November 10, 2025
‘It’s just empowering’: How hanging a championship banner fueled Harvard on opening night
The Crimson started their season with a win over a BIG EAST team in St. John’s
ALLSTON, Mass. — Leading up to the Harvard women’s basketball season opener on Friday, head coach Carrie Moore and director of athletics Erin McDermott practiced how the pregame ceremony would go. They would use ropes to pull down each side of a black sheet, revealing a banner celebrating the team’s 2025 Ivy League Tournament championship, and the timing had to be precise so the banner would appear evenly.
Continue reading with a subscription to The Next
Get unlimited access to women’s basketball coverage and help support our hardworking staff of writers, editors, and photographers by subscribing today.
Already a member?
Login
But at the last minute, Moore found out that 2025 graduate Elena Rodriguez would be in town. Rodriguez is playing professionally for the Spanish team Baxi Ferrol, but her league is on a weeklong break. So after the Crimson showed a highlight reel from last season, including clips from the tournament championship game she played in, Rodriguez joined Moore and McDermott along the baseline at Lavietes Pavilion.
The trio unveiled the banner without a hitch, though a few players would playfully critique the synchronization after the game. Moore hugged Rodriguez, then jogged back toward her bench and high-fived players and staff. As the team started to line up for the national anthem, Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It” blared from the speakers.
The IX Basketball, a 24/7/365 women’s basketball newsroom powered by The Next
The IX Basketball: A basketball newsroom brought to you by The IX Sports. 24/7/365 women’s basketball coverage, written, edited and photographed by our young, diverse staff and dedicated to breaking news, analysis, historical deep dives and projections about the game we love.
The banner reveal capped an offseason of celebration for the Crimson. The tournament title was the first in program history, and it got Harvard to its first NCAA Tournament since 2007. It’s the 14th banner hung in Lavietes for the women’s program, but the first standalone addition since 2008, when the team won its most recent Ivy League regular-season title.
“When I first got here three years ago, that was the goal,” Moore told reporters postgame. “I recruited [my] first recruiting class to do exactly that, to hang banners, and now we’re here doing it.”
The Crimson got championship rings and commemorative varsity jackets in the fall and were honored at a September football game. And on an off day as the calendar flipped to November, Moore rewatched the tournament championship game and the postgame press conference for inspiration ahead of the new season.
“If anything, it has just fueled me to be an even better coach,” Moore told reporters on Wednesday. “… I don’t want it to be necessarily a one-off.”
When the banner appeared in the rafters on Friday, it inspired the players to keep winning, too.
“It’s just empowering seeing that,” junior guard Karlee White — who was part of that first recruiting class Moore mentioned — told reporters postgame.
“[It] throws me back to where we were at the beginning of preseason last year, before any of that commotion happened,” junior forward Abigail Wright added. “And I think that that’s where we want to get to again. And I think that that’s the inspiration that even our younger guys that weren’t here for that needed.”
That championship energy helped the Crimson pick up right where they left off, getting a 61-56 win over St. John’s. The game tested them in many ways, especially because they are trying to figure out what life looks like without Rodriguez and 2025 Ivy League Player of the Year Harmoni Turner. That duo combined to score 49.8% of the team’s points a season ago.
Senior guard Saniyah Glenn-Bello, the team’s top returning scorer, left early in the second quarter with what Moore suspected was a hamstring injury. Wright, Harvard’s main physical presence down low, and others battled early foul trouble. And the game was close throughout, forcing the Crimson to execute down the stretch.
But Moore said on Wednesday that she wanted her players to treat the game as “our opportunity to be champions today,” and they did the little things and the hard things right to gut out the win.
“Our culture is how hard we play, how tough we are, how gritty we are, how unified we are,” Moore said postgame. “And I think from [the] start, throughout the game, through the finish … our upperclassmen really led in that way.”
Order ‘Rare Gems’ and save 30%
Howard Megdal, founder and editor of The IX Basketball and The IX Sports, wrote this deeply reported book. “Rare Gems” follows four connected generations of women’s basketball pioneers, from Elvera “Peps” Neuman to Cheryl Reeve and from Lindsay Whalen to Sylvia Fowles and Paige Bueckers.
If you enjoy Megdal’s coverage of women’s basketball every Wednesday at The IX Sports, you will love “Rare Gems: How Four Generations of Women Paved the Way for the WNBA.” Click the link below to order and enter MEGDAL30 at checkout to save 30%!
