After Saturday’s 88-77 victory over Dartmouth, the Harvard women’s basketball team’s players and coaches universally agreed that sophomore forward Hana Peljto owed much of her 36-point performance to the complementary presence of freshman center Reka Cserny. Senior point guard Jenn Monti, who dished out 10 assists on Saturday, believed that Cserny’s 33-point performance against Manhattan opened things up for Peljto against Dartmouth.

“I think Reka has been attracting a lot of attention, especially after scoring 33 in the last game,” Monti said. “That’s a tough combination to guard because you can’t pick one.”

Dartmouth was leaving Peljto with wide-open looks at the basket for much of the late first half and early second half, and Peljto did not miss, earning 17 of her team’s points in a row during a 10-minute stretch.

The Big Green finally gave Peljto more attention in the last 15 minutes, when she scored just eight and fell into foul trouble. But Harvard still came through because Monti and junior center Sarah Johnson each stepped up with seven second-half points, while sophomore forward Tricia Tubridy added five.

This past week was not the first time that two different Harvard players had scored 30 points in back-to-back games. On Feb. 6, 1998, current Eliot House tutor Suzie Miller ’98 scored 33 points—including a school-record eight three-pointers—in a 90-74 win against Penn. The next day, current Charlotte Sting forward Allison Feaster ’98 scored 34 points in a 56-53 loss to Princeton.

Sweet Charity

This year’s Crimson club is on pace to be the greatest free-throw shooting team in school history. Thirteen games into the season, Harvard is shooting 77.6 percent. The school record is 76.2 percent, set in the ’91-’92 season.

Leading the way for the Crimson are Cserny and Peljto, who are shooting 88.9 percent and 85.0 percent from the line, respectively. Naturally, the two have taken twice as many free throws as anyone else on the team.

Harvard’s free-throw percentage is easily the best in the Ivies. Dartmouth came into Saturday’s game shooting 73.0 percent for the season, and made 4-of-5 free throws in the first half but just 6-of-11 in the second.

Harvard was 5-for-7 from the line in the second half. But thanks to Cserny and then Tubridy, the Crimson earned the offensive rebounds on both free-throw misses.

The NCAA has not released national statistics since Dec. 17, so it is difficult to tell precisely how Harvard’s free-throw shooting stands nationally. But assuming that other teams’ percentages remain relatively constant, the Crimson will be in the top ten nationally once the current rankings are tabulated.

Glass Ceiling

The Crimson led Dartmouth 44-32 at the halftime, but the teams’ field-goal percentages weren’t even close—just not the way one would expect. The Big Green shot 56.5 percent from the floor while only 39.0 percent of Harvard’s shots fell through.

The difference was the offensive glass, where Harvard beat out Dartmouth by an absurd margin of 16-3 in the first half. Peljto, Tubridy and Cserny each had as many or more offensive rebounds than the entire Dartmouth team.

“Just try to box out Hana, Reka, and Tricia Tubridy,” Harvard Coach Kathy Delaney-Smith said. “They’re just relentless. They don’t stop.”