Billie Moore, 1st US women’s Olympic basketball coach, dies

By The Associated Press

FILE - Inductees of the 1999 Basketball Hall of Fame pose together following a news conference in Springfield, Mass., Friday, Oct. 1, 1999. From left are Wayne Embry, Kevin McHale, Billie Moore, John Thompson and Carl Bennett, who is accepting the award for Fred Zollner. Billie Moore, who coached the first U.S. Olympic women's basketball team to a silver medal at the Montreal Games in 1976, has died. She was 79. UCLA, where Moore was the women's head coach from 1977-93, announced Thursday, Dec. 15, 2022, that she died at home surrounded by family and friends. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)[ASSOCIATED PRESS/CHARLES KRUPA]

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Billie Moore, who coached America’s first women’s Olympic basketball team to a silver medal at the Montreal Games in 1976, has died at age 79. UCLA, where Moore won 296 games over 16 years including a national title in 1978, announced her death on Thursday. Moore also won a college title at Cal State Fullerton in 1970, a year before the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women began. She was the first coach in women’s basketball history to lead teams from two different schools to national championships. Moore was inducted in both the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999.