Harvard relied on its pressure defense, which is familiar from a season ago, and its depth, which has grown from last season. Moore said in preseason that she was planning to rotate 10 to 11 players this year, the most she’s ever used, and 10 players got minutes in the first quarter on Friday. Frequent substitutions aren’t always conducive to being on the same page defensively, yet Harvard forced 24 St. John’s turnovers on the night, including two shot-clock violations in the first quarter.
“[When you] get those big stops, the amount of energy that you feel is more than when someone gets an and-one,” Wright said.
Offensively, White and Wright gave the Crimson some early answers about who will absorb more of the scoring load this season. White had 16 points on 5-for-11 shooting, with five rebounds and four steals. Wright added 11 points, seven rebounds and two assists. As sophomores last season, White averaged 5.0 points per game and Wright averaged 5.4.
“It’s really fun to play with Karlee,” Wright said. “I think that she makes it easy, and she rewards you for your hard work, too. So having a point guard like that who’s so selfless and so gritty is just pretty inspirational to be on the floor with.”
Harvard also saw impactful scoring contributions from several of its guards. Glenn-Bello added 8 points before her early exit, sophomore Nina Emnace had 8 on 3-for-5 shooting, and sophomore Alayna Rocco added 7 to give Harvard a balanced attack. First-year Olivia Jones — a player Moore believes will contend for Ivy League Rookie of the Year — also had 4 crucial points, all in the fourth quarter.
“Olivia is the glue to the class,” Moore said on Wednesday. “She’s the glue to, I think, at times, our team. … We can put her in, and she just makes things happen. … She’s 5’9, but she plays like she’s 5’11 [or] 6’.”
Jones’ most impactful play came in the final seconds, after Harvard had missed two layups and committed two turnovers while clinging to a 1-point lead. With 10 seconds left, Wright blocked a St. John’s layup, and Jones grabbed the rebound in traffic and got fouled.
“We were hyping her up,” White said about the moments before Jones shot the first two free throws of her college career. “Like, we know she can make those shots at any point, and we wouldn’t want anybody else up there.”
Jones calmly sank both free throws, giving Harvard a 3-point lead. In between her attempts, she even gestured to a teammate standing behind the 3-point line, seemingly giving instructions.
“She’s built for those moments,” Wright said. “We could have said nothing to her, and she would have still gone up there and iced both of them. …
“That’s just the type of player she is. She’s gonna do everything on the court 150%, and she’s gonna step up in those moments. And in some ways, she’s super mature, acting almost older than she is as a first-year. And I think that that’s really cool to see because we’re going to need her. We’re really going to need her this season.”
Want even more women’s sports in your inbox?
Subscribe now to The IX Sports and receive our daily women’s sports newsletter covering soccer, tennis, basketball, golf, hockey and gymnastics from our incredible team of writers. That includes Basketball Wednesday from founder and editor Howard Megdal.
Readers of The IX Basketball now save 50% on their subscription to The IX.
After Jones’ free throws, all Harvard needed was one more defensive stop. It was a tense moment but a somewhat comfortable position, given that the Crimson allowed the fourth-fewest points per game in the country last season.
White deflected a pass with 6.9 seconds left, forcing St. John’s to reset. She did even better on the Red Storm’s final try, stealing the ball on a handoff and closing out the game at the free-throw line.
“In those moments, I was kind of just going back to practice,” she said. “We practice moments like that, getting one stop, every single day. … That’s what we take pride in. And going through that, I just knew we needed one stop, and we were all going to do that.”
With that stop, Harvard showed that its culture and principles hadn’t changed in the offseason, even as some of the faces on the roster changed. And now, that young roster — with 10 underclassmen, three juniors and three seniors — has a recent banner in the rafters, a North Star of sorts as it tries to keep the program rolling.
“To get the banner and the dub in the same evening,” Moore said, “[I] just really couldn’t be more proud.”
Written by Jenn Hatfield
Jenn Hatfield is The IX Basketball's managing editor, Washington Mystics beat reporter and Ivy League beat reporter. She has been a contributor to The IX Basketball since December 2018. Her work has also appeared at FiveThirtyEight, Her Hoop Stats, FanSided, Power Plays, The Equalizer and Princeton Alumni Weekly.
