Lehman women have eye on CUNY crown

They say big things come in small packages, and you don’t have to ask Lehman women’s basketball coach Eric Harrison twice if he agrees with that old adage. Ask him what the key to his upcoming season is and he immediately mentions his junior point guard Amely Del Rosario — all 5-foot-5-inches of her.

“We feel we have the best player in the conference in Amely Del Rosario,” said Harrison, now in his 18th season as coach of the Lightning. “She’s a [5-foot-5-inch] scoring guard who plays the point and can score. In our preseason scrimmage she wound up scoring 40 points in the game. She’s a tough all-around gutsy player.”

She is also the reason why Lehman did not fulfill what was thought to be a championship-contending season last year as a knee injury to Del Rosario just after the New Year put a major crimp in the Lightning’s plans.

“We lost in the first round in the CUNY playoffs last year,” Harrison said. “We were one of the top teams in the conference before Amely, who was our best player, suffered a knee injury in early January. So we pretty much played the whole second half of the season with her on a limited basis. She was the leading scorer and we thought she had was a sprained knee. But she found out later that it was an ACL [anterior cruciate ligament] injury, but she didn’t tell anybody. She just wanted to continue to rehab it so she played the latter part of the second semester with the injury. But at the end of the day without her at 100% we struggled.”

Del Rosario, a graduate of the John F. Kennedy Campus in Marble Hill, is back to 100 percent this season and with that, the Lightning are considered a legitimate contender for the CUNY crown. The 5-foot-5-inch dynamo averaged 12.5 points a game last year while appearing in just 19 of Lehman’s 26 games. But with her back this year, combined with a pair of senior guards in Jennifer Navarro and Amani Lightbourne, the Lightning will go as far as their talented backcourt will take it.