The Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame named finalists Friday for 2025 induction. They include players on the 2008 Olympics gold medalist team (Carmelo Anthony, Dwight Howard), Jennifer Azzi, Maya Moore, and Molly Bolin.
Before the WNBA, before the ABL, there was the WBL: The Women’s Professional Basketball League, which operated 1979-1981.The first player signed in that league was Molly Bolin from Grand View College in Des Moines. (Grand View University athletic staff could not ascertain if Jennifer Jorgensen, who played for Lynne Roberts at Pacific for three minutes, broke Bolin’s scoring records there, due to inattentive record-keeping in one era or the other — like, who’s ever going to care about *that*, right?)
The WBL San Francisco Pioneers were the last professional women’s basketball team in San Francisco that people are likely to remember (the NWBL was a winter league for American women from 1997-2006 — in the NWBL’s last year of operation, the San Francisco Legacy, who played their home games in a community center gym in Oakland, finished in last place), and since the Pioneers were in business while I was watching women’s basketball played for the first time at Cal State Hayward, I had to pay attention.
“Machine Gun” Molly Bolin was the second player I ever saw light. It. Up. (The first was Rick Barry, who played for the 1975 NBA champion Golden State Warriors.) Bolin set WBL records for scoring average and scoring in a game.
Bolin was an impossible defensive assignment — she could get clear for shots behind screens if the screener was a lawn chair. (There’s video of Iowa Cornet Bolin on fire against a Dallas Diamonds team with Nancy Lieberman.)
She’s nominated for the Basketball Hall of Fame! I think she’s the first WBL player to get that recognition — another first.