3-for-7 from the foul line. Shafer also scored in double figures, contributing 10 points.

The following night, Columbia jumped out to a 16-8 lead at Brown (10-18, 6-8) only to trail by three points at halftime. Orlich hit a three-pointer in the first minute of the second half to tie the game at 25-25, but the Bears soon answered when freshman guard Lauren Clarke hit a trey of her own. Clarke’s shot was the first of three Brown three-pointers in the opening six minutes of the second half. With 14:07 left, Brown held a 40-31 lead.

Later in the half, the Bears had a 50-39 advantage. Columbia then went on an 8-2 run, with all eight of the Lions’ points coming from sophomore forward Tyler Simpson. Then, a three-pointer from Shafer with 4:05 to play made the score 54-50 in Brown’s favor. But Clarke hit a layup on Brown’s next possession, and sophomore guard Lindsay Nickel hit one with three minutes left to put Brown ahead 58-50.

“We gave up those two layups, and all of a sudden we’re back down eight,” Nixon said after the game. “That was really the ballgame there.”

Simpson answered with two free throws for Columbia, and after junior forward Aileen Daniels made another layup for Brown, senior guard Kathleen Barry completed a three-point play with 1:19 left to shrink the Bears’ lead to 60-55. Columbia did not score again, however, and Brown made five free throws in the final 1:04 to earn the 10-point win.

“We thought the win last night [at Yale] was definitely a sign that we were going to be a new road team, and just come in here and just do what we had to do,” Simpson said. “We didn’t pull through the way we thought we would.”

Simpson finished the night with 10 points, six of which came at the foul line. She was one of three Columbia players to score in double figures. Senior forward Lauren Dwyer had 11 points, while Barry scored a team-high 13 points and grabbed a game-high 10 rebounds for her seventh double-double of the year.

Nixon took Dwyer and Barry, Columbia’s two seniors, out of the game with 22 seconds left. In his postgame interview, Nixon noted that Dwyer and Barry ended their careers as one of the few classes to have beaten every Ivy opponent at least once. With the loss to Brown, he said, Dwyer and Barry also have been defeated by every Ivy team.

“It’s a little bit ironic,” Nixon said. “But the biggest thing for me is, before their arrival, Columbia had never finished above fifth in the league. And since they’ve been in the program, we’ve never finished lower than fourth. So they’ve definitely made a positive impact.”