Billie Moore, a Corridor of Fame ladies’s faculty basketball coach who grew to become the primary to take two totally different colleges to nationwide championships, died on Thursday at her residence in Fullerton, Calif. She was 79.
Her dying was introduced in a press release on the U.C.L.A. Athletics web site. A spokesman for U.C.L.A. Athletics stated she had a number of myeloma.
Moore was simply 26 when she was named head coach of the California State-Fullerton ladies’s basketball squad in 1969, when the ladies’s recreation was solely a blip on the faculty basketball scene. She loved immediate success at Cal-Fullerton, teaching it to the 1970 championship of the C.I.A.W. (Fee on Intercollegiate Athletics for Girls) with a victory over West Chester State School of Pennsylvania within the ultimate.
Moore was the pinnacle coach of the primary United States ladies’s basketball workforce to compete within the Olympics, taking the squad to a silver medal on the 1976 Video games in Montreal. Her workforce included the star gamers Nancy Lieberman, Ann Meyers and Pat Head, who was later the Corridor of Fame coach Pat Summitt.
Moore grew to become head coach of U.C.L.A.’s first ladies’s basketball workforce, which took the ground for the 1977-78 season, 5 years after Congress handed what grew to become generally known as Title IX, which prohibits federally funded colleges and different academic establishments from discriminating in opposition to college students and workers members based mostly on intercourse.
Her first Bruins workforce posted a 27-3 report and defeated Maryland, 90-74, on the Bruins’ residence court docket, Pauley Pavilion, for the championship of the A.I.A.W. (Affiliation for Intercollegiate Athletics for Girls), the group based in 1971 because the successor to the C.I.A.W.
The Bruins’ triumph — sparked by Ann Meyers, a four-time all-American, who had 20 factors, 10 rebounds and eight steals — ended the dominance of ladies’s basketball by two small colleges, Delta State of Mississippi and Immaculata of Pennsylvania, which had taken turns profitable the six earlier nationwide championships. And it spawned the event of big-time budgets for the ladies’s recreation.
However the N.C.A.A. didn’t put ladies’s basketball underneath its auspices till 1982.
Meyers and Denise Curry, who additionally performed for Moore, grew to become Corridor of Famers. In Moore’s 16 seasons at U.C.L.A., her groups went 296-191. She grew to become the eighth coach in ladies’s basketball historical past to succeed in the 400-win mark, posting an general report of 436-196.
She was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Corridor of Fame and the Girls’s Basketball Corridor of Fame in 1999.
Moore was additionally an assistant coach for the American ladies’s groups that competed within the 1973 World College Video games in Moscow and the 1975 Pan American Video games in Mexico Metropolis. She retired from teaching after U.C.L.A.’s 1992-93 season, when the Bruins had a 13-14 report.
Billie Jean Moore was born in Humansville, Mo., a small metropolis within the west-central a part of the state, on Might 5, 1943. Her household moved to Kansas when she was younger.
Her father had coached boys’ and ladies’ basketball, however the small highschool she attended in Topeka didn’t have athletic groups, so she performed for a squad sponsored by a meat firm. She was an assistant coach at Southern Illinois College earlier than being employed as head coach at Cal-Fullerton.
Details about survivors was not instantly obtainable.
In an interview with the web site Hoops HD in 2020, Moore was requested whether or not she thought one other coach would ever match her report of taking two totally different colleges to nationwide basketball titles.
“I believe another person will do it sooner or later,” she stated. “With the arrival of Title IX, I figured it was only a matter of time till the big-time conferences would begin dominating ladies’s basketball. It took some time for Title IX to have an effect. Earlier than that it was small colleges like Immaculata/Delta State, however now it is just power-conference groups.”
After retiring from teaching, Moore was a advisor or teacher for quite a lot of faculty basketball groups and camps.
“I spent about 27 years across the Tennessee program and went to all of their N.C.A.A. tourney appearances,” she stated. “Solely just lately have I actually been a spectator.”
Maia Coleman contributed reporting.
Supply: NY Times
