Her team featured trailblazers of the game — Pat Summitt, Ann Meyers Drysdale and Nancy Lieberman.
LOS ANGELES — Billie Moore, who coached the first U.S. Olympic women’s basketball team to a silver medal at the 1976 Montreal Games, has died. She was 79.
Moore was the first coach in women’s basketball history to lead teams from two different schools to national championships. She guided Cal State Fullerton to the Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women title in 1970 and UCLA to the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women title in 1978.
She began her coaching career as an assistant at Southern Illinois. Moore then spent eight seasons at Cal State Fullerton, where she went 140-15. Moore led UCLA to a 27-3 mark in 1978 and posted a record 296 victories in her 16 years with the Bruins. In her 24-year career, she finished with a 436-196 record.
“We’re in the locker room before the silver-medal game against Czechoslovakia. She looked at all of us and she said, ‘Ladies, whatever you do today, will change and support the course of women’s basketball history for the next 25 years,’” Lieberman said in a statement released by the Hall of Fame on Thursday. “To have that type of understanding and vision about the historical element of what we are doing, when we’re just thinking about getting loose in layup line, has never left me.
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