ITHACA, N.Y. — After the initial bursts of confetti and screaming and jumping for joy, Princeton juniors Ashley Chea, Skye Belker and Fadima Tall celebrated winning the Ivy League Tournament on Saturday by lying in a pool of confetti on the center-court logo. They’d made snow angels earlier, but this was less that and more sunbathing in the glittering gold pieces.
While they relished their 63-53 win over Harvard, head coach Carla Berube walked over with a smile on her face. She carefully stepped over Belker’s outstretched arm and placed the championship trophy between the three players. As she was arranging it just so, the Tigers’ fourth junior, Olivia Hutcherson, raced in and slid onto the floor.
The Ivy Madness title is the Tigers’ sixth in the past seven conference tournaments. As the top seed, they beat fourth-seeded Brown and third-seeded Harvard, both by double digits. They will enter the NCAA Tournament with a 26-3 record and wins over Belmont, George Mason, Georgia Tech, Penn State, Rhode Island, Rutgers, Seton Hall and Villanova. Their only losses are to Maryland once and Columbia twice.
That all paints a picture of Princeton as a juggernaut on an inevitable path. But this title was special to the Tigers partly because they had to climb back up the mountain. Last season, Harvard upset them in the semifinals, dealing Berube her lone loss in Ivy Madness since she was hired in spring 2019. Tall told reporters after Saturday’s game that it felt like something was “taken” from them with that loss and that revenge was on their minds this season.
“You remember those games,” she added. “… I think remembering where we came from was a big boost in this game.”
Entering the tournament, there were also some lingering questions about how special this Princeton team could be, despite its gaudy record and an offense that ranks 24th nationally in points per 100 possessions. The Tigers have just 11 rostered players and 10 healthy ones. With no player taller than 6’2, they don’t have a lot of size or rim protection. And their defense squeezed opponents at times throughout the year but didn’t suffocate them the way Berube’s teams are known for.
But Princeton has beaten deeper and taller teams all season, and it finally found its rhythm defensively late in the season. Berube told reporters on Thursday that her team has been watching a lot of film on both its good and its bad defensive moments, has been practicing better, and has been “playing with a little more grit and intensity on that end” lately.
That showed in the Ivy League Tournament, as Princeton played some of its best defense in racing out to insurmountable leads in both games. In the first quarter alone on Saturday, the Tigers turned nine Harvard turnovers into 9 points.
“It almost [was] as if they were bullying us, just ripping the ball out of our hands,” Harvard head coach Carrie Moore told reporters postgame. Her voice was hoarse, and she occasionally wiped away a tear as disappointment washed over her. “We gotta be stronger. We gotta be tougher.”
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Harvard also struggled to defend Princeton in the first half. Moore said the team had zero streaks of three straight defensive stops — commonly known as “turkeys” — in the half, which made it hard to gain any traction.
Princeton led by as many as 12 points in the first half, but even that didn’t fully reflect how in control the Tigers were. The Crimson were fortunate to enter halftime down only 9.
And Harvard hung around long enough to make a push in the fourth quarter. Junior guard Karlee White scored 10 of the team’s points in a 12-6 run that tied the game at 51 with 4:01 left.
“We threw so much at them. They were still scoring,” Tall said. “They came back. We told ourselves, ‘They can’t keep chipping away.’”
Tall drew White’s fifth foul with 3:52 left, and the tide turned back Princeton’s way. Harvard has pulled off four Ivy Madness upsets in the past four seasons, all as the No. 3 seed. But it wasn’t to be on Saturday, as the Tigers closed the game on a 12-2 run.
“They just look at each other and they say, ‘We’ve got this,’” Berube said postgame, crediting the Tigers’ tough nonconference schedule for making them comfortable in close games.
Tall and Chea were Princeton’s top scorers on Saturday, and both were named to the All-Tournament team, with Tall winning Most Outstanding Player.
Both of them had been first-years on the 2024 team that won the Ivy League Tournament, so the moment wasn’t entirely new to them. But they’d played much smaller roles off the bench then, and Tall had barely seen the floor in the 2024 championship game. Now, they’re the experienced stars leading sophomores and first-years who’d never won a postseason game before this weekend.
“Winning it this year means a lot to, I think, all of us [juniors] just because we’re upperclassmen now, and we’ve been starting together for the past two years,” Chea told reporters postgame. She choked up as she continued, and Berube rubbed her shoulder in support. “And I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we’re all best friends. And I think winning that together … means honestly everything.”
