W. hoops bus accident foreshadows weekend

After last weekend, the women's basketball team thought it was on the right track. It had won its first Ivy League game, 55-52 over Brown, bringing its season total for wins to four.

Princeton (4-17 overall, 1-6 Ivy League) has run into lots of problems over the first part of its season, but on Thursday night the Tigers took that to a new level.

As the team bus traveled through southern Connecticut, a car and an 18-wheeler bumped yards ahead of Princeton's bus. The car then moved in front of another truck that was directly in front of the Tigers. The driver of the second truck slammed on his brakes to avoid the car, causing Princeton's bus to slam into the back of the truck.

The front of the Tigers' bus was severely damaged although no one on the bus was injured. The accident delayed Princeton's trip for several hours while the bus was dislodged from the truck.

One might think that the Tigers had nowhere to go but up after that, but Princeton's weekend did not significantly improve after the accident. The Tigers fell to both Dartmouth (14-6, 6-1) and Harvard (13-6, 6-1), further cementing their position near the bottom of the Ivy League. Princeton could not use the absence — figurative in the case of Dartmouth and literal for Harvard — of each of the team's best players to its advantage.

Big Green guard Courtney Banghart scored just three points while playing 22 minutes against the Tigers. Crimson center Melissa Johnson did not play due to injury.

Iron deficiency

Princeton never seemed to be able to get it together Friday against Dartmouth, falling 74-57. The Tigers shot an anemic 36.4 percent from the floor, including just 10 of 31 from the field in the first half. Freshman guard Allison Cahill provided one of the lone bright spots for Princeton, scoring 18 points and draining 6 of 7 from three-point land.

"Against Dartmouth, we were with them in the beginning and then we let them get up quite a bit. We were kind of in a hole and had to dig ourselves out a bit," senior center Brooke Lockwood said.

Princeton did manage to put together a solid game against Harvard, but in the end just ran out of time, losing by the margin of 73-67.

"We played very well [against Harvard], as our coach said at the end of the game," Lockwood said. "We just needed to get two more stops anywhere in the game and we would have won the game. We gave them a few too many open shots."