PROVIDENCE, R.I. – It wasn’t a pretty scene last weekend. For the first time since 1968, Penn got swept at home in an Ivy League weekend. While the Quakers have, along with Princeton, dominated the Ivy League for a long time, one thing they didn’t do was drop both games at home in an Ivy League weekend. But after Columbia and Cornell came to the Palestra and knocked off the Quakers on consecutive nights, it happened.
The aftermath wasn’t pretty.
“Nobody was happy,” said sophomore Jack Eggleston. “It was tough practice. Everyone was frustrated, we know we didn’t give our best effort, we didn’t play our best weekend. That was really motivation for this weekend, on top of the 40-point blowout last year (at Brown), it was getting swept at home for the first time in 41 years. Everyone kind of came together and said, look, this can’t happen again.”
The Quakers certainly looked like they were a different team on Friday, out-playing Brown in every way for a 73-52 romp over the struggling Bears. The game wasn’t even as close as the final score indicates, and in the second half the Quakers looked like the Penn of old with pure dominance.
Penn coach Glen Miller mentioned the historic significance of last weekend to the team. It was surely one of the things he used to motivate and drive his team during the practices leading up to this weekend, and if Friday night’s result is any indication, it worked. The Quakers looked more like the team that beat Harvard in its Ivy League opener and were clearly the better team on the court.
“Penn’s not an easy place to coach if you’re losing. I think that’s an understatement,” Miller said. “A credit to our players is that they just come every day and block out all the negatives and keep on working.”
Miller continues to note that this team is young, not unlike last season. They start two freshmen, two sophomores and a senior, while being without two of the more experienced players in the program due to injury in juniors Darren Smith and Andreas Schreiber. Two more seniors, Cameron Lewis and Kevin Egee, also see time, but everyone else is an underclassman. The Ivy League is notoriously difficult for younger players and teams, no matter how talented, and that can be seen with Penn and Harvard, as the Crimson also lost on Friday night to drop to 2-5 in league play.
Penn used a solid offensive showing in the first half to take a ten-point lead into the locker room. Among the bright spots was some good early shooting by Tyler Bernardini, who had a game-high 16 points. The sophomore wing has struggled shooting the ball this season, so the Quakers surely hope this is the start of something. The Bears tied the game at 21, but Penn responded with nine unanswered points to take the lead for good.
In the second half, defense did the trick. The Quakers continued to pressure Brown’s guards, not letting Adrian Williams get good looks from long range and not giving Chris Skrelja any freedom to run the offense. The game wasn’t competitive for most of the second frame, despite the Quakers shooting under 38 percent from the field. They held Brown below 27 percent.
In all, it seemed like the prior weekend was a distant memory.
“We’re a confident bunch of guys, so we just had to keep our heads high and forget about the games,” said sophomore Harrison Gaines. “You have to have a short memory playing basketball, that’s a big key. We thought about the game, thought about our mistakes and what we can improve on, and came back to practice ready to go.”
The Quakers certainly can’t go back in time and reverse what happened. But they can get better from it and try not to let that happen another time. Friday’s game at Brown looked to be one step in that direction.
