Just over seven minutes left. Up by 14 points. Yale sophomore Ciniya Moore knew the time and score when she caught the ball behind the 3-point line in a game at American in November. She eyed the rim but turned down the open shot, knowing head coach Dalila Eshe wanted to slow things down.
But the Bulldogs’ leading scorer remained open. So she reconsidered.
“[Eshe] looked at me like, ‘You better not!’” Moore told The IX Basketball recently. “And I’m like, ‘I’m about to make this, Coach D. I already know this is good.’”
Moore swished the 3-pointer, prompting American to call timeout. As she entered the Yale huddle, she and Eshe chuckled about the shot.
“She is so confident right now, and at the end of the day, as a coach, you got to trust your players,” Eshe told The IX Basketball postgame. “… I’ll ride with a player like that any day.”
Moore has been playing that freely and confidently all season, which is how she’s found such success as a scorer. Her jump from 5.6 points per game as a first-year to 17.7 this season is the largest of any Ivy League player and the 16th-largest nationally among players who appeared in at least 15 games each season. And it’s happened even though Moore was known more as a defender than as a scorer in high school.
“You have to be so mentally tough, and you have to play a little bit with a chip and an edge,” Eshe told The IX Basketball recently about Moore’s role as leading scorer. “And she absolutely does that, and it’s just been incredible to watch.”
Moore, whose parents were both college athletes, first played basketball on carpet in a local church league. Encouraged by her dad, CJ, she immediately became an active and athletic defender.
In middle school, Moore started taking basketball more seriously and dreaming of attending an elite academic university — with Harvard or Yale being her ultimate goal. She also started to embrace offense more, leading The Out-of-Door Academy in scoring from seventh through ninth grade.
Ahead of her sophomore year, Moore transferred to IMG Academy, a prep school in her hometown of Bradenton, Florida. IMG has one of the country’s best basketball programs, and during her senior season, it had two top-40 national recruits in her class and three more in the class below her.
“I was more of a role player where my role was get in there, defend, shoot the open three,” Moore said. “… I definitely didn’t have the opportunity to kind of show everything that I was capable of doing. But I never let that get to me.”
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Moore’s recruitment took off as a sophomore, when she starred in an AAU game against a top-tier opponent. But she still had her heart set on the Ivy League, and Eshe had a few inside connections. Shell Dailey, the director of girls’ basketball at IMG, was Eshe’s position coach at Florida in the mid-2000s. And Eshe and Moore played for the same AAU coach on Essence Girls Basketball.
Those connections helped assure Moore and her family that she’d be taken care of at Yale, and she felt like Eshe’s system and the team culture were good fits for her. Plus, she said, “It’s Yale. You really can’t go wrong.”
Moore arrived on campus in fall 2024 confident that she could have a big role right away, but she also understood that she had to earn the coaches’ trust. In the first six games, she played zero minutes once and under 10 minutes in each of the other five. She started to get more minutes after that based on her defense, which was the side of the ball Eshe had primarily recruited her for.
Then forward Grace Thybulle got hurt, and Eshe needed Moore to do more — including sometimes playing out of position for a very undersized Yale team. At 5’10, Moore was often tasked with defending power forwards, which she’d never done before. In the first game Thybulle missed, Moore played 33 minutes in a loss at Syracuse. Two games later, she had a season-high 21 points on 9-for-13 shooting in a loss at Florida International University.
“Offensively, we kept her out on the perimeter, so we ran a lot of four-out, one-in action,” Eshe said. “But she did defend a post player a lot, and … people were trying to figure out how to defend her because they didn’t know what position she was. So when she had an advantage where a post was guarding her, like the FIU game or something, she was able to get downhill, and she started to find her confidence … in her ability to score.”
In addition to learning a new position defensively and a whole new playbook as a first-year, Moore also had to deal with the shock of going from an elite high school program to a Yale team that went 4-23 and at one point lost 21 of 22 games.
“It was a big adjustment,” Moore said. “I think it’s almost like an adjustment you kind of don’t want to make; you don’t want to get used to losing. … It was just hard for me to stay positive and in the mindset [of] ‘Things will get better’ when it felt like they weren’t. … But I feel like it helped me, if anything. I really mentally got stronger from that.”
Overall, Moore started seven games last season and averaged 17.9 minutes per game, the most of any Yale reserve. If the opponent’s top player was a guard or an undersized forward, she usually drew that defensive assignment.
Back home in the offseason, Moore worked on scoring more effectively from everywhere on the court. She did two workouts per day: an early-morning one with her longtime trainer, followed by a long nap, and then an evening workout with her dad or her uncle. (Her uncle is a strength and conditioning coach.) Sometimes she also played pickup to test her new skills or tagged along to her younger siblings’ track workouts in the Florida heat.
“I despised it,” she said of the track workouts. “But … I knew none of it would matter if I wasn’t in shape and I couldn’t do these things [on the court] when I was tired.”
