Which Ivy League head coach was the best player? 2025 edition

“Oof, not playing,” Princeton head coach Carla Berube told The Next in December. “I don’t want to rupture anything.”

“It would be an awesome pickup game,” Harvard head coach Carrie Moore told reporters in October. “… I would be down for that, although my game doesn’t really reveal what it used to be.”

“There’s a lot of good former players as coaches in our league,” Brown head coach Monique LeBlanc told The Next in December. “… Now we’ve all crossed over into the age where I don’t know if anybody would be willing to play 3×3 or 4×4 and even risk it. Probably Meg [Griffith at Columbia].”

“I’d definitely not be afraid to play,” Griffith told The Next in January.

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Though the odds of such a game are probably low, the idea begs a question: Which Ivy League head coach was the best player in their prime?

In 2022, I sought to answer this question through a combination of looking at the statistics and polling the head coaches. Berube took the title on the strength of winning a national championship as a player at UConn in 1995.

But since then, four of the eight Ivy head coaches have departed, including the three who finished at the bottom of the 2022 rankings. The newcomers include a WNBA draft pick and a Division I scoring champion, so it’s time for a redo.

The table below displays statistical totals for each of the coaches, based on information from their alma maters’ athletic departments and Sports Reference. The best result in each category is highlighted in green, and the second-best result is in yellow.

I also asked every current Ivy League head coach who they thought was the best player. They were allowed to vote for themselves, and several of them did. If they didn’t, I asked them where they would rank themselves. I also recruited a “guest judge,” former Harvard head coach Kathy Delaney-Smith, to round out the poll.

Taking the poll and the statistics into account, here are the power rankings of the head coaches as players, ending with No. 1.

8. Linda Cimino (Dartmouth)

Played at: Adelphi
Career stats: 4.6 points, 2.6 assists, 1.9 rebounds per game in 85 games in three seasons
First-place votes: 0
2022 rank: N/A

Cimino is only in her second season coaching at Dartmouth and played at Division II Adelphi, so many of her Ivy League peers weren’t familiar with her playing career. “I don’t know much about Linda’s career,” Berube said, “but [she] seems like a baller.”

Cimino played only through her junior year at Adelphi, so she’s at a disadvantage compared with coaches who played all four years. But she hit the ground running as a freshman, averaging 5.2 points per game on 36.2% 3-point shooting. As a sophomore, she scored about the same but added 4.4 assists and 1.1 steals per game.

In her career overall, she averaged 4.6 points per game and shot 33.5% from 3-point range. The latter is tied for third among the current Ivy League head coaches.

She is still confident in her shooting ability, telling The Next in December that if the coaches’ pickup game was just a 3-point or free-throw shooting contest, she’d rank herself “close to the top.” She also staked her claim as the best pickleball player in the group. But, she added, “if [the pickup basketball game] involves playing defense and running, all that, I’m dead last.”

Cimino began her coaching career in 2001, the year she graduated from Adelphi. She coached at the high school, community college and Division II levels before becoming a Division I head coach at Binghamton in 2014. She is aiming to rebuild the Dartmouth program, just like she did at her three previous stops.

7. Monique LeBlanc (Brown)

Played at: Bucknell
Career stats: 4.5 points, 4.6 rebounds, 1.2 assists, 0.9 steals in 23.2 minutes per game; two-time captain
First-place votes: 0
2022 rank: 5th

Coincidentally, LeBlanc and Cimino both grew up in Rhode Island and played against each other in high school. “Mo was better than me,” Cimino said.

In college at Bucknell, LeBlanc was a two-time captain and did a little bit of everything. Many of her stats increased every year, culminating in a senior season in which she averaged 5.4 points, 6.4 rebounds and 1.9 assists per game and Bucknell made the NCAA Tournament for the first time. She finished her career with over 500 points and 500 rebounds, and her field-goal percentage of 45.1% was one of the top marks among current Ivy League head coaches.

“I feel like she would probably take it to me,” Berube said in 2022, for the previous edition of these rankings. “… I never got to see Monique play, but I know she was a great player.”

LeBlanc didn’t vote for herself as the best player among the Ivy head coaches, but she did make the case that she would be valuable in a coaches’ pickup game.

“I’m the teammate that everybody needs,” she said. “So I’m going to be your best screener. I’m going to rebound your misses; I’m going to get you the ball right back. I’m the glue player. … So I would rate myself as really important to the team’s success.”

LeBlanc transitioned to coaching soon after she graduated in 2002 and got her first head coaching job at Merrimack in 2011. After becoming the Warriors’ all-time wins leader and helping them transition from Division II to Division I, she took the job at Brown in April 2020.

