Sakima Walker hated wearing pants designed for boys.
As the only daughter in a family with four sons, she constantly heard how much she resembled her older brother, how they looked like twins despite their 3-year age gap. She didn’t want the comparisons to extend to their outfits too. But Walker was always tall for her age — she wore a size 9 in women’s shoes as a fifth grader and hit 6 feet entering her sophom*ore year of high school — so it was either wear pants like her brother’s or don an ankle-exposing style that might be considered a fashion faux pas.
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Walker, now a 6-foot-6 senior playing for No. 1 South Carolina, grew to embrace the latter.
“Still to this day, I love my high waters,” she said. “I learned to love my high waters because I knew that’s as good as it’s gonna get for me.”
When Walker takes the court with the Gameco*cks in the Women’s NCAA Tournament, she’ll stand out for her height — a natural advantage that can make the game look easy.
But the players who tower a few inches over their tall teammates and competitors, who are already well above average height, face a different challenge outside of the gym: finding clothes that fit their exceptional height or extraordinary wingspan.
Just ask Alec Puffenberger, an associate director of equipment at Purdue who is tasked with ordering team apparel for Zach Edey, the 7-foot-4 center who is literally and figuratively a large reason why the top-seeded Boilermakers are among the favorites to cut down the nets in the Men’s NCAA Tournament.
With a Nike partnership that includes a $200,000 budget and a catalog of extended sizes that go beyond anything in a store, Puffenberger can mostly accommodate Edey by purchasing “extra large tall tall” sweats or travel suits in “4XLT” (extra extra extra extra large tall). But ordering Edey’s on-court shoes is complicated; options for size 20 feet are limited, even with a Nike deal.
For a while, Edey wore Zoom Rize 2s because they were the only style above a size 18 available in the team catalog. He tore through them quickly — he broke the soles to the point that the sneakers could be folded in half — and when Nike discontinued the shoe, Puffenberger had to get crafty.
“I bought three pairs off eBay,” he said. “Some of them were in straight red. One was aqua and white, so I had to send a couple out to get painted either black or white so it didn’t look too crazy. Especially the red part. We can’t do that around here.”
Most of the 68 programs that begin their March Madness journeys on Selection Sunday shower their players in branded gear, from T-shirts and hoodies to parkas and polos. Aaron Bradshaw, a 7-foot-1 freshman at Kentucky, said his wardrobe got a major upgrade once he started playing college basketball. He remembers his closet had a couple of pairs of sweatpants, some shorts and a few white shirts before he joined the Wildcats.
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“The closet looks crazy now,” he said. ”You probably would get lost in (there).”
Bradshaw’s memories of his closet before college are how many top-rated high school basketball recruits describe their current clothing options. Up-and-coming stars of future NCAA tournaments don’t have equipment managers scouring eBay for discontinued sneakers or flexing university apparel partnerships to conjure up multiple pairs of Nike joggers in unheard-of sizes. They’re years from the NBA and WNBA, where a professional salary can help curate a closet.
The extra-tall teens opt for oversized sweats and rely on Mom to make some magic when it comes to finding outfits. Trent Burns, a 7-foot-3 recruit committed to Missouri, and his mom Zel know the struggle of in-person shopping well.
He was 5-11 in fifth grade and eye level with Zel, who would take him to department stores like Macy’s, Dillard’s or Marshalls to hunt for extra small men’s pants.
“The challenge more so was not the style. It was the financial part of it, because adult clothes are a lot more expensive. Adult shoes are a lot more expensive,” Zel said.
These days, the four-star recruit out of Houston’s Good Vision Academy almost exclusively shops at American Tall, an online retailer that is a staple of Walker and Bradshaw’s closets as well because it caters to people who need longer sleeves and pant legs. It’s the only place Burns can find pants with a 42-inch inseam and a waist size that fits his leaner frame.
