Penn Women's Hoops Looks For 5th Straight Win

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- The University of Pennsylvania women's basketball team will look for a fifth-straight win tonight as the Quakers welcome Yale to the Palestra.

This will be their first full weekend of league play for the Quakers with the match-up with the Bulldogs followed by a home game with Brown on Saturday. The Quakers opened up Ancient 8 play in a big way on the road last Saturday, beating Princeton 62-57 to improve to 7-4 overall.

"Eleven games through, we've only had three home games," Penn head coach Mike McLaughlin tells KYW Newsradio, "so we've found a good way to win on the road. We play well together. We do compete extremely hard so we've given ourselves a pretty good chance to win every time out for that reason. We're coming together, we have a good nucleus back from last year. We're adding some younger players to the mix and they are starting to progress. So I kind of like where we're at right now, we're showing progress on both ends of the floor and excited for the weekend."

Listen to the entire interview with Penn's Mike McLaughlin

The Quakers are led by two talented frontcourt players in Michelle Nwokedi and Sydney Stipanovich. Nwokedi, a junior forward, is tops on the team in scoring (15.5 ppg) and rebounding (10.1 rpg) with the senior center Stipanovich siting second in both categories (12.0 ppg and 9.0 rpg).

Tonight the Quakers face a Yale team that is 9-4 and McLaughlin says they are a force on offense.

"They can really push the ball," he says. "They shoot the three. A lot of dribble drive. We're going to have to keep the ball in front of us. We're going to have to keep the pace where we would like to play. We've got to play the way we play against them because they do want to push the issue, they do want to try to score quick."

Friday's game starts at 5:30pm. The Penn men's game with Yale follows at 8:00pm.