Moore got an early chance to show what she could do on Yale’s foreign tour in August. In two exhibition games, she totaled 24 points, which was second-best on the team.
“From then on,” Moore said, “I was like, ‘I’m stepping into this role, and I’m going to take full advantage of my opportunity,’ because [Eshe] was giving me the green light.”
Eshe saw the difference in Moore early in preseason — and not just in how much Moore was scoring. “It was a mentality shift,” Eshe said. “… I could see it in her eyes. I’m like, ‘OK, C’s there. She got it; she put the package together.’”
Moore started the season with 20 points against Northeastern, and opponents quickly moved her up their scouting reports. About a week into the season, Eshe told her midgame, “Congratulations, you’re on the top of everyone’s scouting report. Now you’ve got to counter this.”
Moore has unequivocally done that: She has scored in double figures in 23 of 24 games, including every Ivy League game. She has put up 20 or more points eight times and tied or broken her career high four times this season. Her position coach, Anna Kim — who played in the Women’s Korea Basketball League until 2024 — has helped her anticipate what’s coming from opposing defenses and learn how to maximize her advantages. And though Moore has room to grow in her overall efficiency, her 3-point accuracy has improved from 25.8% as a first-year on 1.2 attempts per game to 38.1% this season on 4.4 attempts per game.
The Bulldogs have gotten better, too, even though they’ll miss the four-team Ivy League Tournament for a fourth straight season. They are scoring 5.4 more points per game than last year and allowing 1.9 fewer. They’re also shooting significantly better from 3-point range, sharing the ball better and making opponents shoot worse from the field. Moore has played a big part in that.
Until now, Moore hadn’t shouldered the responsibility of leading a team in scoring since ninth grade. But she doesn’t see that role as pressure or a burden. For her, pressure was knowing she needed to make something happen whenever she checked in for IMG so she could stay on the floor.
“Now I’m in the space where … it’s really no pressure,” Moore said. “[Eshe] knows what I’m capable of, my teammates all have this belief in me, and I have this belief in myself. And it’s kind of just like I just go out there and I hoop.”
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In December, Moore had a career-high 33 points in a double-overtime loss at High Point. She shot 13-for-26 from the field and added three steals and three blocks. She was so unstoppable that her teammates were constantly emphasizing getting her the ball in their on-court huddles, and nearly every play Eshe drew up in overtime was for her.
“High Point is such an amazing school — it’s so beautiful,” Moore said. “And so I’m already in the gym, and I’m like, ‘OK, this place is nice. The arena is nice. I’m already in the mood’ — you know, feel good, play good. …
“I reached this kind of flow state where I think everything’s about to go in. So every shot I shoot, I’m like, ‘That’s a bucket. That’s a bucket.’ And … when they stopped the three, then I’d just pull up, or when they’d stop the pull-up, I’d just drive. And it felt like I had a counter for everything.”
A few weeks later, Moore opened conference play with 25 points against Brown, which currently has the league’s best defense. She also had electric performances in back-to-back games against Harvard on Feb. 13 and Dartmouth on Feb. 14. Against Harvard, she had 32 points on 9-for-18 shooting from the field and 12-for-14 from the free-throw line. Against Dartmouth, she had 26 points on 5-for-10 3-point shooting, plus four assists.
What stood out most about the Harvard-Dartmouth weekend was that Moore was effective in nearly opposite ways, without needing much time to adjust. She got to the rim and the free-throw line against the Crimson’s pressure defense, using their aggressiveness against them. Then she didn’t hesitate to shoot threes against Dartmouth’s sagging defense.
“Must be something about the last name, I don’t know,” Harvard head coach Carrie Moore quipped on Feb. 18. (As a senior at Western Michigan in 2006-07, Carrie Moore led Division I in scoring.) “… Twice against us, she’s been able to kind of do whatever she wants: turn corners at the point of screens, get threes off at the point of screens. We lose her in transition or we lose her in our press, and she gets some easy ones. … Giving up 30-plus to their best player is just not good enough.”
The next step for Ciniya Moore, both she and Eshe agree, is improving her ball-handling. That will help her avoid turnovers when she’s under pressure and create space for her shot. This season, she hasn’t needed a lot of moves off the dribble to get shots off, but she knows it’ll only get harder as defenses scout her even more and guard her even tighter.
Eshe has already seen her take the first step toward doing that. Early in the season, Moore was dribbling a lot more without having a plan. Now, she’s become a better passer and gives the ball up quicker when she doesn’t have an advantage.
The most exciting part about Moore’s development is that she’s only a sophomore. She’s gone from being recruited primarily for her defense to being the Ivy League’s third-leading scorer in the blink of an eye, and now she has two more years to keep pushing the Bulldogs forward in their rebuild.
“The worst thing that can happen to a kid when they love the game … is to not continue to see their development over the four years, for them to kind of stay the same,” Eshe said. “And so we’re not stopping here. There’s so much more that can be added to her game. … I feel lucky to be her coach, and I’m excited to continue to watch her grow over her junior and senior year as well.”
