Weekend Wrapup: Lehigh Women Cross Off the 'Cross

The Lady Hawks can cross another thing off of their "bucket list": beating Holy Cross at the Hart Center.

It went down to the very end - and two huge defensive stops at the end of the game - but Sue Troyan's squad held on for a gutty 72-70 win in a venue where Lehigh has been 2-18 (now 3-18) lifetime. Balanced scoring - and, yes, unselfish play - has allowed the Lady Hawks to soar to sole possession of first place in the Patriot League.

The Lady Hawks soared to a 6-0 lead, thanks to a pair of treys from junior G Alex Ross (whe ended the afternoon with a game-high 20 points and 7 rebounds) and appeared on their way to a laugher while jumping to a 13 point halftime lead. Sophomore G Erica Prosser failed to break double digits for the first time for what seems like forever - clearly Holy Cross made it a point to pressure her all game - but she responded with 9 assists, including a huge one to senior G Tricia Smith (11 points, 4 rebounds) with 30 seconds to play to increase the lead to 3 points.

17-5 Lehigh (Real Time RPI: 91) now enjoys a week of rest before the final game of their brutal three-game road trip at American.

*****

On the men's side, Lehigh hung tough with a physical Holy Cross team that brought full-court pressure almost the entire game. For about 30 minutes Lehigh hung tough - but finally wilted in front of the onslaught. Tied at 42 with 10 minutes to play, Holy Cross would hold Lehigh to 10 points the rest of the way in a 67-52 defeat in Stabler.

Junior G Marquis Hall led Lehigh with 14 points, but also turned over the ball four times (Lehigh as a team turned over the ball 16 times):

''It was tough,'' Hall said. ''We just didn't execute well down the stretch and they just continued to get baskets.''

''In those situations we just have to be able to come up with stops, and then execute down on our end in order to put ourselves in a position to win. They hit us kind of quick.''

Once again, junior F Zahir Carrington came up big for the Mountain Hawks with 9 points and 11 boards, while sophomore G Rob Keefer also added 7 rebounds on an afternoon where Lehigh would nab 37 rebounds. But aside from Carrington and Hall, no Lehigh hoopster would score more than 6 points on the afternoon - a recipie for a loss against the first-place team in the Patriot League.

13-8 Lehigh (Real Time RPI: 221) will have plenty to prove this coming weekend when defending Patriot League champion American comes to Stabler. Win that game, and Lehigh could prove to be a factor in this Patriot League title race. Lose, and the story of the 2008 Mountain Hawks may very well be set as a team that doesn't has the depth, consistency or physicality to finish basketball games.

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results. In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago . Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth. Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled. Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season. The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League. W

UMass 21, Lafayette 14, halftime

Are you watching this game? UMass had this game under control until about 3 minutes in the second quarter, and then got an interception, converted for a TD. Then the Leopards forced a fumble off the return, and then converted THAT for a TD, making this a game. It's on CN8. You really should be watching this.

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though? Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me? Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything. Everything. The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who

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