STORRS – It was March 14, 1998, a Saturday night first-round NCAA Tournament game at Stanford’s Maples Pavilion, when Allison Feaster helped her Harvard women’s basketball team make history.
Feaster, an All-American senior, led the16th-seeded Crimson to a 71-67 upset over No. 1 seed Stanford that night, the first time a 16 seed had beaten a No. 1 in the men’s or women’s NCAA Tournament. It was also the Ivy League’s first NCAA Tournament women’s basketball win.
Feaster had a dominant performance – 39 points, 13 rebounds and five steals and was a big factor in holding off Stanford – which was missing two key starters to recent ACL injuries – down the stretch.
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Twenty-seven years later, on Monday night, Feaster sat a few rows behind the UConn women’s basketball bench at Gampel Pavilion, watching the Huskies beat South Dakota State 91-57 in an NCAA Tournament second round game.
Her daughter, UConn freshman Sarah Strong, had 15 points, seven rebounds, three steals and two blocks in the win, which advanced the Huskies to a Spokane Region 4 semifinal matchup with Oklahoma Saturday (5:30 p.m.) in Spokane, Wash. In the first-round win over Arkansas State, Strong’s first NCAA Tournament game, she had 20 points, 12 rebounds, five assists and five blocks, the way she’s played all season for UConn in her freshman year.
Feaster, who works in the Boston Celtics front office as a vice president of team operations and organizational growth, gets to as many UConn games as she can to watch her daughter. And watching Sarah, who has started every game and is the Huskies’ second leading scorer (16.1 ppg) and leading rebounder (8.5), has been a fulfilling experience for Feaster. Getting the chance to see her play in the NCAA Tournament – a time of year that has given Feaster special memories – is even better.
“I just have a great sense of gratitude,” Feaster said. “It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. Or if you’re lucky, you get four cracks at it.
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“I’m really grateful that she can experience this with a program like UConn, alongside her teammates, one of the all-time greats in college women’s basketball, Paige Bueckers, Geno (Auriemma) and his staff.”
Strong is the daughter of two basketball players – Feaster, who scored over 2,000 points at Harvard and played for 10 years in the WNBA and overseas, and Danny Strong, who played at NC State and professionally in Europe.
Sarah Strong said Sunday she has always looked up to her mom as a role model.
“She has been a really big influence on me,” Strong said. “She’s played where I want to play and done what I want to do. She’s always been there for me. Both my parents have. They really help me through everything; they walk me through everything.”
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Strong was born in Spain when her parents were playing in Europe. She said she didn’t realize how influential her mother had been as an Ivy League player and her role in women’s college basketball history until early on in high school as she matured and started paying more attention to the sport.
Strong said Feaster “talked about it a little bit, but she would never brag about something like that.”
Harvard and Feaster, who is in the school’s athletic Hall of Fame, had been to the NCAA Tournament two years before 1998. When Feaster was a sophomore, Harvard was the 14th seed and lost to Vanderbilt, 100-83. The next year, the Crimson were the 16th seed and lost to North Carolina 78-53 in the first round.
The next year Harvard made history. Since then, two 16th-seeded men’s teams – UMBC, which beat Virginia in 2018 and FDU, which beat Purdue in 2023 – have knocked off No. 1 seeds in the tournament. But Harvard was the first.
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Prior to the game, Stanford had lost two starters – Kristin Folkl, the team’s leading scorer and rebounder, and forward Vanessa Nygaard – to ACL tears. Nygaard was injured in the last regular season game; Folkl was injured the day after the selection show in practice.
When the bracket was announced, the extent of Nygaard’s injury was apparently not known to the selection committee and Stanford was awarded the top seed.
Harvard, which was ranked 62nd out of 64 teams in the tournament, was led by Feaster, who was the leading scorer in the country, averaging 28.5. The Crimson thought they were better than a 16 seed.
Harvard raced out to a 22-9 lead in the first half, but Stanford came back. The Cardinal went up 65-62 with less than four minutes to go in the game, but Harvard rallied with a 9-2 run and Feaster’s steal with 46 seconds left and a 3-pointer by Suzie Miller clinched the win.
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“We could not guard Feaster,” Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer told ESPN’s Michelle Smith in an oral history of the game in 2015. “She was too big for a little and too little for a big. She was really a terrific player. No matter what we did, it didn’t work. No one had anything in the tank. We were playing in mud.”
The loss to Harvard was VanDerveer’s first first-round loss in the NCAA Tournament and snapped a 59-game Stanford win streak at Maples Pavilion. Harvard lost its second-round game to Arkansas, which went on to play in the Final Four that year.
“I just remember more the process of what it took to get there,” Feaster said Monday. “I think that’s what competing at this time of year is all about, it’s about the process much more than it is the final moment.
“You spend one to four years putting in the work day to day and if you’re lucky enough, you get a chance to celebrate that in the best tournament in the world of any sport, in my opinion. It’s a magical moment.”
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Feaster remembered being very well prepared for that moment.
“We really bought into a system and we pulled off something that’s not been replicated in women’s college basketball history since then,” she said. “I remember my teammates. All those little small moments that went into that big moment.”
But right now, for Feaster, the narrative belongs to her daughter and her UConn team.
“It’s amazing,” Feaster said. “It’s all about her and her team and I couldn’t be more proud to be a mom at this moment.”
