LUSIA HARRIS
BASKETBALL
A lifelong gym rat who had parlayed her hoops
passion into a career as a player and coach,
Jenny Boucek was 33 before she discovered the
pioneer who arguably made it all possible.
That would be Lusia Harris: the first woman
to score a basket in the Olympics (1976), the
only woman ever drafted by an NBA team (’77)
and the first female college player inducted into
the Basketball Hall of Fame (’92). Harris was,
by many accounts, the first truly dominant
player of the women’s game, a key trailblazer in
the sport, though unknown to the generations
who followed her.
Boucek, a college star at Virginia who played
in the WNBA’s inaugural season, didn’t learn
about Harris until 2007, after becoming coach of
the league’s now defunct Sacramento Monarchs.
After a lifetime of doing drills named for men,
Boucek set out to recast her playbook by honor-
ing legends of the women’s game. She promptly
named a post drill after Harris, in hopes that
her young players would gain a better apprecia-
tion for those who paved the way. “It’s some-
thing that we all have to be intentional about,”
says Boucek, now an assistant coach with the
NBA’s Pacers.
It wasn’t until this past year that Harris f inally
broke into mainstream consciousness, via the33 JUNE 2022PION
TO RE
PIONEERS
TO REMEMBER