“I’m more slender, so big and tall stuff is always super wide and chunky, and the waist is like 40-something inches,” Burns said. “It’s kind of hard to fit into anything like that without it looking like it’s not my size.”
Trent Burns, a 7-foot-3 high school senior committed to Missouri, almost exclusively shops at one online retailer that has pants to fit his 42-inch inseam and slender frame. (Photo: Jamie Schwaberow / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)
Aaron Bradshaw and his mom Shawndel were in the same boat not long ago, so they now aspire to start an affordable, stylish clothing line that caters to exceptionally tall people.
Walker, the South Carolina center, hopes to leverage her social media following — which is up to 15,000 on Instagram — into a name, image and likeness partnership with Fashion Nova, one of few retailers selling trendy pieces like ripped jeans in tall sizes.
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“I want to show that the tall girls can get clothes from there that fit us,” she said.
Younger hoopers who don’t yet have name recognition take whatever hoodies and sweats their coaches hand out at practice and hope for the best.
Avery Gordon, a 6-6 Purdue commit in the Class of 2025, wore 2XL sweatpants as a young girl playing travel basketball because they were the correct length, but they required a few alterations. Her mom, Kathy Gilstrap, cinched in the waist and tapered the wide legs so the sweats wouldn’t swallow Gordon. She still makes a few adjustments to her daughter’s clothes, and with prom approaching, Gilstrap will have a new project. Gordon has her eye on a dark purple dress she saw online, but she’s never found a dress that’s been long enough without tailoring.
“If I just ordered her a prom dress off the rack, it would be floor length for most girls, but it would probably fall mid-calf for her,” Gilstrap said. “We’ll either have to order something special or have it tailor-made.”
Semi-formal dresses for homecoming dances or Sweet 16 parties that are meant to fall above the knee also need extra fabric. When they’re just a bit too short, they limit movement to the point that Olivia Vukosa, a 6-5 recruit ranked No. 2 in the Class of 2026, coined a specific name for them: “Standing dresses.”
“Because I can’t sit down in them,” she explained.
The tuxedo market isn’t much better. While most high school students seeking a suit for prom have the option of renting, that isn’t in the cards for 7-footers like Trent Burns. He went looking for tuxes months in advance of his May prom, and came back to Zel with an estimate for a simple black suit.
“It was like bare minimum $500. That’s not even tailored,” Zel said. “It’s a nice suit, but I don’t necessarily want to have to pay for it.”
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A made-to-measure suit constructed of premium fabrics for someone about Burns’ size would cost between $1,800 and $2,000, according to Mike Moon, a clothier who has made five custom suits for Purdue star Edey. Moon is behind suits worn by past Purdue draft picks, team captains and coach Matt Painter.
Once a year, usually during the summer, Moon makes the trek from Argyle, Texas to West Lafayette, Ind., to turn the Boilermakers’ film room into the menswear equivalent of a Build-A-Bear Workshop. He takes players’ measurements and walks them through the customization of every aspect of their suits — from the coat lining down to the color of the buttonhole thread — then sends that information to a clothing factory that produces the garments.
The wait time for most clients is four weeks. Orders for Edey often hit snags due to Moon having to answer “Are you sure?” emails in response to Edey’s measurements, or manufacturers realizing they don’t have enough fabric to complete 32-inch coat sleeves.
“I seriously doubt if I’d ever made a sleeve that long,” Moon said.
Mike Moon, who is 5-foot-8, fits Zach Edey for his suits and often gets puzzled questions in response when he submits Edey’s measurements. (Photo courtesy of Moon)
Perhaps one day the sticker shock of custom suits and stories of high waters will be a funny memory for recruits and college players who could turn into NBA and WNBA stars with flashy pregame fits. For now, they’ll stick to their sweats and keep searching for sleeves that reach their wrists, jeans that cover their ankles, or a dress that can be worn standing and sitting.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: David Berding, Jacob Kupferman / Getty Images)
