PRINCETON, N.J. — When Princeton head coach Carla Berube was asked whether junior guard/forward Olivia Hutcherson is the bounciest player she’s ever coached, she didn’t hesitate.
“Yep, for sure,” Berube told reporters after Saturday’s 72-61 win over Cornell. “Yeah, the way … she’s on the floor like for a second to go back up with it, [she’s] quite an athlete.”
Hutcherson has had a meteoric rise over the past few seasons. She played just 20 total minutes and scored 4 total points as a first-year. Then she became the starter at small forward five games into her sophomore year after star guard Madison St. Rose tore her ACL. She averaged 4.2 points per game, but because she wasn’t a 3-point shooting threat, Berube admitted that Princeton tried to hide her offensively at times.
Not anymore.
The 6’ Hutcherson moved to power forward this season after St. Rose returned and center Parker Hill graduated. She’s still not shooting threes, but the Tigers haven’t needed her to. Instead, she’s been a menace posting up and attacking off the dribble.
“We call it a little ‘bully ball,’ where you’re kind of hitting the defender and still using them and then being able to elevate and make plays,” Berube said.
Hutcherson is averaging 12.2 points, 5.9 rebounds, 1.7 assists and 1.6 steals in 28.4 minutes per game. All are career bests, as is her 56.6% shooting from inside the arc. Her increase in scoring from last season is the fourth-largest jump in the Ivy League and easily the largest on her team.
Hutcherson has tied or broken her career high in scoring five times this season, most recently on Saturday. Against Cornell, she scored 20 points on 10-for-13 shooting and added seven rebounds and three steals.
She believes her tempo and confidence have made the biggest difference for her this season. She has worked hard with Princeton’s assistant coaches and on her own over the summer on her post moves, and now she knows she can take her time and execute even against bigger defenders.
“If the ball is in my hands, they’re gonna have to come get it from me,” Hutcherson told reporters on Saturday. “And if they close in on me, I can kick it out. If they don’t, then I have the time to figure out how the defense is playing me and make those moves.”
Hutcherson’s confidence has only grown as she’s seen the ball go in more. She started off strong with 15 points on 7-for-12 shooting in her homecoming game at Georgia Tech and had 19 on 8-for-10 shooting against Maryland two games later. Then she scored at least 16 points in three straight games in December before opening conference play with 20 points on 7-for-12 shooting at Penn.
“She certainly has very different skills than everybody else [on the team],” Berube said. “But the way that she can cut, she can post, you can find her, and you can just throw it up there because she’s gonna elevate and get it … she’s been just a huge part of our offense and defense. I think that’s different than last year. …
“What she can do in that paint, or the way that [she] can get by, or what she can do in transition has just made us a lot better.”
Seemingly every game, Hutcherson makes a highlight-reel play or two. They come partly from her athleticism and bounce, but also from her basketball IQ and hard work over the past few years.
In the first quarter against Rutgers on Dec. 10, for example, Hutcherson ran into the lane from the weak side as teammate Fadima Tall shot a 3-pointer. She stepped around a boxout from one defender and got inside position on another. She leaped to grab the rebound, then took one dribble and went back up with it with three Rutgers players around her, earning an and-one.
Hutcherson made another eye-popping play in the third quarter, this time on defense. She was in help position deep in the paint as Rutgers started its halfcourt offense. When a Rutgers forward got double-teamed and kicked the ball out to the perimeter, Hutcherson sprinted up, anticipating the next pass. She intercepted the ball in full stride, kept it in bounds and raced downcourt for a layup.
On Monday, Hutcherson earned her second career Ivy League Player of the Week award. She’d scored 37 total points in back-to-back games on Friday and Saturday — the highest two-game output of her career.
But she wasn’t satisfied with her play on Friday in a loss to Columbia, according to Berube. That night, Hutcherson had 17 points on 7-for-14 shooting and 10 rebounds for her second career double-double, but she also had seven turnovers and fouled out late.
She corrected that on Saturday, committing zero turnovers and just one foul despite often guarding Cornell’s second-leading scorer, senior forward Emily Pape.
Hutcherson opened the game by making her first four shots and grabbing three of the first four available rebounds. “That definitely got me on a roll,” she said about her shooting. “My teammates were hyping me up, and so I was just excited.”
She continued her onslaught from there: On her first miss, she got her own rebound and put it back in. Late in the third quarter, Hutcherson nailed an elbow jumper as the shot clock expired to tie the game at 41. She also had all three of her steals in the third quarter, including two on consecutive Cornell possessions.
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In the fourth quarter, Princeton went on a 14-4 run that would decide the game, and Hutcherson bookended it. She found sophomore Emily Eadie on a high-low pass for a layup to start the run and scored the last 4 points herself. That forced Cornell head coach Emily Garner to burn her second timeout of the quarter just 4:50 in.
“She does a great job in terms of her bounciness combined with her physicality,” Garner told The IX Basketball postgame. “She creates her own angles and creates her own spacing because of her verticality and what she can do, but also the way she reads and takes her time off of her moves. I think she’s incredibly crafty. I think her bounciness is tough to stop because she can just rise up over people. And … she really hurt us tonight, obviously.”
Hutcherson’s weekend scoring came at the perfect time for a few reasons. For one, St. Rose missed Saturday’s game after appearing to tweak her surgically repaired knee late in Friday’s game, and she’s considered day-to-day.
In addition, Hutcherson’s father, Kenneth, was in town from the Atlanta area to see her and the Tigers play. He played basketball at Samford and Alabama and introduced Hutcherson to the sport.
“I think he’s just really excited to see me out here, because this is what I’ve been working for ever since I was little,” Hutcherson said. “When he introduced me to basketball, this was the goal. And so now I’m here, and he’s just excited to be able to see that.”
