published on June 18, 2024 in celeb

How Princeton womens basketball created the blueprint for national prominence in the Ivy League

Upon arriving at Princeton for an official visit in the fall of 2008, Niveen Rasheed had options. Many options. She was on her way to becoming the all-time leader in every important statistical category for Monte Vista High School in Danville, Calif., and a nominee for the McDonald’s All-American game. Name a school in her general vicinity, and chances are it sought her out. But a grassroots teammate was making the cross-country trip, and Princeton pitched an idea: Why not tag along? This also would sate parents who wondered why their daughter wouldn’t consider the dang Ivy League. So Rasheed got on the plane.

As is customary on recruiting weekends, Rasheed jumped into pickup games with Princeton’s players. And she noticed something. They were, well, good. She asked the players who else recruited them, and names such as Stanford and Wake Forest came up.

Wait, Rasheed thought. What’s going on here?

A few weeks later, she committed to play for a school she never expected to consider. Four-plus years after that, Princeton had made four straight NCAA Tournaments and Rasheed was an honorable mention All-American, the first Tigers women’s player to earn that level of national recognition. But this wasn’t just another Ivy program on a good run. This wasn’t about bragging rights at mixers.

Princeton women’s basketball, as it turned out, was thinking substantially bigger. That’s what was going on here.

“Back at 17 (years old) I was like, I want to go to a top 25 program, I want to compete and go to the NCAA Tournament, and that really wasn’t something that was consistent from the Ivy League,” Rasheed says now. “I didn’t think I’d get the best of both worlds. But it ended up really being the best of both worlds.”

In its first 37 years of existence, Princeton women’s hoops lost more games than it won. In the last 12 seasons, during which Ivy League schools have played basketball – you might remember a pandemic getting in the way that one year – Princeton has taken the floor 352 times. It has won 281 of those times. The Tigers have 16 conference losses, total, since 2009. They don’t have any in the last two years of league play. In March, they reached the NCAA Tournament for the ninth time in the last 11 postseasons in which they’ve been eligible to compete.

Only one Ivy League women’s program has ever crashed the Associated Press poll: Princeton, at 21 appearances total. The Tigers’ 11-week run in the poll during the 2014-15 season represents the longest stretch any program from the conference has been ranked since Penn’s men’s hoops squad held a spot in 16 straight polls … in 1971-72. They begin this season as the No. 24 team in the nation — a preseason distinction never previously earned by an Ivy League women’s squad. Returning five of the top six scorers from last year, including All Ivy-League guard Julia Cunningham and defensive player of the year Ellie Mitchell, makes a first-ever trip to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament very doable.

Considering the competition levels in various eras, it’s arguably a dominance and visibility never before seen in Ivy League basketball, period. So … how? It’s instructive to start at the start, because a lot and very little has changed since then.

After one winning season in six years, Richard Barron left Princeton in 2007 for an associate head coach gig at Baylor. In came Courtney Banghart, a then-28-year-old Dartmouth assistant who’d won two league titles as a player for the Big Green and helped lead the program to NCAA Tournament appearances in 2005 and 2006. Banghart also was four years removed from coaching high school basketball and tennis in Alexandria, Va. Her arrival was a bet more than an omen. And Princeton’s women’s hoops was not exactly a mega-horsepower turbine, idling while it waited for the right person to hit the ignition. “I mean, the Ivy League, it’s not (recruits’) focus,” Banghart says, a few minutes before a practice at North Carolina, where she’s now the head coach. “All you’re really talking about is how nice your locker room is. We were never behind or ahead.”

Still, Princeton had started making investments, with former men’s player and Ariel Investments founder and co-CEO John Rogers donating a new team room in 2008. After Banghart’s first year, the locker room got much-needed upgrades: a sound system with actual speakers and wood-paneled lockers with a massive stowage area under the seat. “People would hide in there, because the space was so big, and then jump out when someone was coming to get changed,” former Tigers guard Blake Dietrick says. “It was great.”

Renovations had more meaning simply because the players weren’t expecting them. “It wasn’t because we were necessarily better at the time,” says Addie Micir, the Lehigh head coach who was a guard for Banghart’s first two teams and later a Princeton assistant. “But that kind of stuff was coming, and it mattered.” Yet the stuff was a sideshow. Banghart’s core vision for the program revolved around one simple concept: Sign really talented players. “There’s two types of coaches in our game: those that can recruit and those that get fired,” Banghart says. “We had really good people and we needed more.”

