NEW YORK — In the days leading up to Saturday’s game, it wasn’t certain that Harvard junior guard Karlee White would play. But the moment she started warming up, with no brace in sight on the knee she’d injured a week earlier, Harvard’s prognosis against Columbia got brighter.
“If she doesn’t play, I don’t like our chances,” head coach Carrie Moore told reporters postgame. “… When things get hard, she is our anchor. She’s the one that we are going to and her teammates are looking to.”
Not only did White play, but she was the best player on the court in the second half on Saturday. Overall, she had a team-high 24 points on 8-for-17 shooting, nine rebounds, four steals, three assists and a block to lead Harvard to a 68-64 win. That cost Columbia a share of its fourth straight Ivy League title and frustrated a sellout crowd of 2,647 who came to see one of the fiercest rivalries in the league.
White has stepped into a starring role for Harvard this season as a co-captain and its leading scorer. After averaging 5.0 points and 3.6 rebounds per game as a sophomore, she is now putting up 15.4 points, 5.1 rebounds, 2.0 steals and 1.8 assists in 27.0 minutes per game. She has also been extremely efficient, shooting 55.5% from the field, 46.7% from 3-point range and 85.7% from the free-throw line.
Her jump in scoring this season makes her one of only seven Ivy League players since 2009-10 to improve their scoring by more than 10 points per game from one season to the next.
However, White has battled injuries since high school, including knee surgery as a senior. She was underrecruited out of Oak Park High School in Burbank, California, but Moore got a tip that White was her type of player.
When Moore saw her play, “I just felt like [she was] gritty and tough and resilient,” Moore said in January. “… Those are winning qualities that you can really build things around.”
White started 13 of her 19 games as a first-year and averaged 3.9 points per game, then came off the bench as a sophomore. That season, she battled leg and foot injuries, and last March, she was “playing on damn near one leg,” Moore said on Wednesday.
White had recovered from those injuries to start her junior season, but she suffered a severe bone bruise in her knee against Boston College on Nov. 19 and missed a month.
“Leading up to her injury, I think Karlee was … doing everything that we need her to do, I think, offensively but definitely defensively as well, and just adding things to her game,” Moore said in December. “She was posting more. She was taking advantage of mismatches with smaller guards on her. She was shooting the ball really well. She was getting to the rim. [We] had her coming off ball screens in the middle thirds.
“[She was] just doing a lot of things that I was hopeful for her to be doing this year, but didn’t think that they would latch on as quickly as they did.”
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Since returning from the bone bruise, White has arguably been even better. Moore challenged her in January to show the Ivy League how good she is at her best, and she responded with 27 points on 10-for-15 shooting and 10 rebounds in an overtime loss at Princeton on Jan. 19.
In February, White scored a career-high 35 points on 16-for-26 shooting in a win at Yale. She also scored 20-plus points against Brown and Cornell late in the season.
But the injury bug struck again in the rematch with Princeton on Feb. 28. White collided with a teammate while going for a loose ball and had to be carried off with an apparent knee injury. Like the bone bruise in November, it didn’t look good — perhaps even season-ending.
But for the second time this season, she escaped ligament damage. White and Moore had a conversation on Wednesday where Moore told her that if she wasn’t healthy and couldn’t move well enough to help the team, she wouldn’t play. For Moore, “healthy” generally means being able to practice on the two days before the game.
“I love the game so much, and sitting down kills me inside,” White told reporters after Saturday’s game. “So I’ll kind of do anything I can to not do that. But I think Coach Moore also does a good job holding me accountable.”
After White practiced on Thursday and Friday, Moore wanted to gauge how her body felt.
“So are we doing this?” Moore asked.
“Yeah,” White responded.
White and the Crimson started slowly on Saturday, surrendering an 8-0 run to begin the game and trailing by as many as 14 points in the first half. White entered the halftime locker room with just 4 points on 1-for-8 shooting.
Columbia’s lead swelled to 16 in the first four minutes of the third quarter, but then White heated up. With her leading the way, Harvard unleashed a 24-8 run to tie the game at 51 at the end of the third.
Harvard’s press started turning Columbia over, forcing eight turnovers in the third quarter and seven in the fourth. White had two steals at the beginning of the run, and then with 2:35 left in the third quarter, she banked in a 3-pointer to cut the deficit to 5 points.
