“This building has been really good to me.”
That’s what Diana Caramanico W’01 LPS’11 told the Daily Pennsylvanian after leading the Penn women’s basketball team to a win at the Palestra over Princeton to conclude the 2000–01 regular season.
The victory, as the Gazette described it at the time [“Sports,” May|Jun 2001], “finished off a spectacular and unprecedented season.”
That Penn team, which this year celebrates its 25-year anniversary, won the program’s first Ivy League championship, went undefeated in conference play (only the second time that happened), and closed the regular season on an NCAA-best 21-game winning streak.
The Quakers’ first trip to the NCAA tournament was less kind as they got routed, 100–57, in the first round by Texas Tech, in Lubbock, Texas. But it was an appropriate end for Caramanico to play her final college game on the national stage.
One of the most dominant Penn athletes across any sport, Caramanico closed her four-year career with 2,415 total points, which is still the record for Penn and the Ivy League (and, until 2023, the Big 5). She also holds program records for career rebounds (1,207) and steals (201), and she formed a potent pairing with another 1,000-point scorer in classmate Erin Ladley (now Leonard) C’01.
In a Gazette feature on 100 years of women’s sports at Penn [“Century Club,” Jul|Aug 2021], Caramanico recalled her senior season in 2000–01 in vivid detail, from her program-record 42-point outburst in a game against Albany to the Ivy-clinching win at Harvard that lacked much of a celebration because, she said, Harvard “hid anything we could stand on to cut down the nets.”
Caramanico and the rest of the Quakers instead saved their big celebration for their Palestra finale on March 7, 2001, hoisting up the championship trophy in front of their home fans and opening doors for a program that would go on to win five more league titles. —DZ