She was given no recruiting budget, in a good way; wherever Banghart needed to go, she received a green light. She and her coaches arrived at grassroots events 15 minutes early and stayed a half-hour late. She’d identify the best two players on the floor for every grassroots team she saw. Then she’d go look at the transcripts. Basically, Banghart didn’t put a limit on the level of player Princeton could pursue before she had to. She wasn’t recruiting smart kids. She aimed at basketball players who were smart.

She also knew she had to create a package that stood in for athletic scholarships, because the Ivy League doesn’t offer those. She seized on a fundamental precept — Princeton grads love them some Princeton — and decided to stoke alumni passion for the school and leverage former players as a resource to current Tigers. But the pipeline had to be built. Banghart and her staff played in the first two alumni weekend games she staged, because there weren’t enough former Tigers to fill the teams. Free beer and free donuts were offered to anyone who’d come through and play. Soon enough, there were 30 or 40 alumni on hand. And now those alumni return to address the team, formally, on multiple occasions each year. “Coaching is not rocket science,” Banghart says. “Give someone beer and donuts and they’re going to come back and see you.”

Prospects have to say yes and take the leap, though, and the most important recruit was one of the earliest. Rasheed’s visit, with friend and future Princeton teammate Lauren Polansky, inspired instant rave reviews. “I remember walking up to the coaches’ offices after (the pickup games) being like, ‘Yes. I love those two,’” Micir, the former assistant, says now. “It was very apparent the level had been raised.” Holdover players felt no threat because they knew they needed more skill; the captains for Princeton’s first-ever NCAA Tournament team in 2010, in fact, were seniors Tani Brown and Cheryl Stevens. They each made one start that season.

With the chemistry part solved, all Banghart had to do was teach Princeton how to win. “Our theme was, ‘Got your six,’ which is that military term – you’d never go to war without someone at your back,” Banghart says. “But you also have to be strong enough to have somebody’s back.” Excellence was expected; Banghart told players she wasn’t concerned with how they lived away from Jadwin Gymnasium, as long as they were the best version of themselves inside it. But her sympathy had limits. Stressed over an exam? We’re all going through things, Banghart would say. “When you step on the court, if you’re not competing, then you’re actually not being a good teammate,” Micir says. “You’re letting your teammate off the hook that day.”

Grace Stone and her Tigers teammates won the Ivy League Basketball Championship game last season, a third-straight title. (Rachel O’Driscoll / Getty Images)

Systematically, Princeton evolved with its players. After a couple set-heavy and 3-point happy seasons, a fast, free-flowing attack emerged. “If I didn’t have to call a set for an entire game of basketball, I was happy,” Dietrick says. Princeton never finished lower than the 91st percentile nationally in points per possession, per Synergy Sports, as it reached five NCAA Tournaments between 2010 and 2015. The definition of success had been recalibrated. When Princeton lost nine games in 2013-14, the mood was funereal. “Devastating,” Dietrick says. It was also useful. The next year, Princeton went 30-0 during the regular season.

As deftly as Banghart deployed the talent, enhanced talent was behind all the winning. Princeton solved the riddle of luring top-end recruits without the resources of blueblood programs. When the 6-foot Micir was a player, she occasionally played on the blocks. Upon her return as an assistant, she worked with Bella Alarie, a 6-4 former top-100 prospect and future top-five WNBA Draft pick. “I’m like, Oh, right. We got post posts now,” Micir says. When Dietrick played in Princeton’s Elite Camp, she was competing, she says, with “the best of the best.” The top 100 recruits of her senior class included names like Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis, Elizabeth Williams and Dearica Hamby, none of whom attended Princeton. “But I know Courtney was looking at that list,” Dietrick says. “Who on this list can we convince that the athletics and the education together are the right combination, and who is going to fit our program?”

Banghart left for North Carolina after the 2018-19 season but left the cupboard stocked with a streak of 10 straight postseason berths intact. Upon her exit, she joked to then-athletic director Mollie Marcoux Samaan that her mom could win with that team. Nevertheless, it was a transition, so there was existential nail-biting. Was it all the coach? Or was the progress irrevocable?

Never mind doing better. Could Princeton keep this up?

Carla Berube arrived at UConn in the summer of 1993, right when the cinder block dropped on the gas pedal in Storrs. The Huskies played 140 games in her four seasons. They won 132 of them. Her first head coaching gig became UConn, done small: Division III Tufts University won 80.8 percent of its games in 17 seasons under Berube’s watch. She also had an idealized existence of coaching players who thrived on athletic and academic balance, who won but also ran junior thesis thoughts by her. “I really loved my job,” Berube says. “I certainly saw myself there for a very long time.”

