Lusia Harris

College

Delta State University

Pro team(s)

Houston Angels (WBL)

Hall of Fame

⭐ Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame

Lusia Harris-Stewart was born on February 10, 1955, in Minter City, Mississippi — a small community in the Leflore County Delta — one of nine children raised in a family that emphasized education and faith. She attended Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, where she became the most dominant women's basketball player of her era, leading the Lady Statesmen to three consecutive AIAW National Championships (1975, 1976, 1977) and establishing herself as the player who defined what women's basketball could be at the collegiate level. She scored the first two points in Olympic women's basketball history at the 1976 Montreal Games, where she led the U.S. team to a silver medal. In 1977, the New Orleans Jazz selected her in the seventh round of the NBA Draft — making her the only woman ever officially drafted by an NBA team. She was pregnant at the time and declined to attend tryouts. She later played in the Women's Basketball League. Lusia Harris was a pioneer in the most complete sense of the word: she arrived before women's professional basketball existed in any organized form, before Title IX had fully transformed women's athletics, and before the public broadly understood what women's basketball could look like at its highest level. She showed them. She was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992 and again honored as a member of the inaugural class of the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999. Born in Minter City, Mississippi.