6. Emily Garner (Cornell)

Played at: Lafayette
Career stats: 8.0 points, 6.2 rebounds, 0.9 steals in 24.1 minutes per game; one-time captain
First-place votes: 0
2022 rank: N/A

Garner, the newest and youngest Ivy League head coach, played it safe when asked to vote on the best player among her peers. “I don’t know,” she told The Next in December. “I definitely wouldn’t want to play a game of one-on-one with any of them right now. …

“It’s honestly hard to go wrong with most of them in the group. So definitely I would put myself towards the bottom.”

Garner might be selling herself short as a player, but she’s not wrong about how hard the voting was. Consider the fact that Garner, the sixth-place finisher, averaged 10.8 points per game on 49.8% shooting from the field as only a sophomore at Lafayette. She scored a little bit less as a senior but reduced her turnovers, set career highs in rebounds and steals, and was a team captain. Her 665 career rebounds rank 11th in Lafayette history, even though she ranks just 38th in games played. (One of the secrets to her success: eating an orange before games.)

Among the Ivy League head coaches, Garner ranks third in total rebounds and blocks and fifth in total points. (Each of those rankings considers only the coaches for whom data is available in that category.)

In college, Garner hadn’t been sure whether she wanted to coach. But she decided to become a graduate assistant at LIU Brooklyn, and she was hooked right away. In 2016, Garner got her first head coaching job at Division III Trinity, and she came to Cornell in spring 2024.

5. Megan Griffith (Columbia)

Played at: Columbia
Career stats: 10.1 points, 3.6 assists, 2.2 rebounds, 1.4 steals in 29.7 minutes per game; three-time captain
First-place votes: 1
2022 rank: 3rd

Griffith was one of the best players in Columbia history — especially before some of the players she’s coached recently came along and passed her on several program leaderboards.

Entering the 2024-25 season, Griffith ranked 10th in program history with 1,061 career points, fifth with 373 assists, fifth with 151 steals, seventh in free-throw percentage at 76.6% and 10th with 115 made 3-pointers. But senior guard Kitty Henderson — who told The Next as a first-year that she “would love” to play like Griffith — has since passed Griffith in the first three categories.

“I love joking about it with them,” Griffith told reporters in January. “… I’ll always say to them … ‘I have the best hands in the gym’ until Kitty breaks my [steals] record. I’ll say I’m the best shooter in the gym [until that record is broken].”

Among the Ivy head coaches, Griffith ranks second in several categories, including points per game, minutes per game, total steals and free-throw percentage. She was also a rare three-time team captain and started 82 out of 105 career games.

As Berube put it, “Everybody knows about Megan Griffith’s time at Columbia.”

Griffith voted for herself, and her being this low on the list is further proof of how stacked the pool of Ivy League coaches is. She played three seasons of professional basketball in Finland and the Netherlands after graduation before starting her coaching career at Princeton. She returned to her alma mater in 2016, leading a remarkable turnaround in the team’s record — and frequent rewrites of the individual record books.

4. Dalila Eshe (Yale)

Played at: Florida
Career stats: 6.7 points, 4.8 rebounds in 19.4 minutes per game; selected 25th overall by the Seattle Storm in the 2006 WNBA Draft
First-place votes: 1
2022 rank: N/A

Eshe’s college career presents an interesting conundrum for this exercise. In her first three seasons at Florida, she averaged 4.6 points and 4.6 rebounds in 17.0 minutes per game. But as a senior, she showed dramatic improvements, averaging 14.2 points and 7.1 rebounds in 32.0 minutes per game. As a 6’3 forward in the 2000s, she even added a 3-pointer, shooting 20-for-52 (38.5%) after making zero threes in her first three seasons.

That growth was enough for the Seattle Storm to select Eshe in the second round of the 2006 WNBA Draft. She never appeared in a regular-season game but participated in training camps with the Washington Mystics in 2007 and the Atlanta Dream in 2008. Meanwhile, she played for teams in seven countries between 2006 and 2014 and appeared in the EuroCup, one of Europe’s top club competitions.

Eshe’s status as a WNBA draft pick gave her instant credibility in the voting to be the best player among Ivy League head coaches. Other coaches heavily considered her, and she didn’t hesitate in voting for herself.

“Oh, me. Without a doubt,” she told The Next on December. “I’m not [voting] for everybody else. I was a bucket and I was tough. The internal competitor, I can’t do that.”

Eshe started coaching while she was still playing professionally. She was an assistant coach in the U.S.-based Elite Youth Basketball League (EYBL) and a player development coach internationally. She entered college coaching in 2013 and joined the Ivy League as a Princeton assistant coach in 2019 before being hired at Yale in 2022.

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3. Mike McLaughlin (Penn)

Played at: Holy Family
Career stats: 1,710 total points, 755 assists, 161-for-279 shooting from 3-point range (57.7%) in three seasons
First-place votes: 1
2022 rank: 4th

McLaughlin put up staggering numbers in just three collegiate seasons, as Holy Family didn’t have varsity basketball until his sophomore year. His exact number of games played isn’t known, but if we estimate 30 games per year, that would give him career averages of 19.0 points and 8.4 assists per game.