And then, well, Princeton.

“I think Princeton,” Berube says, “was just a little bit different.”

Actually, it’s not been. Berube has lost five games in two seasons as the Tigers head coach. Her group was one point away from a Sweet 16 appearance last March. Now she has a ranked team featuring two national top-50 prospects. Another six players are committed for 2023, a top-65 wing among them. (As context, Banghart signed six top-100 recruits during her tenure.) So, yes, Princeton kept it up. And then some. “She’s balancing on that line of working from what coach Banghart has done while adding her own things that are making us even more successful,” Cunningham says. “The record speaks for itself. She knows how to do things the right way. She has her principles, and she teaches them, and everything is very black and white.”

Princeton essentially found a way to the same place with different directions. Berube, like her predecessor, brings authenticity to the job. During a meeting with players before a summer camp in 2019, she conceded that she, too, was anxious about how all this would go. “I’m real,” Berube says. “I’m not going to try to be somebody I’m not. And I’m an introvert by nature, so it’s always a little bit harder for me to put myself out there and be as real as I can, because I’d rather just stand in the shadows. But I thought that for us to trust each other as quickly as we can, they’re going to have to get to know me as soon as they can.”

It doesn’t mean she runs a program without personality; Berube and her staff wore full-body tiger costumes to the team’s recent Halloween day practice, and Berube also outfitted athletic director John Mack with his own get-up when she saw he wasn’t wearing a costume at work. Princeton’s players have understood, for a while, how little can change even if the boss has a different delivery. “She holds her cards close at most times,” Cunningham says of Berube. “But then once you commit, and you’re part of this program, you know it’s the same — you’re going to be taken care of and she has your back.”

Likewise, Berube diligently tapped that alumni pipeline. Within her first two weeks on the job, Berube contacted Rasheed to introduce herself. During an alumni weekend, Berube carved out time for coffee with the former star. And recognizing the value in how things were done in turn provided Berube the slack to reshape parts of the operation, particularly on defense. Though hardly a sieve over the years, the Tigers did rank 138th nationally in points per possession allowed in 2018-19, per Synergy Sports.

In Berube’s first two seasons? First and sixth, respectively.

“You have to be able to defend and play really hard at all times,” Berube says. “You’ve got to be smart and communicate and have active hands. We don’t take plays off.”

It all hit a zenith in Bloomington, Ind., last March. With a legion of expectant alumni watching around the globe — Dietrick, for example, frantically fed a loaded group chat at 1 a.m. in Italy — Princeton beat SEC tournament champion Kentucky in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Not An Upset, read the locker room dry-erase board. “We were a Top 25 team and we got an 11 seed — I’m not a math major, but somehow that doesn’t add up to me,” Cunningham says now. Not even the one-point second-round loss to Indiana dimmed the mood. “When we were watching film, I just knew that we were going to win that game,” Berube says. “It wasn’t some Cinderella story or anything like that. This is really great basketball that we play.”

At some point, that might’ve been all an Ivy League program could ask for.

At this point, Princeton has earned the right to ask what more there might be.

The program doesn’t want for resources, relatively. Princeton has massage therapists. It has devices to track players’ sleeping patterns. Two new shooting guns recently arrived. The shared facilities are not prohibitive to individual skill improvement. “Pretty much anything you need in the gym is available 24-7,” Cunningham says. Nor is the momentum slowing for infrastructure and resource improvements. In 2020, the university received an anonymous endowment for the women’s basketball head coach position. Last season, the team room was renovated. Princeton’s main varsity weight room is set for renovation in spring, and while that’s not necessarily basketball-specific, Berube’s program obviously will benefit from the upgrades.

Nor do administrators flinch at Berube’s ambitions to play power conference teams annually, like a visit to Oregon that never happened due to the pandemic-canceled season, or the jaunt to Texas this season. (Not to mention a shorter trip to face UConn in Storrs.) While a school such as Princeton always will require some hoop-jumping before putting plans in motion, there’s generally less or little resistance when there’s a defensible “why” behind any idea. “That’s the conversation we’re having now, and its not limited or specific to basketball — right-sizing and modernizing all our facilities,” Mack says. “My focus is less on comparing ourselves to what other institutions have than looking across the university and making sure our facilities are consistent with the quality that we have in the new dorms that opened, or the Lewis Center for the Performing Arts that opened a few years ago, or the new engineering buildings that are going up now. If we can provide facilities that are on par with those, I think we’ll have everything we need.”

