The women’s basketball team returned from a weekend on the road at both Dartmouth (6-17, 4-5 Ivy) and Harvard (15-8, 6-3 Ivy) with another career-high performance by guard Sarah Halejian ’15.
After a 66-55 win against the Big Green on Friday night, the Bulldogs (10-14, 5-5 Ivy) traveled to Cambridge, Mass., to try to avenge their loss against the Crimson earlier this season. Despite Halejian’s 29-point game, Harvard broke Yale’s three-game winning streak with a 69-66 victory.
“We came out to a slow start but got back in the game and did everything we could to claw and fight back. It just didn’t turn out how we wanted it to,” guard Janna Graf ’14 said.
Halejian, the Elis’ leading scorer, was just seven points shy of surpassing Yale’s all-time single game scoring record. Erica David ’07 is the current record holder for points scored in a single game, putting up 36 for the Bulldogs against Lafayette during the 2003-’04 season. Prior to last weekend, guard Megan Vasquez ’13 held the No. 2 spot with 28 points in a single game.
“The first half really hurt us in the end. We can’t let people jump out to a lead and play catch-up the whole time,” Halejian said.
On Saturday, Vasquez scored eight of her 13 points for the night in the first half, contributing to the Bulldogs’ 11-5 run just minutes before heading into the locker room.
After a rough start to the match, Yale trailed by nine at half and managed to tie the game three different times during the second period. Halejian scored 22 of her points in the final 20 minutes of the game, keeping Bulldog hopes alive. However, in the final five minutes, the Crimson pulled away with a 9-2 run that sealed the victory.
Halejian cut the deficit with a 3-point jumper at the six-second mark, but her efforts were too late as the clock ran out. Despite the Elis’ three-point loss, they outscored Harvard 40-34 in the second half and shot 39.7 percent from the field overall.
“Coach [Chris] Gobrecht has been telling us that the most important thing is to end good and confident about the whole season,” Halejian said. “We’ve had our ups and downs, but we’re going to go out on a good note.“
Yale will continue conference play this weekend, with only four more regular season games on the team’s schedule.
“We want to play the best basketball we can. We want to finish well and feeling good about ourselves,” Graf said.
The Bulldogs will return to John J. Lee Amphitheater for their final weekend at home to take on Columbia this Friday at 7 p.m. and Cornell on Saturday at 6 p.m. for Senior Night.