His total assists are nearly twice as many as any other Ivy League head coach — again, in only three seasons — and his total points rank second. Plus, he made 161 total 3-pointers on 57.7% shooting, which is nearly 20 percentage points higher than any other Ivy League head coach.

“I would like to see him and Carla in a one-on-one match,” Cimino said, noting that she’d seen video of him playing.

In that video, McLaughlin was suiting up for the Washington Generals, the team that plays against the Harlem Globetrotters on tour. He played for the Generals for three years right after college, captained the team for two years and played in more than 50 countries. (Click the first link in this paragraph to see a photo of him in his Generals uniform.)

McLaughlin eventually left the Generals to return to his alma mater as an assistant coach. He became Holy Family’s head coach in 1995 and set an NCAA record as the fastest women’s basketball coach to reach 400 career wins, going 400-59 to begin his tenure. In 2009, he took his first Division I head coaching job at Penn, and he is now the longest-tenured coach in the league.

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2. Carla Berube (Princeton)

Played at: UConn
Career stats: 10.0 points, 4.9 rebounds, 2.8 assists, 1.0 steals in 24.1 minutes per game; 1995 national champion
First-place votes: 3
2022 rank: 1st

Almost before I could finish asking Cimino which Ivy head coach she thought was the best player, she voted for Berube.

“You want to know why?” Cimino asked. “I used to watch her when I was a kid growing up. … She grew up like 20 minutes away from me in Massachusetts.”

Berube’s name also came up for several other coaches, and she nearly defended her title from 2022. Winning a national championship at UConn is something no other Ivy head coach can match, and she did it while averaging double-figure points and being efficient offensively. Her career field goal percentage of 51.3% is the highest among Ivy head coaches, and she ranks second in total rebounds, assists, minutes and 3-point percentage.

“She was a blue-collar worker,” Delaney-Smith told The Next in January. “She was not a star there, I don’t think, but I remember loving her as just a tough, tough kid.”

“She was a killer, but she was a glue kid,” LeBlanc added. “And I’ve always loved those type of kids on teams.”

Berube, on the other hand, wouldn’t even rank herself in the top three. “Probably somewhere down [the list],” she said. “… I’m far below. No. 8. I’ll put me on No. 8.”

After Berube graduated in 1997, she was the No. 21 pick in the American Basketball League (ABL) draft and played for the New England Blizzard until the ABL folded in 1998. She then entered coaching as an assistant at Providence, spent 17 years as the head coach of Division III Tufts, and came to Princeton in 2019. She has won Ivy League championships every season at Princeton and has a 118-22 record as the Tigers’ head coach.

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1. Carrie Moore (Harvard)

Played at: Western Michigan
Career stats: 18.5 points, 7.0 rebounds, 3.1 assists, 1.6 steals in 35.8 minutes per game; Western Michigan’s career scoring leader
First-place votes: 3
2022 rank: N/A

Not much can top a national championship, but Carrie Moore has an ace up her sleeve: an NCAA scoring title.

As a senior at Western Michigan, Moore led Division I in scoring at 25.4 points per game en route to becoming the program’s all-time leading scorer with 2,224 career points. She also owns the program’s single-game record of 41 points. As a 5’9 guard, she even pulled down 836 career rebounds, which ranks fifth in program history.

Curt Miller, now the Dallas Wings general manager, was the head coach of MAC rival Bowling Green when Moore was in college and watched her shred the conference. “Carrie was one of the best to play in the MAC,” he told reporters in August 2024. “… For someone at the mid-major [level] to lead the entire nation in scoring just tells you what kind of competitor, what kind of player she was, and now you’re seeing it as a leader of Harvard.”

Moore leads the Ivy head coaches in total points, rebounds, steals and minutes, plus each of those on a per-game basis. She also ranks first in 3-pointers made and second in total blocks and games played.

“Of course I’m voting for myself. I’m not voting for anybody else. Are you kidding me?” Moore said with a laugh. She acknowledged Berube’s national title but added, “You said who’s the best player, not the best team.”

Berube agreed with Moore’s assessment. “I think we’ve ramped [the competition] up a lot now that Carrie’s a head coach,” Berube said. “… I’m gonna have to go with Carrie.”

Moore went undrafted after graduation but earned training camp contracts with the Phoenix Mercury and Chicago Sky in consecutive years. She also played in Poland for a year before retiring and entering coaching. Her first job was at Princeton as the director of basketball operations, and she was an assistant coach at three Power Five schools before becoming Harvard’s head coach in 2022.

Moore still occasionally jumps in drills in practice or in individual workouts with players. But if anyone ever needs a reminder of how she lit up the MAC, there’s a commemorative basketball in her office, right beside the ones highlighting her coaching milestones at Harvard.