Just two days before the start of the Ivy League tournament, Princeton star Kaitlyn Chen turned in a draft of her senior thesis. A medical anthropology major, Chen is writing on the relationship between sports and meritocracy. More specifically, she’s researching how socioeconomic status influences accessibility to certain sports, and how that translates to college athletics recruiting. She admits, rather humbly, that she is still figuring out parts of her argument, such as how to square the financial barriers athletes have growing up with the hard work they put in. She’s written about 70 pages. “I’ve still got a lot of editing,” she said. “Stuff to take out and put in.”
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Chen played four sports growing up in San Marino, Calif. By high school, she settled on volleyball and basketball. The latter was always her favorite. Like many Angelenos, the Lakers’ back-to-back championships in 2009 and 2010 helped cement her interest in the game.
The 2023 Ivy League Player of the Year, Chen is approaching her final stretch with the Tigers. They have made five consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances as an automatic qualifier after winning their conference tournament, including this season’s Ivy championship over Columbia. The past two seasons, they won their first round NCAA Tournament game as well. No. 9 seed Princeton will look to do the same on Saturday against No. 8 seed West Virginia (with a tipoff is set for 5:30 p.m. ET). A matchup likely against the top-seeded Iowa Hawkeyes awaits in the second round.
HER.
17.5 points – ✅
4.5 assists – ✅
3.0 rebounds – ✅
2.0 steals – ✅Most Outstanding Player 3Peat.
The definition of a superstar – @kaitlynchenn2 #GetStops 🐯🏀 pic.twitter.com/N75uM12agD
— Princeton WBB (@PrincetonWBB) March 17, 2024
Although Chen is a senior, she will play another year of college basketball next season. She isn’t exactly sure where, however. Chen is suiting up at one of the most unique times to be an Ivy athlete.
While the NCAA provided college athletes an additional year of eligibility because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ivy League rules prohibit its athletes from using the eligibility within the league. If they want to play to keep playing, they need to do so somewhere else. As a result, Chen entered the transfer portal last fall, weeks before she began her second straight All-Ivy season. The public expectation is a national powerhouse — perhaps UConn, UCLA, USC or Stanford — will be her next stop. “She’s gonna go in and really help a team out a lot,” Princeton coach Carla Berube said.
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Even for Chen, the thought of doing so is a bit surreal. “When I was enrolling on campus, we didn’t even have a season,” she said. “It is pretty crazy to think about how far we’ve come in the last four years.”
She moved cross-country in the fall of 2020 not knowing if her freshman basketball season would even occur. In July 2020, the Ivy League canceled its fall sports and said winter sports would resume Jan. 1, at the earliest. They didn’t start back up until the fall of 2021.
Instead, during her first semester, Chen, fellow freshman Chet Nweke and three other teammates ran laps, did ladder sprints and performed burpees on an outdoor track. They played pickup on outdoor courts until it got too cold. Her apartment complex had an indoor hoop, “but it was like the tiniest court ever,” Chen said, with barely enough space to shoot a high-school distance 3-pointer.
In the spring of 2021, Princeton students were allowed back on campus, but most of Chen’s teammates had either taken a gap year or elected against coming back with no games scheduled. Chen, Nweke, seniors Carlie Littlefield and McKenna Haire and junior guard Abby Meyers, however, stayed in the area, working almost daily with the Tigers’ coaching staff. They lifted weights and developed their games, with Chen showcasing her body control on contested layups and her ability to finish over players, no matter their size. During one practice, in particular, Meyers recalls going against Chen in a drill called the Texas Death Match.
“I hated it, because most of the time, I would have to guard Kaitlyn because she’s just crafty and quick,” Meyers said. On that occasion, Meyers added, “She broke my ankle so bad that I actually sprained my ankle. I was only out for a few days.”
Chen didn’t gloat much then. Nor does she now. By the start of her sophomore season, which was her first with actual games, she had already grown close with the teammates she spent hours practicing with the previous spring. Berube said that while Chen’s freshman season was a tough, unusual time, she grew even more fond of Chen. “It was also a really special time for all those reasons,” Berube said.
