Coach Billie Moore sat her basketball team down before its 1976 silver medal match against Czechoslovakia at the Montreal Summer Games. The squad had endured a long and winding journey to get to this point, now on the precipice of history. Moore delivered an important and prescient message to her players: win this game and they would forever shift the trajectory of women’s sports in the United States. Forty-seven years later, that silver-medal-winning team is being recognized for doing just that, as the first women’s basketball team to represent the U.S. at the Olympics.
Captained by Juliene Brazinski Simpson and the late Pat Head Summitt, the team is among the honorees that will descend upon Springfield, Mass., this weekend to celebrate the enshrinement of the class of 2023 into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Inductees include household names like Dwyane Wade, Tony Parker and Becky Hammon, among others. While perhaps the 1976 squad, on the whole, is less recognizable in popular culture than its Naismith compatriots, the group is more than deserving of the Hall of Fame limelight.
Walter Iooss Jr./Sports Illustrated