And it’s no small thing that Princeton has elevated to the top tier of schools outfitted by Nike. Swag may not be anyone’s primary focus, but not long ago an extra sweatshirt for making the NCAA Tournament was awe-inspiring. Now Princeton players receive Nikes to walk around in. Not to play in, practice in or lift in. Just to wear.

Like it or not, it helps Princeton seem cool, right away. “To just even get a shoe like that is so next level,” Dietrick says. “They have so much gear, it’s insane. I just saw all the stuff they got for the beginning of the season this year, and I’m floored. But I’m proud. I’m very, very proud that our teams were part of getting them to that point.”

The headwinds from here are about what you’d expect — and in some ways picking up. Winning recruiting battles against power-conference teams is a roadblock cleared. It happened with Rasheed. It happened with Cunningham, who opted for Princeton over Wisconsin and Michigan. It happened with Madison St. Rose, the nation’s No. 46 recruit in the Class of 2022. The 5-10 guard finished as the No. 2 all-time leading scorer for St. John Vianney High School in Holmdel, N.J., a program with merely 17 state championships. “A lot of the other schools like to tell you about their shoes and what they have and what they can offer you,” St. Rose says. “I wasn’t really looking for that. I just wanted to find a team that I felt like I could fit in with, because sometimes when you do go to those top schools, you receive all that flashy stuff they’re offering, but then you might not really fit in. So my biggest interest was to jell with the girls. And I felt like with (Princeton’s players), I could really just build that family connection.”

But Princeton has to keep winning these battles to make the noise it wants to make. For Mack, that first means incentivizing Berube to stay where she is, and maybe by any means necessary. “I may have told her at one point that I would lay in the driveway in front of the moving truck if I have to,” the athletic director says. Past that lies the question of how deep Princeton’s recruiting waters are. How many Madison St. Roses are there every year — who, notably, couldn’t take in-person official visits due to the pandemic? How many Julia Cunninghams, who see the Ivy League’s rule that prohibits summer team workouts as a benefit, so she can work in a surgery center as an anesthesiology tech?

Maybe enough?

Tabitha Amanze, another Princeton freshman, was ranked three slots higher than St. Rose as a prospect. Fadima Tall, one of the half-dozen commitments for 2023, is positioned at No. 64 nationally. And the kind of prospects Berube prefers makes it easy to shop outside the top 100, too. “It’s not always just the most talented players,” she says. “We’re looking at them on the bench. Are they swapping fives with their teammates? I love players that are diving on the floor, getting after rebounds, not giving up on anything. It’s a balance of great talent, and then the right fit. Do they really want to be at Princeton, and do they have a great passion for this sport? Do they love it? Are they willing to get in the gym on their own and get better? I think that will sustain us.”

To counter it all, a strategy has emerged in the Ivy League: Become Princeton. Columbia coach Megan Griffith is a former Tigers assistant. Harvard (Carrie Moore) and Yale (Dalila Eshe) both hired former Princeton assistants for head coaching jobs last spring. Princeton’s peers are getting ambitious. The blueprint is being brazenly stolen, potentially raising the degree of difficulty in winning league titles. Meanwhile, high school participation for girls basketball dropped 19 percent since 2002, per a study by the National Federation of State High School Associations released this year. Will Princeton’s smaller pool grow smaller? Will the increasing visibility of the sport spur a rebound? Will it matter either way? “Being biased, because I’m a woman, we think about this,” says Rasheed, now director of brand communications for the NBA Players Association. “We think about life after basketball faster than men think about life after basketball. Candidly, I think if you’re (recruiting) someone for Princeton that has the grades to do it, the kind of player that can make an impact, for the most part it’ll be a conversation at least.”

And if Princeton can just get to that conversation, it won’t only be coaches doing the talking.

The hard sell likely will come in generational waves, from former players who helped build a hegemonic power and who are, frankly, kind of obsessed with it. Rasheed is on a text thread that includes recently graduated Tigers and says it feels like they all went to school together. Dietrick is inviting Micir to her wedding. It’s like a rabid fan club made up of the band itself. In a space where Princeton can’t give top prospects things other Division I programs can, it’s an ace card nobody else has.

In fact, when she answered her cell phone to chat for this very story, Blake Dietrick was hours away from a flight to France. Her fiancé asked her if she still needed to pack for several months playing overseas. She said yes. Her fiancé suggested that should take priority, maybe. It did not. She got back to travel prep only after a 38-minute conversation about her team. “Princeton basketball,” Dietrick explains, “always takes priority.”

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(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos of Carla Berube, Niveen Rasheed: Rachel O’Driscoll / Getty; Hartford Courant, Unsplash)

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