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The Tigers went 25-5 during Chen’s sophomore campaign and won the Ivy League tournament over Columbia. Princeton upset Kentucky in its Round of 64 game, only 13 days removed from the Wildcats topping South Carolina in the SEC tournament final. Last weekend, Meyers, who is currently playing professionally for the London Lions, re-watched the entirety of that victory. Years later, Meyers remains struck by Chen’s performance. She scored 17 points and made 9 of 11 free throws in her NCAA Tournament debut.
“Every time we needed her to score or do something, she followed through with it,” Meyers said. “It reminded me of how clutch Kaitlyn Chen is during the big moments.”
That season, Meyers said the Tigers had a tradition to keep themselves grounded at the start of quarters and after timeouts. The five players on-court would huddle together, and take a synchronized deep breath in and out. They’d say they loved each other and break the circle down. Then, like now, Chen played with a calm that rubbed off on her teammates. “You just trust her so much,” Berube said. “She could put the team on her back in a way that I’ve never seen or been a part of. But doing it in a way that gets her players to play with great joy.
“I wish we had one more year together after this season.”
In some ways, there has never been a better time to be an Ivy League star. Though Chen says interest in women’s basketball hasn’t changed that much on campus since she arrived, the conference’s national profile has heightened. It was one of two mid-major conferences to receive multiple bids to this year’s NCAA Tournament. (Columbia, which split the Ivy regular season title with Princeton, lost its First Four game against Vanderbilt on Wednesday night.) The league says its social media accounts (excluding school-specific channels) have had more than 6 million impressions on women’s basketball content this year, a 65 percent increase from the 2018-19 season. McKenzie Forbes, Kaitlyn Davis and Kayla Padilla transferred to USC from Harvard, Columbia and Penn, respectively, and play integral roles for the top-seeded Trojans. Former Princeton coach, Courtney Banghart, has made the NCAA Tournament every season since taking the UNC job.
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Though former Tigers, such as Bella Alarie and Blake Deitrick, went straight from Princeton to the WNBA, Meyers was among the first players to take advantage of the transfer rule to further her career. After winning Ivy Player of the Year honors in 2021-22, she transferred to Maryland, where started 34 of 35 games and averaged 14.3 points on 45.5 percent shooting from the field. She parlayed her success with the Terrapins into being a first-round WNBA Draft pick last April.
“I just hope that I showed some people that I played at Princeton, a mid-major school, I’m a nerd and I can also ball,” Meyers said. “And there’s other people doing just that.”
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Chen is one of them. She averaged 15.8 points and 5 assists per game this season. She said of the Ivy League: “I think it’ll only get more competitive from here … You can come to the Ivy League, get an amazing education but also play at the highest level and be able to compete in the NCAA Tournament.” After the Lions’ at-large berth, the Ivy hopes the selection committee will continue to consider it as a multi-bid league. A school might not even need to win the Ivy Madness to make the field of 68.
In the locker room after beating Columbia for the Ivy tournament title, players showered Berube with water in celebration. Fittingly, Berube had only one clean, and dry, shirt left in her bag – an orange T-shirt with Chen’s face printed on it — which she wore to her postgame press conference. “You cannot possibly be wearing that right now,” Chen told her coach.
Princeton coach Carla Berube wearing a shirt with the face of her star guard Kaitlyn Chen printed on it.
“I got soaking wet in the locker room and this is the shirt I had remaining,” Berube says. pic.twitter.com/jjfoekUglH
— Ben Pickman (@benpickman) March 17, 2024
Berube said she planned to bring it to Iowa City. “It’s pretty good luck. I’d love to be able to break that out again,” she said. Perhaps she will if the Tigers shock the Hawkeyes.
A matchup with the Mountaineers is first, however. And the contest hasn’t been the only thing on Chen’s mind this week. She already received feedback on her thesis. Chen says her advisor complimented her rough draft but also gave lots of edits. “It’s so hard to work on it right now because I just want to watch West Virginia play,” she said. Earlier this week, she was trying to do both. “That’s just part of being a Princeton student-athlete,” Berube said.
That’s what Chen still is, for as long as the Tigers stay alive.
(Photo of Kaitlyn Chen: Gregory Fisher / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
