Billie Moore, legendary ladies’s basketball coach, dies at 79

Billie Moore, the history-making ladies’s basketball coach that received nationwide championships with two totally different colleges, died  Wednesday from most cancers, UCLA introduced. She was 79.

The college stories that she handed away at her Fullerton, California, house surrounded by family and friends following a “prolonged battle with a number of myeloma.”

Moore was the primary ladies’s basketball coach to steer two totally different colleges to nationwide titles: Cal State Fullerton in 1970, and UCLA in 1978.  She additionally served as the pinnacle coach for the primary ever U.S. ladies’s Olympic basketball group, which took the silver medal on the 1976 Montreal Olympic Video games.  

Moore started her teaching profession as an assistant at Southern Illinois, in keeping with the Related Press, after which spent eight seasons as head coach at Cal State Fullerton, the place she went 140-15, earlier than shifting over to UCLA. 

She was at UCLA for 16 seasons, from 1977 to 1993. She holds the college report for many wins by a ladies’s basketball coach, with 296. 

She totaled 436 wins as a collegiate head coach, and in 1991 grew to become solely the eighth ladies’s Division I head coach to win 400 video games, UCLA stated.

“It’s laborious to place into phrases the depth of Billie Moore’s influence,” stated Cori Shut, present UCLA ladies’s basketball head coach, in an announcement. “I’m keenly conscious that I get to stroll on the path that Billie Moore blazed. A very exceptional life nicely lived.”

Moore was inducted into each the Naismith Memorial Basketball Corridor of Fame and the Ladies’s Basketball Corridor of Fame in 1999. She was inducted into UCLA’s Corridor of Fame in 2000.

USA Basketball tweeted Thursday that it was “proud to have been a part of her (Moore’s) journey. Our ideas are together with her family members at the moment.”