PISCATAWAY – The Princeton women’s basketball team is remaining confident that it’ll reach its goals, even though leading scorer Madison St. Rose is now on the bench with crutches. The Tigers had an inconsistent start to the new season, but those challenges deepened when St. Rose went down with a knee injury on Nov. 16 against Quinnipiac. The program announced Friday that St. Rose had torn her left ACL and will miss the rest of the season. St. Rose’s ACL tear came on a non-contact play. As she was driving into the paint, she tried to come to a stop and went down in immediate pain. Princeton coach Carla Berube told the Trentonian that St. Rose is doing “as best as she possibly can” in the wake of her injury. “It was heartbreaking news,” Berube said. “We kind of knew it when it happened and then found out (the final diagnosis) this past week. She’s just going to meet it head on, and she’s super tough and resilient and she’s already this leader on the bench that we really need, especially with all of our young players.” Berube said she expects St. Rose to be ready for the start of the 2025-26 season, since the injury happened so early in the campaign. All the Tigers have done in the time since is sweep New Jersey rivals Seton Hall and Rutgers for the third year running. On Sunday, Ashley Chea had career highs of 20 points and nine rebounds, Skye Belker scored 13 points and Fadima Tall posted her first career double-double with 11 points and 10 rebounds in a 66-49 victory at Rutgers. The result pushed Princeton to 4-2. Tall said the team was “very, very emotional” when it found out about St. Rose’s fate. “But then we have her telling us like, yes, she’s out, yes, she’s a big scorer, but we all want to do this for her. We want to give her another ring for another Ivy League championship,” Tall said. “We all are banding together even more because now we know all we have is each other, and all we have is all we need. “And Maddie’s always right there with us. It’s like she’s not even gone, honestly.” Princeton’s season had gotten off to an uneven start. The Tigers entered Sunday with three wins over Big East opponents DePaul, Villanova and Seton Hall but a pair of losses to fellow mid-majors. The Tigers were outscored 20-4 in the fourth quarter of their season-opening loss at Duquesne, and they lost 74-66 at Quinnipiac after St. Rose exited in the fourth quarter. While Chea and Belker will share the bulk of the scoring load for the Tigers going forward, several individual players will likely take on new responsibility as well, primarily Tall, Olivia Hutcherson and Toby Nweke. As freshmen last year, Tall and Hutcherson combined to total 109 minutes and 49 points on the year. Nweke is in her first year at Princeton but is plenty familiar with the program as the younger sister of recent graduate Chet Nweke. Tall has been the Tigers’ starting four in every game this season and left her mark everywhere Sunday. On top of her double-double, she had four steals and helped centers Parker Hill and Tabitha Amanze bottle up Rutgers star Destiny Adams, who went 2-of-5 for four points after averaging 25.2 ppg through five games. A 6-footer from Maryland, Tall is ready to take the next step in her game to help Princeton compensate for St. Rose’s absence. “I think I definitely need to make myself more aggressive offensively and produce more a little bit, as well as making sure we have those rebounds secured over a single game because as we know, we lost a lot of rebounding last year with Ellie (Mitchell) gone,” Tall said. “So I think encouraging my teammates and myself to fill that gap in offensively and defensively the way Maddie did is going to be perfect for us.” Hutcherson has filled St. Rose’s place in the starting lineup and had a career-best eight points and nine boards against Rutgers. Notably, she grabbed four offensive rebounds and scored putbacks on all four. “She’s really hard to box out, especially coming from a guard position from the perimeter,” Berube said. “And yeah, to start the game, she was just all over the boards. And I think that set the tone on how, how we were going to attack them, you know, and not just settle for one shot. “Those are two sophomores (Hutcherson and Tall) that didn’t get a lot of playing time last year that are stepping up into really big roles.”