‘She’s the example’: How Columbia senior Kitty Henderson has stepped up as a scorer

The pace barely let up from there, making it the perfect kind of game for Columbia point guard and co-captain Kitty Henderson. Columbia head coach Megan Griffith describes the 5’10 senior as a player who never tires and who has been “the tougher, ‘I’ll outlast you’ player” her whole career.

In the Lions’ 77-61 loss on Sunday, Henderson showed both the grit that’s made her impactful from Day 1 for Columbia and the growth she’s had as a scorer this season. Playing nearly 38 minutes in a game where no other player on either team reached 30, Henderson had 20 points on 9-for-19 shooting, five rebounds, four assists and two steals.

“She’s playing like a senior, playing like the best player,” Griffith told The Next postgame, “and that’s what you want for all these players in their careers.”

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As a first-year, Henderson cracked Griffith’s rotation immediately with her toughness and tenacity. The only time she played fewer than 15 minutes was in her Lions debut. She ended up starting 23 of 32 games and averaging 8.3 points per game.

“She’s the kind of player if you need something done, you put her in the game,” Griffith told The Next early that season. “[If] you need a rebound, you need a stop … put her in the game. She’ll figure it out.”

Over the next two seasons, Henderson increased her scoring to 9.3 points per game as a sophomore and 12.1 as a junior. She also averaged at least four assists in each season, which put her among the top 3% of players nationally. She was named honorable mention All-Ivy as a sophomore and second-team All-Ivy as a junior.

This offseason, though, Henderson knew she had to step up even more. The Lions graduated guard Abbey Hsu, the all-time leading scorer across Columbia women’s and men’s basketball, and have a young roster this season. Henderson is one of just two seniors and the only one who’s been in the program for four seasons. (Fellow senior Cecelia Collins is in her second season at Columbia after transferring from Bucknell.) Meanwhile, the Lions have four first-years and five sophomores.

“I don’t need to be told to look to score anymore,” Henderson told reporters at Ivy League media day in October. “… I’ve come in with a completely new mindset that I want to go and get those points that Abbey’s left on the table. So, yeah, I’m super excited to kind of showcase what I can do this year and where we can get our team.”

Henderson has answered that challenge by averaging 15.2 points on 48.7% shooting from the field, 5.4 rebounds, 5.1 assists and 2.4 steals in 35.5 minutes per game. All of those statistics except rebounds are career highs. She also has a career-low turnover rate of 15.0%. And she’s one of the leading voices in practice, pushing her teammates toward their goal of an outright Ivy League championship.

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Though Henderson started the season strong with a near-triple-double against Stony Brook, she has particularly shined as a scorer in her past two games. On Nov. 25 against Ball State — Columbia’s third game in three days in the Battle 4 Atlantis tournament — she had a career-high 24 points on 9-for-16 shooting, plus six rebounds, four assists and four steals.

She followed that up with Sunday’s performance, which was just the fourth 20-point game of her career and the first time she’s had consecutive 20-point games. She kept the Lions in the game despite their 21 turnovers against Duke’s pressure and their 4-for-22 shooting from 3-point range.

Henderson got going early, with 9 points in the first quarter, and many of her baskets came on crafty moves around the rim. For instance, late in the first quarter, she dribbled to the right block, kept her dribble as she drove toward the middle and spun back to her right for a full-extension layup around Duke guard Oluchi Okananwa.

“I just know that that’s what I need to do,” Henderson told The Next postgame. “I need to go out and be aggressive, and if it’s there, I’m going to take it. Otherwise, I’ll hit my teammates. But yeah, there were just gaps a lot on my drive, so I was just looking for myself first.”

Scoring at close range has been Henderson’s bread and butter this season: She has taken 5.7 shots per game at the rim, one of the highest averages in the country, and is one of the more efficient players nationally there.

“I thought [Columbia] did a good job of just kind of isoing, old-school, kind of back-you-down [offense],” Duke head coach Kara Lawson told reporters postgame. “They did that a lot, and they showed that on film before this game. We knew that. We didn’t do a good job of holding our ground down there and guarding one-on-one in the paint.”

