“When you give a player like that guidelines and a system, she’s brilliant in it,” Delaney-Smith said. “She knows angles, she knows timing, she knows how to read a defense and create. She didn’t do it last year in the flex, but wait until you see her this year.”

Captain and forward Kate Ides is at the helm of this star-studded Harvard team. Ides played in every game last season, starting in seven, and averaged 10 points per game over the span of three contests, against Yale, Columbia and Cornell.

Ides’s team will need all of its talent, old and new, to step up early on as the Crimson plays its most formidable nonconference schedule in recent memory.

Right off the bat Harvard looks to test its potential by opening with Syracuse. In 2001, Harvard fell to the Orangemen 78-66. The Crimson looks at its tough schedule as not just a challenge, but as an opportunity.

“We have the toughest early season Harvard has ever had with several NCAA tournament teams,“ Dunham said. “Our goal by playing them is to show that we can beat high-caliber teams and that we deserve to be back in the tournament again.”

Harvard looks to November and December match-ups against BC, Minnesota and at Vanderbilt in the First Tennessee Tournament to gauge its NCAA prospects and prepare for its Ivy League season.

After experiencing March Madness last year in the Crimson’s first-round loss to North Carolina whetted the Harvard’s appetite for national success. Heading into the 2002-2003 campaign, the Crimson, armed with a crop of hungry young freshmen and celebrated veterans, looks to surpass last year’s glory.

“Nationally, I’d liked to stay in the top 30—that’s how good I think we are,” Delaney-Smith said.

“I think anything less than an Ivy League title and an NCAA berth for our team would be very disappointing,” Peljto said.