After Harvard lost to Michigan State 64-50 in the first round of the NCAA Tournament on Saturday, senior guard Harmoni Turner huddled with her teammates on the court. Then she ran straight back to the locker room and cried.
But Turner’s tears weren’t all sad ones. There were tears of joy, for getting to play college basketball and taking Harvard to its first NCAA Tournament since 2007. And there were tears of gratitude, for all the coaching staff has taught her and all the moments she’s shared with her teammates.
“That was just all that emotion, just going out,” Turner told reporters postgame.
Joy is one of Harvard’s core values, alongside unity, grit and integrity. As the game slipped away on Saturday, the Crimson stayed true to those values — even joy.
None of the players who took the court against Michigan State had NCAA Tournament experience, though head coach Carrie Moore did from past stints as an assistant coach. In the week leading up to the game, Moore didn’t tell them much about what to expect. Instead, she wanted them to stay present and feel the joy of March Madness, however the game went.
“There’s just a lot going through my head, I feel,” Moore told reporters on Friday, “and I’m trying to process it all and write it all down and journal and get it all out before game time. But I think the most important thing is … making sure we’re soaking this up and enjoying the moment. … It means the world that we’re finally here doing this.”
So the Crimson celebrated with a selection show watch party, and they enjoyed their send-off and charter flight to Raleigh, North Carolina. Once they arrived, they delighted in getting March Madness-branded hats, stickers and other swag like they were 5 years old again on Christmas morning. They also had a dance-off, with players breaking out their best moves everywhere from the court to the hotel lobby.
On Saturday, Turner even turned to the Harvard fans during a stoppage in play and yelled, “Let’s have some fun!”
“Watching them the last week has been such a blast,” Moore said postgame. “I mean, the smiles on their faces, the joy that they’ve been having together as a group is, you can’t replicate that. … You never forget your first [tournament].”
Part of what helped the Crimson win 24 games, the most in a single season in program history, was knowing they could always respond to opponents’ runs. They could do it with their suffocating pressure defense, which allowed the fourth-fewest points per game in the country this season. They could also score in a hurry behind Turner, the Ivy League Player of the Year who ranks in the top 10 nationally with 22.5 points per game.
Harvard needed that self-belief on Saturday when No. 7 seed Michigan State raced out to an 11-0 lead. The No. 10 seed Crimson missed four shots and committed two turnovers in that span.
The Crimson couldn’t find an offensive groove for the rest of the quarter, shooting just 2-for-16 in the opening 10 minutes. But they held the Spartans without a field goal for the final 5:26 and closed the gap to 15-11.
Harvard continued to struggle offensively in the second quarter, but it leaned on defense and its senior leader.
“Defense is our identity,” Turner said. “It caused us to win a championship in the Ivy League. And our shots weren’t falling, but that’s basketball. They’re not going to fall every single game. … This is what happens during March, and I feel like we still left it all out there.”
About three minutes into the second quarter, Turner and senior guard/forward Elena Rodriguez blocked Michigan State shots on consecutive possessions. Not long after that, Turner was seemingly everywhere defensively for several minutes.
The sequence started with Turner drawing a charge on Michigan State’s Ines Sotelo. Still laying on her back, she stuck both arms in the air when she heard the call. On the next defensive possession, she stole the ball in the backcourt but missed the resulting jump shot. Then she took another charge, hit a floater and dove into the scorer’s table trying to steal another possession.
Offensively, too, Turner carried the Crimson, scoring 12 of their 19 points in the first half and 24 of their 50 overall. With the Spartans dialed in on her all game, she shot just 7-for-22 from the field, but she drew 11 fouls and made eight of nine free throws.
“She is clearly the focal point of their offense and their team,” Michigan State head coach Robyn Fralick told reporters postgame after using three different defenders on Turner. “… She’s got a motor. She never gets tired. She goes after every ball. And we knew we were going to have to change [defenders] up.”
Harvard trailed by just 5 points at halftime, but the third quarter brought an early indicator of trouble. After cutting the deficit to 1, the Crimson got four offensive rebounds on one possession but couldn’t take the lead. Michigan State scored once it regained possession to push the lead to 3.
“We got kind of lucky,” Fralick said. “… I thought we dodged a bullet there early and then settled in.”
Less than a minute later, Michigan State went on another 11-0 run, giving it a 37-25 lead with 5:08 left in the quarter. Moore said her team “started to unravel” and was “unhinged a little bit” during that run.
Harvard clamped down after that, but the lead stayed stuck in double figures entering the fourth quarter. Ultimately, a 15-4 Michigan State run to start the fourth quarter put Harvard in too deep of a hole to climb out of, even with a late closing run of its own.
