The Columbia women’s basketball team guaranteed that it would finish the season with the program’s best-ever Ivy League record when it beat Yale on Friday night. On Saturday evening, the Lions did themselves one better with a 54-41 victory over Brown. With the win, Columbia completed a 9-5 Ivy campaign and assured itself of being the outright third-place team in the conference.
“We wanted to go out with a bang,” senior guard Danielle Browne said.
Friday night’s victory over Yale also assured the Lions’ three seniors—Browne, Caitlin Stachon, and Sara Yee—of being the winningest senior class in the history of Columbia women’s basketball. As members of head coach Paul Nixon’s first recruiting class, the three were expected to lead the program’s turnaround, and that is exactly what they did.
“I really couldn’t be prouder of them,” Nixon said. “They’ve come in and they have done a tremendous job of raising the bar for this program, and turning this into a winning program, and they’ve set the standards now for the returning players and the new players that we have coming in.”
Browne made her mark as a playmaker on both ends of the floor, taking charges and blocking shots while also slashing to the hoop and making pinpoint passes. This season, she tallied five or more assists in 14 games—including four 7-assist performances—and ended the year averaging 4.4 assists per contest. She recorded at least one block in 11 games and scored 14.3 points per game in Columbia’s last four matchups.
Yee was known for taking care of the basketball, compiling an assist-to-turnover ratio of 2-to-1 as a sophomore. After a slight dip in efficiency as a junior, she improved upon her ratio in her final season, ending the year with a 2.6-to-1 mark. Yee also made her presence felt as a defender and was recognized after the 2008-09 campaign as the Ivy League’s inaugural Defensive Player of the Year.
Stachon, meanwhile, saw playing time in all of Columbia’s games during her final two seasons. She averaged 10.4 minutes per contest this year, providing a steady post presence off the bench.
As a group, the seniors formed the foundation of the Lions’ rise to prominence. They turned Nixon’s vision of a competitive Division I team into a reality.
“They’re leaving as [members of] one of the better teams in the league,” Nixon said. “And just looking at what they’ve been able to do outside the league [this season] as well, it’s really a testament to how hard they’ve worked, how much they’ve committed to the program and believed in not just the system but in each other and their teammates. … They’re going to be missed, and nobody’s going to miss them more than their head coach.”
The seniors were part of a history-making season long before Ivy play began. The Lions started the year by winning nine of 14 nonconference games, a program record at the Division I level. Columbia then went on to sweep Cornell, recording a 68-44 victory over the Big Red in Ithaca and a 68-47 win at home.
The Lions swept a total of four Ivy opponents this season, with Dartmouth, Penn, and Brown joining Cornell in that group. Columbia split its series with Yale, while the Lions themselves were swept by Harvard and Princeton. Princeton is currently 13-0 in Ivy play and already clinched the Ivy title, while Harvard is the second-place team in the league with a 10-3 record.
Columbia did not achieve a weekend sweep—two wins in one weekend—until beating Yale and Brown to close Ivy play. It was a fitting end to a record-setting season, a season in which Columbia established itself both within the Ivy League and beyond.
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