CNN
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Billie Moore – the pinnacle coach of the primary US girls’s Olympic basketball workforce, the primary head coach to guide two colleges to nationwide championships in girls’s basketball and a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Corridor of Fame – died Wednesday on the age of 79.
Her dying was introduced by UCLA, the place she led the Bruins to an Affiliation for Intercollegiate Athletics for Ladies nationwide championship in 1978 and the Naismith Corridor of Fame, on Thursday.
The UCLA athletics division stated Moore had been battling a number of myeloma, a most cancers of plasma cells that suppresses the physique’s immune response, and he or she died at her residence in Fullerton, California, surrounded by household and buddies.
“Billie Moore was a trailblazer as a head coach and amongst a really small group of people that laid the muse for the place girls’s basketball is in the present day,” Naismith Corridor of Fame president and CEO John L. Doleva stated. “Her influence on the basketball group is aware of no boundaries, and he or she will likely be missed by the complete Corridor of Fame household.”
Moore, who coached UCLA from 1977 to 1993, holds the document for many wins (296) by a girls’s head basketball coach in program historical past.
Earlier than teaching UCLA, Moore was the pinnacle coach for the primary US girls’s Olympic basketball workforce in 1976. With gamers corresponding to Pat Summitt, Ann Meyers Drysdale, Lusia Harris and Nancy Lieberman, Moore led Crew USA to the silver medal on the Summer time Video games in Montreal.
Moore, who was born in Westmoreland, Kansas, additionally led Cal State Fullerton to a nationwide title in 1970. She was inducted into the Naismith Corridor of Fame and Ladies’s Basketball Corridor of Fame in 1999.
“One of many issues that, once I obtained the decision, that was foremost in my thoughts was that I’m being inducted as coach in a workforce sport,” she stated at her enshrinement. “And when you’re in a workforce sport, you’re not right here due to one thing you probably did your self. It’s apparent that this award is shared with lots of people which have performed a vital half down by way of the years and it belongs to lots of people.”
She credited her father with giving her a love and fervour for the sport. She instructed the viewers she had hoped her profession wouldn’t be based mostly on wins and losses however within the lifelong buddies she made on the court docket.
Total, Moore compiled a collegiate document of 436-196 for a .690 profitable proportion.
Ladies’s Basketball Coaches Affiliation Govt Director Danielle Donehew stated Moore was an enormous who paved the way in which for different feminine coaches.
“Most significantly Billie was a instructor who continued to share her knowledge with former student-athletes and colleagues like Pat Summitt, her mentee, lengthy after Billie retired as a coach,” she stated.
“I met Billie whereas working for Pat and can endlessly cherish her knowledge and humor. Billie’s influence on our sport survives her by way of the multitude of lives, mine included, she touched.”