“You can’t create this experience any other way than just being here,” Moore said. “And I think at times … the moment maybe was a little bit too big for our team because we hadn’t been here before. And I think this experience hopefully fuels us to do everything that we need to do to get back to this point and show up at our best.”
However, as Moore emphasized in the first words of her postgame press conference, the loss does not define Harvard’s season. This team was one of the best in program history in only Moore’s third season, winning the program’s first Ivy League Tournament title and making its seventh NCAA Tournament appearance. Harvard had never received better than a No. 13 seed in the NCAA Tournament before this year.
“What [Moore has] done at Harvard in such a short amount of time is so impressive,” said Fralick, who was a graduate assistant at Western Michigan for part of Moore’s playing career there in the mid-2000s. “I know it’s going to continue. Everything she’s part of, everything she touches, excellence becomes attached to it. So it’s hard to get [to the NCAA Tournament], and she’s done it in a really short amount of time.”
In fact, Moore has already accomplished nearly everything she set out to do when she replaced legendary head coach Kathy Delaney-Smith in April 2022. At the time, she told The Next that she wanted to implement a tough, defensive-minded style. Check. She wanted players to enjoy their experience. Check.
She wanted to get Harvard back to being a consistent contender in the Ivy League — and be part of the league getting multiple bids to the NCAA Tournament. Check and check. The Crimson have finished third in the regular season each year under Moore and gotten multiple wins over Columbia and Princeton, the top two teams. They’ve also made two Ivy League Tournament finals. And the league got a historic three NCAA Tournament bids this year.
Moore also said she wanted to recruit top players and develop them into pros. First-year Hana Belibi was ranked in the top 100 players in her class, as is class of 2025 recruit Aubrey Shaw. Harvard is the only Ivy League program with a top-100 player in those classes. And though Moore didn’t recruit Turner to Harvard, she has helped develop Turner into a likely WNBA draft pick. She even decided to be Turner’s position coach this season rather than assigning that to one of her assistants.
“When I found out that Coach Moore was my positional coach, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re definitely winning a championship this year,’” Turner said on Friday. “I knew that she was going to put me through workouts that were tougher than the games. And I think that’s also allowed me to kind of just calm down a little bit once the game actually [started].”
One other thing Moore wanted to do was instill belief in her players that all of this was possible, using the mantra “Believe it.”
“We’re gonna say those two words every single day,” Moore said in 2022, “and I want us to believe in all that we can accomplish.”
Slowly, her players started to believe in themselves individually and collectively.
“I’m so thankful for [Moore], thankful for her belief in me, thankful that she never gave up on me, especially in times where I was doubting myself,” Turner said on Saturday. “… She’s told me since she’s gotten here that I was generational, and she led me to believe that. And you can’t ask for a better coach than that.”
“I didn’t get a lot of playing time my freshman year, and my confidence wasn’t there,” Rodriguez told reporters on Saturday. “And then Coach Moore came in and she believed in me, even when I didn’t.” Rodriguez is now a two-time All-Ivy selection and scored just shy of 1,000 career points.
More than anything, that belief is how Moore got the program back to playing on a national stage in such a short time. She had her players visualize pivotal moments before they happened so they’d feel familiar on the court. They rewatched past wins before big games, including watching their November win at then-No. 25 Indiana the night before they dealt Columbia its first conference loss in February.
“We don’t say ‘Believe it’ very lightly, even though we [say] it a lot,” Rodriguez said. “We have to believe in ourselves, believe in our teammates, believe in our coaching staff, believe in this program, and I feel like that’s what it’s been about the last three years.”
What the loss to Michigan State does define about Harvard is the new standard for the program. Moore credited Turner and Rodriguez with showing their teammates “how to handle adversity … how to be a great teammate, how to be coachable, how to fight.” With their graduations, their teammates will have to keep pushing the program to meet and exceed that standard.
Though Turner and Rodriguez were the team’s top scorers this season, there are plenty of returners who’ll look to claim larger roles next season. Starting guards Gabby Anderson and Saniyah Glenn-Bello will be seniors and are crucial in Harvard’s press with their grittiness and ability to disrupt opposing ball-handlers. Starting point guard Lydia Chatira and backup guard Alayna Rocco will be poised to take sophomore leaps. Captain Katie Krupa, a rising senior, is well positioned to replace Rodriguez’s frontcourt contributions, and rising juniors Karlee White and Abigail Wright played huge minutes off the bench in the Ivy League and NCAA tournaments.
That list doesn’t even include Belibi, who wasn’t in Harvard’s rotation this season, or the five players coming in as first-years.
So as the 2024-25 season fades from the present to a joyful memory, the belief within the program won’t change. Moore and her players have come too far for that.
“It is my job to do everything that I can to make sure that we get an opportunity to get back to this place,” Moore said on Saturday. “… And I feel like that is something that we can do.”
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