Billie Moore, legendary women's basketball coach, dies at 79

Billie Moore, the history-making women's basketball coach that won national championships with two different schools, died  Wednesday from cancer, UCLA announced. She was 79.

The university reports that she passed away at her Fullerton, California, home surrounded by friends and family following a "lengthy battle with multiple myeloma."

Moore was the first women's basketball coach to lead two different schools to national titles: Cal State Fullerton in 1970, and UCLA in 1978.  She also served as the head coach for the first ever U.S. women's Olympic basketball team, which took the silver medal at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games.  

Moore began her coaching career as an assistant at Southern Illinois, according to the Associated Press, and then spent eight seasons as head coach at Cal State Fullerton, where she went 140-15, before moving over to UCLA. 

She was at UCLA for 16 seasons, from 1977 to 1993. She holds the school record for most wins by a women's basketball coach, with 296. 

She totaled 436 wins as a collegiate head coach, and in 1991 became only the eighth women's Division I head coach to win 400 games, UCLA said.

"It is hard to put into words the depth of Billie Moore's impact," said Cori Close, current UCLA women's basketball head coach, in a statement. "I am keenly aware that I get to walk on the trail that Billie Moore blazed. A truly remarkable life well lived."

Moore was inducted into both the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999. She was inducted into UCLA's Hall of Fame in 2000.

USA Basketball tweeted Thursday that it was "proud to have been part of her (Moore's) journey. Our thoughts are with her loved ones at this time."

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