Just as Henderson plays a crucial role offensively, she is critical to Columbia’s pressure defense. After a November game in which Henderson got in foul trouble, Griffith told The Next that her team looked like a snake whose head had been cut off without Henderson: “It’s still moving, but it’s not really [going in] any direction.”

Henderson often pressures opposing ball-handlers full court, and she got two steals in the first quarter on Sunday. One came on a trap in the backcourt, and she immediately sank a 3-pointer off the turnover. The second came when she missed a layup with a few Duke defenders around her, then stripped the player who’d gotten the rebound and put it back up.

“She thrives in pressure. She’s a great rebounder,” Griffith said postgame. “I mean, you name it, she’s the kid that you need in all the hard positions.”

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Henderson’s production against Duke moved her into ninth in program history with 1,074 career points, passing Griffith and Ellen Bossert. Earlier this season, she passed Griffith to move into fifth in career assists, and she ranks eighth in steals.

The irony of Henderson’s performance on Sunday, Griffith explained, is that she ended up doing more while she trusted her teammates with more. Though Henderson is the point guard, Collins frequently brought the ball up and initiated the offense. But Henderson moved well off the ball to relieve pressure and took advantage of her chances when the ball found her. And she has built trust with her younger teammates in practices, giving her confidence that they’ll catch her passes or make the right reads when she cuts.

One younger player who thrived in a complementary role on Sunday was first-year guard Mia Broom, who Griffith called a “mini Kitty” after the game. Broom was making her Columbia debut after missing the first eight games with an injury, and she checked in for the first time during that frenetic first quarter. 

Yet she didn’t flinch. She forced a jump ball on the first possession she played, drove hard to the rim, and got two baskets by rebounding her own misses in traffic. She finished with 6 points on 3-for-9 shooting, three rebounds, three steals and two assists in 18:27.

“Mia’s a dawg,” Henderson said, unwittingly using the same word Griffith had used minutes earlier to describe both guards. “I mean, she’s gonna give us energy, she’s gonna give us defense, she’s gonna give us stops … and she’s gonna give us 100% effort.

“So I think [there’s] also a lot to learn from Mia [for] the other players, looking at how she attacks everything. I mean, I love it. I’ve always played like that, too. So I love seeing Mia do a similar thing, and she’s gonna be great for us.”

“Her just doggedness is something that’s such a clear separator, and she’s skilled to match it,” Griffith said. “So I’m excited to see her just get acclimated. … It’s tough when you’re off for three, four weeks not doing anything, and for her not to miss a beat physically was really highly impressive.”

While Broom has played a lot of point guard, Griffith is bullish enough about her scoring that she wants to play her off the ball to “finish more plays than start them.” But Broom’s point guard skills were apparent against Duke as she brought the ball up at times and mostly navigated pressure well.

For example, midway through the third quarter, Broom raced up the court with the ball in transition. After getting stopped in the lane, she threaded the ball between two defenders to junior guard/forward Perri Page for a layup.

“The world is her oyster, really,” Henderson said of Broom’s potential at Columbia. “She could do anything.”

A few minutes later, Broom had the ball on the perimeter and anticipated Henderson’s backdoor cut, throwing a pass that met her in stride on the far side of the basket for a reverse layup.

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Though the scoreboard showed some of Columbia’s weaknesses on Sunday, that play by Broom and Henderson showed a flash of the Lions’ upside. They weren’t ready to beat Duke in December, but maybe they will be against a comparable opponent in March.

“Why you [play] this [game now] is this is … a perfect first-round matchup in March,” Griffith said. “You’re gonna play a team like this that’s athletic, that’s smart, that can score in very different ways.”

To close that gap over the next few months, the Lions will look to improve on both sides of the ball — and keep following Henderson, wherever she leads them.

“She’s the example,” Collins told reporters at Ivy League media day, adding that even she still looks to Henderson for guidance. “… She’s our culture in a nutshell.”