Lieberman, Nancy
Basketball
b. July 1, 1958, Brooklyn, NY
Lieberman fell in love with basketball when she was young and developed her skills on New York City playgrounds, playing with and against boys. As a high school junior, she was a member of the U. S. team in the Pan-American Games in 1975 and a year later she was the youngest member of the team that won a silver medal in the Olympics.
An outstanding shooter and ball-handler, Lieberman entered Old Dominion University in Virginia in 1976. The school won two straight national championships in 1979 and 1980 and Lieberman won both the Wade Trophy and the Broderick Award as the nation's best collegiate woman basketball player both years. In 1979, she was awarded the Honda Broderick Cup as the outstanding woman athlete in any sport.
Lieberman played on the 1979 Pan-American Games team and was chosen for the 1980 Olympic team that didn't play because of the U. S. boycott of the Soviet Union Games. During her collegiate career, she averaged 18.1 points and more than 9 rebounds a game, along with 961 assists and 561 steals.
The first draft choice of the Dallas Diamonds in the Women's Professional Basketball League, Lieberman was named rookie of the year after averaging 26.3 points a game, but the league folded. As trainer and manager, she helped tennis player Martina Navratilova revive her game during the early 1980s, then signed a three-year, $250,000 contract with Dallas of the new Women's American Basketball Association in 1984.
That league also collapsed, and Lieberman in 1986 signed with the Springfield, MA, team in the U. S. Basketball League, becoming the first woman to play in a men's professional league. A year later, she became the first woman to play for the Washington Generals, the team that tours with the Harlem Globetrotters.
The Phoenix Mercury of the WNBA chose Lieberman in the second round of the league's elite draft in 1997. The 38-year-old Lieberman was the oldest player in the league.
The following season, she became coach and general manager of an expansion team, the Detroit Shock. The team went 17-13 for the best winning percentage ever by an expansion team in any sport.