Three straight wins to start the Ivy season--that is the standard the Harvard women's basketball team will be trying to meet for the fifth year in a row when it starts its southern New England road swing at Yale tonight before taking on Brown tomorrow.

Every year since the undefeated Ivy squad of '96-97, the Crimson (3-10, 1-0 Ivy) has been entering league play a step ahead of its competition--a tribute to the lessons learned from its annual challenging non-conference schedule.

A solid start this year will be the toughest yet to come by for Harvard, however. The upcoming road games in the cities of New Haven and Providence will make for tougher opposition than the perennially powerless pairing of Columbia and Cornell that came up early in the Crimson's schedule for most of the late 90's.

Although as of late neither Brown nor Yale has managed to challenge the upper echelon of the standings, this year may well be different.

Brown (5-7, 0-0) returns all five starters from a team that--despite holding the cellar for much of the season--surprisingly beat up Harvard worse than any Ivy team other than Dartmouth in 2000.

The Bears have already beaten Northeastern and Rhode Island, two common opponents who the Crimson failed to overcome. Harvard did manage a win against New Hampshire, who beat Brown in the Bears' season opener.

Brown is led by rising star Barbara Maloni, a sophomore guard, who has blossomed into the ninth-leading scorer in the nation with a season average of 21 ppg after leading all Ivy freshman in scoring last season.

Returning Harvard players, however, will remember Maloni best for tearing up the Crimson defense down that stretch at Providence last year, when she single-handedly turned a close game into a 75-56 Bear blowout--the Bears' first Ivy win after nine straight losses and one of the most surprising scores of the Ivy season. Maloni finished with 30 points.