Hanover
Your kind used to mill about a sold-out Leede Arena, celebrating campaigns that produced five consecutive postseason berths from 2004-09 and seven during an 11-year stretch. There were six Ivy League championships during those years and kids who wanted nothing more than to be as cool as players such as Katharine Hanks, Koren Schram or Brittney Smith.
Now? The Big Green is 3-6 after Saturday’s 66-61 loss to visiting Marist, which improved to 4-7. Today, Dartmouth plays at Rhode Island, a team that earlier this season beat those same Red Foxes by 21 points. After that come clashes with Boston College and Albany, which has a winning record against a tough schedule.
That’s followed by back-to-back games with Harvard, currently 8-1 and which recently won at Kansas by 10 points. Columbia (8-2) arrives after that and the Lions just beat Providence, a scholarship school with a deep basketball tradition.
Hoops bettors, if they deigned to consider such things, would not likely risk money on the Big Green to post its first winning season since 2008-09. It’s also safe to say, however, that Dartmouth coach Belle Koclanes cares not a whit for all the numbers you’ve just read.
“We want to earn as many victories as we possibly can, but we try not to look at that as the measuring stick,” Koclanes said after the lead in Saturday’s game changed hands 13 times. “Everyone in society looks at that measuring stick, but that’s not the best way for us to develop as a program.”
Koclanes was 5-23 her first season, 14-14 during her second and 12-18 last winter. Her Ivy League records are 2-12, 5-9 and 7-7. Those last marks are the ones that truly count, so the upcoming league slate looks vitally important from two weeks away.
Which is why it has to be troubling to some to hear this from junior forward Olivia Smith on Saturday:
“We just need to be consistent with our effort in every single possession,” said Smith, who had 14 points, three rebounds and six turnovers during 26 minutes. “They were getting after loose balls and we just weren’t, and that’s what it came down to.”
Ouch. Dartmouth hasn’t attracted top-shelf talent for nearly a decade and a starter says it need to play harder with what it has? The last time a Big Green women’s hoopster earned first team All-Ivy honors was 2009. It’s produced only three second-team honorees in that time. All-out effort might be the best thing the team can offer its “crowds.” which can drop toward 300 actual bodies in the stands.
You are a Dartmouth women’s basketball fan, and you have to be wondering if and when this is going to improve. Koclanes is asking you to wait.
“It’s really hard to earn a championship,” she said. “You have to have time and you have to get the right people in place and inspire them to greatness. I don’t focus on winning and losing every day; I focus on developing my young adults.”
She’s got some good ones. Whether they become great mostly remains to be seen. Senior Fanni Szabo arrived from her native Hungary as an electrifying guard who scored 20 or more points seven times as a freshman. She started every game as a sophomore, when she led the team with an average of 16.3 points per contest.
Szabo battled lower-body injuries last season, but Koclanes said she’s has been healthy for a while now. Szabo is averaging 7.8 points per game as a senior and comes off the bench. Saturday, she had seven points and four assists during 28 minutes but made just 3-of-11 field goals, including a 1-of-7 performance from behind the arc. She moved gingerly at times. The freshman-year fire looks to have been extinguished.
Dartmouth’s leading scorer is junior guard Kate Letkewicz. The Iowan, who plays with a ponytail that nearly touches the waistband of her shorts, has scored as many as 24 points in a game and as few as two this season. She had seven against Marist and leads the Big Green with an 11.3 per-game average.
Junior forward Andi Norman scored in single digits her first eight games before going for 26 against Maine last week and 13 against the Red Foxes. She’s started all of four games as a collegian, so if she’s going to step into a front-line role, it’s going to be a baptism by fire.
Smith entered this season having started once during two previous campaigns, but has been out for the jump ball every game as a junior. She’s solid, but opponents are surely aware that she’s committed 26 turnovers and they aren’t soon going to stop hounding her in the paint.
Starting point guard Amber Mixon, a junior, has started every game, but averages just 3.0 points and fewer than two assists per outing. Defensively, she’s the cat’s pajamas, but she’s attempted only 21 shots in 194 minutes and Saturday tried only two during 22 minutes of play. Backup Annie McKenna is a freshman who might wrest the job away, but not if she makes only 1-of-4 field-goal attempts, as she did against Marist. Isalys Quinones, a sophomore forward and the team’s tallest player at 6-foot-2, had 10 points.
Asked if she and her team should be judged more critically now because the 16-woman roster includes 15 of her recruits, Koclanes looked mildly irritated.
“Why are we judging?” she said. “Let’s get rid of the judging. Our team is way better than it was three years ago. Competing with Maine and Marist, these are very good mid-major teams and we’re right there with an opportunity to earn victories in the last two minutes of the game.
“Those people outside the program who just see the wins and losses, we want to get you more wins but … you’ve got to understand it takes a process to do so.”
You are a Dartmouth women’s basketball fan. What do you make of that?
Notes: Lovisa Henningsdottir led Marist with 21 points, while teammate Rebekah Hand added 18. … Dartmouth athletic director Harry Sheehy last week addressed the men’s basketball team’s start. The Big Green is 0-10 under first-year coach David McLaughlin. “I’m not shocked, but I’m a little surprised,” Sheehy said. “I don’t care what (McLaughlin’s) record is this year. David’s going to get time to build this in the right way.”… According to their Crate & Barrel gift registry, Koclanes and Jill Glessner, Dartmouth’s assistant athletic director for external relations, are to be married on Aug. 17 of next year. Glessner is a former women’s basketball coach at Northeastern University and provides commentary during Big Green basketball online and radio broadcasts. … Dartmouth gave away “ugly Christmas sweater T-shirts” to fans at the game. They featured digitalized images of moose. … Back in town on a two-week vacation and working the statistics table was former Lebanon High soccer and tennis standout Austin Mansell. He’s in the midst of a year-long operations internship with Norwich-based Grassroots Soccer that has him living in Cape Town, South Africa.