"We will win next year"

After Saturday's season ending loss to Yale, Crimson Coach Kathy Delaney Smith was left clinging to the rallying point of all building teams: next year.

For the Harvard women's basketball team, it was a rebuilding year, turned contending year turned rebuilding year again.

The squad had been a dismal 3 22 the season before, and started the campaign with eight later to dwindle to six freshmen on its roster.

"This year will be the beginning of the team turning around," Co-Captain Wendy Joseph predicted in November.

Joseph proved prophetic, Ironically, as the team's only senior (and the third leading scorer in Harvard history), she will miss out on the fruits of this year's labors.

During the first few games, a hint of great accomplishments for the coming year surfaced.

Harvard won its first three games, and six of its first nine. Suddenly, the team had twice as many victories as the 1983-4 cagers--in barely a third as many games.

"We're ahead of our prediction," Delaney Smith said after the Crimson's sixth win, a 59-50 victory over Springfield.

Delaney Smith's overly optimistic pre-season prediction of .500 ball now seemed realistic, even pessimistic, to the hoopsters.

Beth Chandler echoed the thoughts of many of her trammates midway through the season when she said, "I definitely think were do better than 500."

Those dreams were shattered in the following games. After its early hot start, the Crimson lost 15 of its last 17 games to finish at 8-18; far better than the two previous years, but far below the early-season expectations.

Delaney Smith wasn't sure of the cause of the drastic downturn.

"We worked real hard in the pre-season," so that other teams experience didn't show so much," she said.

"That's only a guess, though," the third-year coach cautioned.