Harvard women's basketball co-captain Allison Feaster began the season with a nagging knee injury that kept her out of practice for much of the preseason.

Yet in the team's first game, a 90-80 exhibition win against Roto Banska Bystrica of Slovakia, Feaster scored 30 points, grabbed 15 rebounds and dished out five assists.

After the game, women's basketball Coach Kathy Delaney-Smith told two Crimson reporters that what we saw against Slovakia was just the tip of the iceberg.

"This woman is going to bring the Ivy League to a level of play it has not seen yet," she said. "You did not see it tonight."

The reporters sighed, for they had heard such embellishment before.

Sparky Anderson, the former Tigers and Reds manager, was famous for it: "Milt Cuyler will make people forget the name Willie Mays." Needless to say, people are still remembering the `Say Hey' kid.

The reporters were quite familiar with Feaster's antics. This was the same woman who had been named Ivy League Rookie of the Year and an Honorable Mention All-American her freshman season, the same woman who was already acknowledged as the best player the Ivy League women's game had ever seen.

But Delaney-Smith insisted that for some reason, this year would be different. Feaster's off season workouts had improved her game--and her sculpted triceps--exponentially. Her shot was sweeter, her box outs more forceful, her sights set higher.

"I definitely came into this season with a different attitude," Feaster says. "I worked out really hard over the summer with my boyfriend, [former North Carolina State swingman Danny Strong]. I knew that this last year was exactly that--my last year to play with four great seniors, win a championship and win in the Tournament."

An NCAA Tournament win: the difference between a team and a program. An ambitious goal for any Ivy League school whose name does not begin with `P'.

Feaster had certainly built her castles in the air, but she spent the season laying the foundations beneath each one.

First there were the individual honors. The typically modest Feaster rewrote the Harvard record books early and often.

On Nov. 30 against Mount St. Mary's, she took over as Harvard's career scoring leader, surpassing the mark of 1,605 set by Tammy Butler '95. She already held the Harvard career steals record entering the season, and she added the all-time rebounding mark to her belt on February 13 against Cornell.

Of course by now Feaster's Harvard records seem like small potatoes, for the Ivy record books suffered a similar fate. The League's all-time scoring mark went down January 26, when Feaster poured in 32 points against Lehigh to eclipse the 1,933 points of Gail Koziara (Dartmouth '82).

Then, on January 31, with 36 points against Yale at Lavietes Pavilion, Feaster became just the second Ivy League basketball player ever to score 2,000 points and grab 1,000 rebounds in a career. The first was Bill Bradley (Princeton'65), the NBA Hall of Famer and former U.S. Senator.