– by Adesina O. Koiki
A Lot of Sports Talk editor-in-chief
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NEW YORK — The centerpiece of the rise of Columbia women’s basketball over the past few years, Abbey Hsu, the school’s all-time leading scorer took her place in front of the Ivy League champions banner — many of her teammates in tow — before the team picture and after the Lions had made history with their win today. But for all of Hsu’s contributions to the program, she scored no points (nor recorded any other statistics) for Columbia this season. Her eligibility ran out after last season’s shared regular-season title.
The teammates she left behind after graduation, and the same ones who posed alongside her today, did the job this year in making sure that the Ivy League championship would only have a Columbia blue tinge to it for the very first time.
The Columbia women’s basketball team completed a three-peat on Saturday afternoon, dispatching Cornell 91-58 to grab at least a share of the regular season title for the third consecutive season and, more importantly, claim the outright championship for the first time in school history.
Columbia’s two seniors, Kitty Henderson and Cecelia Collins, played in front of the Levien Gymnasium fans for the final time, and each hit three-pointers to give the Lions a 6-0 lead and send the team on the way to an easy victory. Collins finished with a game-high 21 points to go along with 10 rebounds and five assists, while Henderson went for 14 points, nine assists, three rebounds and three steals, capping a season that puts her seriously in the running for Ivy League Player of the Year.
Hsu, who’s been seen back on campus as she gets ready for training camp with the Connecticut Sun, the team that drafted her in the second round of last year’s WNBA Draft, celebrated with Henderson and Collins, the latter two now part of three Ivy League regular-season championships as they picked up where Hsu and the Lions left off last year — and then eclipsed it one year later.
“I just have so much gratitude for this place,” Columbia head coach and former Lion player Megan Griffith said in her postgame interview. “Columbia gave me my first head-coaching opportunity and what we’ve been able to here – it took everybody. I’m just so proud that I get to coach this amazing group of young women. We’ve got a lot to work on but it feels pretty good right now.”
*Editor’s note: Above the byline is the photo gallery from Saturday afternoon’s game, with photos taken by New York-based photographer Chris Gonzalez. After clicking on a photo to enlarge the picture, press the left and right arrow buttons on either side of the caption to scroll through the rest of the pictures that appear on the first page, Also, click on the numbers and/or arrow appearing immediately below the picture grid to load the next set of photos. There are 17 pictures in total.
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