Princeton breezes into Ivy final
NEW HAVEN, CONN. >> The Ivy League Tournament brings out the best in the Princeton women’s basketball team.
Bella Alarie scored 21 points, Gabrielle Rush hit four 3s to finish with 12 and the top-seeded Tigers reached the Ivy final by breezing past fourth-seeded Cornell, 6847, in a semifinal game on Saturday night at the John J. Lee Amphitheater.
“We came in here with a lot of momentum, we’re on a pretty big win streak right now,” Rush said. “We wanted to come out swinging. Our last game with Cornell was really close, but we wanted to make sure we set the tone and the tempo from the get-go.”
The Tigers (21-9) won their 11th straight game so easily that coach Courtney Banghart rested Alarie for the majority of the second half. Princeton faces the winner of the second semifinal between Penn and Harvard at 4 p.m. on Sunday. It will be playing for a second straight Ivy Tournament title.
“I’ll be able to rest my body and have full energy and full force (Sunday),” Alarie said. “It will be really helpful for sure.”
The Tigers put the game away with a 22-5 third quarter. In their last meeting against the Big Red (12-14), they almost gave up all of a 21-point lead. That didn’t even come close to happening this time.
“We were expecting their pressure and we took care of the ball a little bit better,” Rush said. “We knew exactly what we needed to do to stop their main two post (players). We did a lot better job this game then we did in the last game. We watched the film and it was really painful to see how that game got right down to the wire.”
Rush helped set the tone by connecting on her first three tries from beyond the arc. When the senior heats up, she’s one of the best shooters in the league.
“She said before the game it was the law averages,” Banghart said with a laugh. “Leave it to a Princeton kid to say law of averages. Hopefully, she’s right. She’s a big shot maker, she’s a big shot taker. She loves this moment. For her, you have the athletic mortality of a senior, so I hope she shoots well (Sunday). It doesn’t always work like that, but I’m going with the law of averages.”
Samantha Widmann, a twotime Trentonian CVC Player of the Year at Notre Dame High, scored a team-high 10 points for Cornell.