Fit Check: Carrie Moore’s Coaching Staff Turns Heads With Sideline Style

replica, alternate Harvard hockey jersey. A Black Panther Party-inspired jersey. A Crimson football jersey. Each one of these outfits — and many more unique choices — was donned on the sideline by Harvard women’s basketball head coach Carrie Moore and her assistant coaches during the team’s 2025-26 campaign.

All season long, Moore and her staff drew praise from fans on and off campus as they expressed themselves through fashion.

“They each have very different individual styles, but I feel like collectively they’re just effortlessly cool,” Brayan Mesa, The COOP’s Photographer and Social Media Lead, said.

“For the coaches, it’s so important to feel like a million bucks when they’re on and off the court, and I know that Coach Moore is very much admired for her style,” he added.

For every game, Harvard coaches plan their outfits, intentionally curating a matching set in the weeks and months leading up to the contest.

For Moore, the outfits represent more than just clothing.

“We’ve got four core values: unity, grit, integrity, and joy, and unity is a big focus,” the coach said. “Our players have to wear the same color sneaker when they play, and so our staff has to form a line in that way too. I want us to be united on the sidelines, and that’s all the way down to the shoes.”

Fully matching outfits do not necessarily set the Crimson coaches apart from their adversaries, who often sport matching team-branded items. Moore’s staff, though, makes a point of mixing up their outfits and going beyond expectations. It is safe to say that no Ivy League opponents are as creative with their stylistic choices as Harvard.

“I think holistically we try to be as creative as possible with our sideline gear,” Moore said. “To dress up in a way that kind of fits who I am as a person and my style, and I think also just throughout our entire staff, is something that works for all of us,” she added.

Central to these efforts is assistant coach Ariel Gatson, who came to Harvard with Moore in 2022. Before becoming a coach, Gaston worked for more than seven years in retail for Nike. After just one year with the Crimson, Moore deemed Gaston the Head of Gear, a title that allows her to take point on curating team outfits.

“Coach Moore is no stranger to the fact that I am very big into fashion,” Gaston said. “I think it’s really cool that the fashion world that I’m into now gets to meet the basketball world that I thrive in every single day. It means the world to me that she trusts me enough to outfit our staff in ways that draw a lot of attention.”

However, the opportunity for the coaching staff to experiment with fashion was not always possible.

‘A major shift on the women’s side’

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, standard coaching attire consisted of a pantsuit, blazer, and heels, while anything less formal was considered unprofessional. This clothing restricted coaches’ movement, making it difficult to communicate with players from the sideline.

“I think the COVID year really shifted some things in terms of sideline gear,” Moore said. “Up until that point, everyone dressed up for games on the sidelines, and after COVID, you saw a major shift on the women’s side.”

“People weren’t at the game, so then coaches didn’t feel it was necessary to dress up, and so they dressed down,” she added. “And then it just kind of stuck.”

Blazers were traded for quarter zips, slacks for sweatpants, and heels for sneakers. While these changes were criticized by some more traditional fans of the game, they made a big difference in enabling coaches to move around on the sideline almost as easily as the players on the court.

“Pre-COVID, all we did was dress up and wear heels, and now looking back on it, I don’t know if I could ever wear heels to coach a basketball game moving forward after being able to wear a pair of dunks,” Moore said. “It’s like, how did I ever do that?”

Recognizing the increased flexibility, Harvard’s coaches began to take advantage of the opportunity to showcase the personality of the group while wearing more comfortable clothing.

‘We continue to try and raise the bar’

The shift toward increased fashion crystallized in the staff’s second year — and Gaston’s first overseeing team gear — ahead of the 2024 Black History Month game. While scrolling through Instagram, Gaston came across a small local business in Dorchester, Mass., and fell in love with the tapestry shirts, sweaters, and jackets it produced.

She reached out to the company to ask whether the staff could wear some of its clothing for the game, and was met with enthusiasm. The business sent matching outfits for the staff to wear.

“I feel like that kind of started the movement,” Gaston said. “Ever since then, I feel like in big games that we’ve had, whether they are nationally televised or against teams like Princeton or Columbia, we just continue to try and raise the bar in terms of what we’re doing from a sideline standpoint.”

“I just thought it was a really cool way to support a local business,” the head of gear added. “We got a lot of attention from that, and we took off from there.”

Since then, Gaston has hand-picked outfits for Moore’s staff for most games, often conducting similar outreach to brands and setting up partnerships for outfits.

One partnership that has had a particularly large impact on outfits is a deal with the COOP.