Tall and Chea have also both battled through their own ups and downs this season. The 6’1 Tall moved from power forward to center in preseason, and initially, she didn’t see the coaching staff’s vision for her there.
“I was not happy,” she said. “… [It] took me a while to realize the potential I could have at this spot. … It’s been a team effort and a lot of mental toughness to be able to figure out where I’m valuable.”
Eventually, Berube won Tall over. Berube’s reasoning was simple: “That girl needs to be on the floor,” she explained on Saturday.
Berube added, “We’re very lucky to have her on our team, and we had to figure out how to make that work. And we say the five [position], but what does that even mean? [She’s] defending maybe the tallest player on the other team, but is she sitting on the block for 40 minutes? No, she’s spreading the floor. She can hit threes, she can go by [you], but also can play on the inside.”
Tall has had a career-best season at her new position, battling a few injuries and illnesses to average 13.2 points, 7.4 rebounds, 2.4 steals and 2.1 assists in 28.8 minutes per game. She is shooting 50.3% from 2-point range and 36.6% from behind the arc and was named second-team All-Ivy on Tuesday. She’s so versatile that, even while playing center, the Tigers trust her to handle the ball and help them break full-court pressure.
On Saturday, Tall opened the scoring with a layup and never looked back. She torched Harvard with 20 points on 8-for-12 shooting, seven rebounds, four steals and three assists. Thirteen of those points and all of her steals came in the first half to help Princeton set the tone. She also drew five fouls in total, including several that put Harvard’s top players in foul trouble.
Tall has been a puzzle for the Harvard coaching staff all season. She’s a mismatch for any defender Harvard puts on her, whether because of her speed, size or versatility.
“We haven’t really been able to figure that out for the three games that we’ve played them,” Moore said. “I think that’s probably something we need to figure out, because she’ll be back next year.”
In contrast, Chea was a first-team All-Ivy selection last season but has struggled this season to find her rhythm offensively. She has always been a clutch scorer, but she’s shooting career lows of 36.7% from the field and 31.2% from 3-point range, which has been frustrating for her at times. During a few particularly trying weeks, Berube encouraged her after every practice, trying to keep her confident.
Chea scored 12 points on 5-for-9 shooting in the Brown win on Friday and 13 on 5-for-9 shooting on Saturday. It was the first time she’d scored in double figures in consecutive games since mid-January. And on Saturday, it seemed like any time Harvard got a big basket, there was Chea, racing the other way for a layup and wresting the momentum back.
“She is a tremendous, tremendous player, skilled and athletic,” Berube said. “And [she] just got that swagger back, and [I] knew she had it in her. And she certainly found it at the right time.”
After the buzzer sounded on Saturday, the Princeton players formed a small mob at center court, only covering about half of the giant Ivy League logo. The confetti fell and stuck to everyone’s sweaty limbs — Tall had some on her right arm as she hustled to the sideline to do her television interview, and Belker had several pieces on her calf as she hugged assistant coach Lauren Dillon. Hutcherson even had one on her forehead that looked like a Band-Aid, but a teammate got rid of it just in time for the group photos.
As Berube watched her team celebrate, she felt a mix of emotions, from joy to pride to gratitude. And when Chea joined the exuberant crew after her own postgame interview, she jumped into Berube’s arms.
“I think I ran up to her after the game just because I wanted to show her that all the times that she has poured into me and all the tears that I’ve cried in all those meetings, that it was for a reason,” Chea said. “It’s not just a fluke.”
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After the team posed for photos and slapped a Princeton sticker on the winner’s line of the tournament bracket, the players were suddenly on the move. They grabbed the trophy and sprinted over to the fans standing and cheering behind their bench. Never mind that the public address announcer was revealing the All-Tournament team at the time — none of the Tigers seemed to care who got the accolades.
Then the players zoomed to the opposite sideline, forcing a horde of photographers to race after them. They wanted to thank the Princeton band, which had an outsized impact on Saturday because the Harvard band was absent and the official attendance was just 698 fans. The players’ last stop was the cheerleaders on the baseline.
When that wrapped up, Tall and Chea grabbed each other again for a hug, then headed to center court with Belker to bask in the golden confetti glow. They’d achieved the Princeton standard: a regular-season championship, a tournament title and an appearance in the NCAA Tournament. Soon, they’ll try to make that NCAA Tournament trip a long one — and relish keeping their small but mighty group together for that much longer.
“They’re undersized, but it’s about the fight in the dog, right?” Berube said. “They’re just kind of warriors. … I know our record looks pretty good, but there’s been some ups and downs and some injuries, and we just have fought through.”
