A big year for Women’s College Basketball in New York

Good morning. It is Friday. We’ll look at why this season was a first for women’s college basketball in New York City. We’ll also find out how LaGuardia Community College will spend a $116.2 million grant from a foundation run by Alexandra Cohen, whose billionaire husband bought the New York Mets in 2020.

This was the first season that the Columbia University women’s basketball team made the NCAA Division I tournament.

The New York University women’s team, undefeated in 31 games, also made the postseason, making this the first year the two colleges have done so simultaneously: Columbia in Division I, with an overall berth in the Big Dance. , and NYU in Division III. NYU won the Division III national title by ending Smith College’s 16-game winning streak, 51-41.

“We finally pulled away and one of the officials congratulated me on my win,” said Meg Barber, the coach of the NYU team. “This was probably with about 45 seconds left. I said, ‘Not yet.’ I was like, ‘It’s not over yet,’ and he said, ‘Yes, it is.’

And next season?

“I’ve barely processed that we won the national championship,” Barber said Thursday, “so I haven’t really thought about next year.”

Columbia’s season ended Wednesday with a 72-68 loss to Vanderbilt in a play-in game prior to the first round of the NCAA Division I tournament.

When I asked Sabreena Merchant, who covers women’s basketball, for an assessment, she said Columbia was outplayed. The game was one of the few times this season that Abbey Hsu, Columbia’s top senior guard, wasn’t the best player on the court.

“The first thing you think about at Abbey is shooting,” Merchant said. “She uncharacteristically missed a couple of free throws. For her to go 2-of-11 on 3s and miss three free throws is surprising.” Hsu is the Ivy League’s leading scorer in three-pointers, with 375.

Columbia has had less experience playing teams like Vanderbilt, which have a long history — after all, this was Columbia’s first appearance in the tournament. “You could see the athletic advantage that Vanderbilt had over Columbia,” Merchant told me. “As Abbey Hsu has done in Ivy League games, there was a different level of defense she faced against Vanderbilt – and her play didn’t step up as hoped, or as Princeton does when they get into these situations. ” Princeton, which defeated Columbia last week to win the Ivy League title, will play West Virginia in the first round of the tournament on Saturday.

Even if Hsu had an off night against Vanderbilt, she has had a remarkable career at Columbia. She holds the Columbia record in basketball, men’s or women’s, with 2,126 points.

She also has a remarkable personal story. She tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee when she was a junior in high school.

A few weeks later, when she heard banging noises from an adjacent building of the school and the teacher ordered her class to leave, she was on crutches. She made her way down the stairs and out of the school – Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, site of the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in American history.

Her first season at Columbia was interrupted by the pandemic and her father, a physician, died of complications related to Covid-19.

Still, Hsu has been Columbia’s defining player in women’s basketball under coach Megan Griffith, who arrived in 2016. Before Hsu joined the team, Columbia had won 31 percent of its games and 26 percent of its Ivy League games. Since then, the team has won 80 percent of its games.

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The latest New York news

Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire who bought the Mets three and a half years ago, is pouring more money into Queens: a $116.2 million grant to LaGuardia Community College for a workforce training center.

But his wife, Alexandra Cohen, gets credit for the vision behind the grant, for a 160,000-square-foot vocational training facility, said Kenneth Adams, LaGuardia’s president.

“This is 100 percent Alex,” Adams said. “Not only does it increase our educational space by 25 percent, which it does, but it is also aligned with Alex’s vision for career and technical education.”

LaGuardia officials said the grant, from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, was the largest ever awarded to a community college. Adams said it would pay for the construction of 67 classrooms, enough to add 6,000 students to LaGuardia’s enrollment. LaGuardia will use the space to train students seeking associate degrees, industry certification and other qualifications.

“I wanted to create a place where students can access high-quality programs and facilities and learn the skills they need to succeed in a rapidly changing world,” Alexandra Cohen said in a statement. LaGuardia said the center, to be called the Cohen Career Collective, would be the largest career and technical facility of its kind in the New York region.

Adams said the foundation had given the college a much smaller grant during the pandemic for a training program called Jobs Direct. It was intended to provide short-term job training to people from Queens who had lost their jobs due to the pandemic. Then, he said, “Alexandra Cohen made it clear that she wanted to do something different.”

“Alex was born in Harlem, she grew up in Washington Heights, and she really identifies with our students” — many of whom are foreign-born, working-class students and the first in their families to attend college, Adams said.

Félix Matos-Rodríguez, the chancellor of the City University of New York, said the grant would enhance LaGuardia’s position “as an engine of upward mobility.”

The center will offer language classes to foreign-born students who need to improve their English before pursuing vocational training. It will also offer high school equivalency classes for students seeking a GED

Adams said the new center would occupy two floors in a former bakery overlooking the Sunnyside Yards railway depot.

“We are receiving more and more requests to train students for green jobs, especially solar panel installation and maintenance,” Adams said. “We don’t have classrooms today that are equipped to teach that. We will.” He also said the center would let LaGuardia teach courses on energy retrofits — entry-level electrical jobs with contractors. Some labs could be used to teach courses in cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

He said the “1980s-level classrooms” used for LaGuardia’s nursing programs would also be upgraded. The center could also host classes to train students for jobs in the hospitality industry.

“All of these programs are driven by workforce dynamics and employer needs,” he said.

The Cohens’ foundation has provided more than $1.2 billion to nonprofits since 2001, including more than $185 million in Queens. In addition, Cohen and Hard Rock are bidding on a casino next to Citi Field, where the Mets play.

METROPOLITAN diary

(Queens, 3 hours)

Dear Diary:

I woke up then
the city
stopped
to talk

Stepped
from my bed

Other un-
dressed men
near windows
listened

to enjoy
nothing
something

Light I
illuminated
a cigarette

and listened

— Rolli Anderson

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send your entries here And read more Metropolitan Diary here.