Over the next 90 seconds, White added two layups and two free throws to score 9 straight points for Harvard. On the Columbia turnover that led to White drawing those free throws, the crowd murmured, “Oh, no!” — sensing that all the momentum was with Harvard, and especially with White.
“Defensively, getting in the groove in [our] press … helps all of us get going, but especially myself,” White said. “And I think leading the charge in that and making them uncomfortable, turning them over [and] getting easy buckets for our team just helps me get into that flow.”
“Karlee made a lot of nice plays today,” Columbia head coach Megan Griffith told reporters postgame. “It wasn’t like she just caught the ball and was wide open. [She] put her head down, drove, made a nice spin move, multiple pivots. … She made plays. That’s the thing: It’s like, who’s gonna make the defensive play?”
White made sure the momentum stayed with Harvard in the fourth quarter. With the score tied at 55, she caught a pass from first-year guard Olivia Jones and drove in for a layup, then scored again on the next possession. That gave Harvard its largest lead of the game to that point. In total, White had 20 points on 7-for-9 shooting in the second half, 8 more than any other player.
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The crowd remained desperate to help Columbia escape with a win, including on two key offensive possessions with less than 30 seconds left. But White and the Crimson clung to the mantra “Poise through the noise” and held the Lions off.
Down by 2 points on the first of those possessions, Columbia didn’t run the play correctly, and Harvard got a deflection. The Lions ended up turning the ball over, and White calmly sank two free throws with eight seconds left.
Columbia called a timeout to draw up a play for junior guard Riley Weiss, who is the Ivy League’s leading scorer at 19.7 points per game but had shot just 2-for-12 to that point on Saturday.
“Shoot the first shot,” Griffith told her in the huddle. But White got her hand up for a block that effectively sealed the game.
To Moore, those possessions showed who Harvard is after a disappointing 13-point loss to Princeton the week before.
“Our conversation leading up to this game this week was, ‘Who are we when things get difficult?'” Moore said. “… And I think they really responded, and they finished.”
About 20 minutes later, Griffith pondered the same question. For 80% of the season, she said, Columbia has been an aggressive defensive team that turns opponents over and gets balanced scoring. But the other 20% has looked more hesitant and disconnected, with one player often having to carry the load.
On Saturday, that player was senior forward Perri Page, who had a game-high 25 points on 9-for-12 shooting and eight rebounds. Ultimately, no one else followed her lead enough.
“We weren’t really connected out on the floor today,” Page told reporters postgame. “And it’s just like, we have to … execute. We didn’t do that, either.”
“We just didn’t trust each other in the hardest moments, [whereas] in all the games we won, they’ve just really trusted each other, trusted the system,” Griffith said. “So … it’s really hard to sit with this right now.”
Columbia also lost its way in its January losses to Cornell and Penn. But two wins over Princeton meant that Columbia was tied for first place entering Saturday, with a chance to clinch another title.
Paired with Princeton’s win over Yale, Harvard spoiled the opportunity — adding fuel to the fire of a rivalry that already burned especially hot. Overall, Griffith’s Lions have beaten Moore’s Crimson in eight of 12 matchups since Moore arrived in 2022. That includes the teams’ first meeting this season, when Page made a game-winning and-one with 1.9 seconds left.
As frustrating as that record has been for Moore, Harvard has topped Columbia in some of the highest-stakes matchups. For example, Harvard knocked Columbia out of NCAA Tournament contention with an upset in the 2023 Ivy League Tournament semifinals.
The Crimson also beat the top-seeded Lions in last season’s Ivy League Tournament final, denying them the one milestone that’s eluded them during Griffith’s remarkable tenure. On Tuesday, Griffith referred to Harvard as “the team that stole a championship from us last year.”
“There’s no love lost between these two teams,” Moore said on Saturday, though she noted there is a ton of respect.
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Because Columbia lost out on a share of the regular-season title, it slipped to the No. 2 seed in the upcoming Ivy League Tournament. With Harvard as the No. 3 seed, that means these two teams will meet again on Friday in the semifinals.
Griffith is confident that her team will avenge its loss, much like it did in 2023 in the WNIT. But Harvard is confident about the rematch, too — especially with White healthy and leading the way.
