What’s wrong with this picture, which dates back to the early 1900s?
Not only was there no women’s basketball at Princeton…there were no women. Not until 1969, in fact, were female students admitted as undergrads. And not for another 35 years was the male/female ratio 50-50. Princeton’s women’s intercollegiate sports program started in the spring of 1971, with the varsity basketball squad taking the floor for the first time in 1971–72 under coach Penny Hinckley.
The inaugural Ivy League basketball tournament started in the spring of 1975 and the Tigers took the first four championships. They won three in a row from 1977 to 1979. The star of this second run was Clair “CB” Tomasiewicz, a prolific scorer who was two-time first-team All-Ivy and an AIAW All-American. She was drafted by the short-lived Women’s Professional Basketball League after graduating in 1979. She also played pro softball in the summers while attending Princeton.
In the 1980s and 1990s, top women’s hoops recruits tended to eschew the Ivys for more prominent national programs. Even so, the 1995–96 earned an at-large bid to the Women’s NIT in Texas—the first national postseason appearance for the varsity.
In 2010, the basketball team captured four straight Ivy League titles. During this run, senior Addie Micir (left) was named 2011 Ivy League Player of the Year. She would go on to be a top women’s hoops coach. The 2011–12 Princeton squad crept into the national rankings at #24, marking the first time an Ivy League women’s basketball team earned that honor. The 2012–13 team featured Niveen Rasheed, who became the first Princeton woman to be named an NCAA basketball All-American. The Tigers’ coach, Courtney Banghart, would win a school-record 254 games.
The 2014–15 team kicked it up a notch and went 30–0 during the regular season and climbed as a high as #23 in the rankings and advanced to the second round of March Madness. Blake Dietrick, an All-American, starred for that club. In 2018, Leslie Robinson—daughter of two-time Ivy Player of the Year Craig Robinson (and niece of Michelle Obama)—became the first Princetonian drafted by a WNBA team.
Robinson’s teammate, Bella Alarie (right), was drafted in 2020 after becoming the first four-time first-team All-Ivy player and three-time Ivy Player of the Year. The Tigers, under new coach and former UConn legend Carla Berube, were 26–1 in Alarie’s senior year when the Covid pandemic ended the season in March. Alarie played 14 professional games before deciding she’d rather work on the business side of sports. Her father, Mark Alarie, was a star at Duke and her grandfather, Norman Augustine, was a Princeton professor and CEO of Lockheed Martin.