“This year we got to do a collab with The COOP that was really cool, where in exchange for us promoting them on social media and doing a video, they outfitted us with four different outfits that we featured during some of our games this past season,” Gaston said.

For its marquee home game against rival Columbia in January, Moore’s staff sported a black Harvard jacket from the COOP and leather pants in front of a packed Lavietes Pavilion.

“It was the first time that the COOP had taken steps to doing a collaboration with a sports team, and I just think it really spoke volumes to what we’ve been able to do, and the attention that we’ve been able to draw since we got here,” Gaston added.

‘Something that was going to catch someone’s eye’

Some of the staff’s most memorable outfits have been those that are connected to movements, both on and off campus.

One of the most prominent displays of the coaching staff’s evolved style came at November’s Raising the B.A.R. (Basketball, Activism, and Representation) Invitational, hosted by the University of California, Berkeley, where all four participating teams were coached by Black women. Harvard’s staff wore custom Black Panther Party jerseys for the games played in California — where the party was founded — paying homage to a major part of African American history.

“We knew that we couldn’t just go there and wear a regular quarter zip. We wanted to wear something that was going to catch someone’s eye,” Gaston said.

“When I was Googling Black-owned businesses in the area, these jerseys popped up, and I was like, oh my god, these are so cool, and how fitting for us going to Cal to be close enough to Oakland, where the Black Panther movement originated. It was just perfect timing,” she added.

The jerseys, which featured the party’s name over a large “66” — representing the year of its founding — were such a hit with both the team and fans that the coaching staff knew they needed to bring them back. While Gaston admitted Moore was hesitant to repeat the look, the team eventually wore the jerseys again during February’s home Black History Month game.

“I had to whip out my charm to get her to allow us to re-wear them again, for our Black History game,” Gaston said, laughing. “Eventually, she conceded.”

The coaching staff has also used sideline outfits to show support for other teams on campus.

In a December matchup against Stony Brook, the staff sported red Crimson football jerseys, a nod to Andrew Aurich’s program. Since coming to Harvard, Moore and the football head coach have bonded over their shared time as assistant coaches at Princeton.

“Andy is definitely somebody that I connect with,” Moore said. “He’s been able to win a lot in his first couple of seasons, so that’s obviously very intriguing to me,” she added.

Then, when the biggest game of the season rolled around — Harvard’s Ivy Madness Championship clash with No. 23 Princeton — Moore once more took the chance to show support for another Crimson team led by a fellow young coach: Laura Bellamy’s women’s hockey team, which won the Beanpot in January.

“Laura and I are close, and she’s somebody that I think I’ve really confided in,” Moore said. “I watched their team very closely, and obviously, what they were able to do this season was a huge step forward, especially winning the Beanpot,” she added, praising The Crimson’s 2026 Breakout Team of the Year.

“I remember seeing the posts that they made on social media about the black jerseys that they wore for the game, and I was like, oh my gosh, those are so cool,” she said. “So, when we were prepping for the Ivy League Tournament this year, I reached out to her, and I was like, hey, do you guys happen to maybe have some smalls?”

Bellamy pulled through for the team, and Moore’s staff sported hockey sweaters for the championship game. While the Crimson failed to defend its conference title, the team’s style on the sideline could not be ignored.

“Unfortunately, we did not have the luck that we had the year before, but we looked, I think, really good during the game,” Moore said.

The coaches’ style has also opened doors for some fun opportunities in fashion. In November, when the COOP was tasked with dressing Dean of the College David J. Deming for The Game, it immediately knew who to turn to for help.

“We asked: who’s the most stylish person that could possibly influence the Dean on what he wears, to maybe go beyond what a dean might typically choose?” Chief Marketing Officer of the COOP, Adrian Gill, said. “Coach Moore was the answer.”

In the end, Deming rocked a stylish white sweater with a crimson H on the front, paired with a Harvard hat and jeans. However, the decision did not come without hard thought and copious advice from Deming’s fashion consultant.

“Coach Moore is definitely the friend you want to have with you when you’re going shopping,” Mesa said. “She was not shy about saying: ‘mmmm, no.’”

While Gaston said that she hasn’t started planning the staff’s outfits for next year, she promised that good things are in store.

“I definitely need to start, you know, putting my thinking cap on and figuring that stuff out,” she said. “But I have confidence that we will still be as fashionable as ever on the sideline.”

—Staff writer Samuel S. Rudavsky can be reached at [email protected].

—Staff writer Connor Castañeda can be reached at [email protected].