Hallion Rallies W. Hoops to Comeback Win

With Harvard down 55-45 and just 10 minutes left against river rival Boston University, co-captain Lindsay Hallion decided it was time to take over.

She netted two quick free-throws to pull Harvard within eight before exploding for two consecutive steals in the backcourt and a pair of fast break layups all within one minute. When Hallion’s work was done, the Crimson stared up at a mere 55-51 deficit. Only 32 seconds had passed since Hallion stepped to the line for her first free throw.

Hallion guided the Crimson to a 72-62 victory over the Terriers, the squad’s first win over its local rival in three years.

Hallion’s outburst was part of a 14-3 Harvard run that gave the Crimson a 59-58 lead on a Claire Wheeler free throw with 6:43 left in the game. Over those four minutes, Hallion scored eight of her game-high 19 points, had three steals and set up Wheeler’s trip to the line with a quick pass into the post.

“Don’t you love her?” Harvard head coach Kathy Delaney-Smith said of her star and co-captain. “She’s fun to play with, she’s fun to coach and she’s fun to watch. She is.”

The quick turn in Harvard’s play set the tone for the rest of the game, as the Crimson clamped down on defense and outmuscled BU on the glass in the second frame.

“I think we as a team made up our mind to let this be our game and we played strong the rest of the way,” Hallion said.

The Crimson trailed BU by four points at the end of the first half, heading into the break at a 42-38 disadvantage. An up-tempo first half led to a series of fast breaks and quick shots early in the shot clock, which Delaney-Smith attributed to Harvard’s succumbing to BU’s game plan.

“They run well—they run really well. They go to the basket hard, they cut hard,” Delaney-Smith said. “It was catching us a little off guard. That irritated me and we know that about them.”

Harvard shot a blistering 55.2 percent from the field in the first half, paced by junior guard Emily Tay’s touch from 15 feet, but a poor effort on the defensive glass and a series of turnovers gave the Terriers easy points in the opening frame.

“I thought [a win] was in reach,” Delaney-Smith said about her team’s first-half effort. “I thought that BU’s system wasn’t working for them. They were capitalizing on our defensive errors. I thought that if we could minimize or get rid of our defensive errors, I felt we would do a better job.”

But the first 10 minutes of the second half did not live up to Delaney-Smith’s expectations,

Due to six quick Crimson turnovers and poor shot selection, Harvard quickly fell to a 10-point deficit in the early minutes of the second half. Jesyka Burks-Wiley’s layup with 16:41 remaining pushed the Terrier lead to 50-40. In what was a game of runs all night—the Crimson responded to a 13-4 BU run in the first half with a 9-1 stretch of its own—Hallion and Harvard provided the final spark. Defensive intensity and renewed effort on the boards helped sustain the run that Hallion started.

“I thought our guards were missing the perimeter box-outs, until they tried to work on that in the second half,” Delaney-Smith said. “And they did better.”

The Crimson looked to iron out some offensive shortcomings in the second half as well, especially after Harvard produced just seven points in the first 10 minutes of the second frame.

Harvard looked to its post game, especially juniors Katie Rollins and Emma Moretzsohn, to complement a perimeter arsenal that had scored the bulk of the Crimson’s points in the opening half.

“They are Harvard student athletes,” Delaney-Smith said. “So when we tell them to look inside, they are one-dimensional because they want to do what they’re told. They’re not supposed to do that. That’s what happened to our offense. They were forcing it inside.”

Then came Hallion’s comeback. The do-it-all senior, who has led the Crimson, turned on the switch just when Harvard needed a boost. When the Terriers took a 55-45 lead with 10:29 left on a Christine Kinneary jumper, the Crimson stared at a double-digit deficit for the third time in the half. Harvard had made just one field goal during the second half’s opening 10 minutes.

“Everyone on the team stepped up and did their role,” Hallion said. “When you get down like that, the thing you stress is you have to make something happen. You have to make a play on defense, execute harder on offense.”

Hallion followed her own advice. The senior from nearby Westwood, Mass., scored 14 of her 19 points in the second half. She topped off the Crimson’s second half tear with a pretty pull-up jumper from the free throw line with 50 ticks left, sending the crowd into a frenzy and Harvard to its second straight win.

“It’s huge,” Hallion said. “The seniors have never beaten BU. It’s a little bit of a personal thing for me. They’ve always come in here a little cocky, and it’s a really big thing for us to beat them.”