Who is Pearl Moore? Meet the woman whose college scoring record Caitlin Clark has yet to beat

(Editor’s note: Caitlin Clark passed Pete Maravich’s point total in a win against Ohio State on March 3.)

Before there was Caitlin Clark, before there was Kelsey Plum, Maya Moore, Candace Parker, Diana Taurasi or even Cheryl Miller, there was Pearl Moore.

Moore isn’t included on many “Greatest Women’s Basketball Players” lists. She’s not even regularly mentioned in discussions on the best pre-WNBA players of all time, like Miller or Nancy Lieberman or Ann Meyers.

Rather, Moore’s legacy is scantly remembered as the hooper from Francis Marion — a tiny university in her hometown of Florence, S.C. — who scored a staggering 4,061 collegiate points from 1975 to 1979.

“One of the greatest players to ever play the women’s game,” said Sylvia Hatchell, Moore’s coach at Francis Marion.

Moore is a soft-spoken, lighthearted, easily embarrassed woman who owns a colossal scoring record that has stood the test of time but garnered hardly any attention before Clark’s record-book sprint. However, she was far more than just a Clark prototype.

“I just really enjoyed playing basketball,” Moore told The Athletic. “I guess I had some success.”

The Sunday after Clark topped Plum’s NCAA women’s all-time scoring record, a minister at Moore’s church addressed the national attention Clark had received. According to Moore, he told the congregation: “Pearl, we know Caitlin Clark has broke Kelsey Plum’s record, but we all know in this church who the leading scorer actually is. And that’s you.”

Moore, 66, said that kind of attention embarrasses her and she’d rather leave her basketball successes on the court.

Those accolades began in the Carolina countryside, where she shot rubber balls through tire rims held up by peach baskets. Later, she and her 11 brothers and sisters moved to Florence, where they had playgrounds with real hoops. It was on those playgrounds where Moore developed her shooting prowess and dribbling moves to score around much bigger boys. It was also where Moore developed her competitive edge.

“She always wanted to beat them because they’d talk junk to her, but Pearl did her talking on the court,” Hatchell said.

But even after all that talking, Moore was too nervous to play basketball when she reached Wilson High, so she skipped tryouts. When the high school coach saw Moore pick up a ball and shoot, she called for another tryout and Moore made the team. Moore said she averaged 13 points as a freshman, 14 as a sophomore and 17 as a junior before blossoming as a senior and averaging 25 points per game.

Despite dominating high school and grassroots basketball, only two colleges came calling with scholarship offers: one from a school in Louisiana and another from a team in Michigan. Moore, a homebody, wasn’t thrilled.

“Women back in them days didn’t really get all these scholarship offers and stuff like they do now,” she said. “Now you’ve got a silver platter. Before, you had to scramble around.”

Instead, Anne Long, who took over as the Wilson High coach after Moore’s junior season, took her on a visit to Anderson Junior College, a regional powerhouse. But after a few weeks of playing there, Moore was miserable. She drove over three hours home every weekend and was ready to return to Florence.

So Long called Hatchell, who had never heard of Moore but drove out to the Wilson gym to watch her play. There, a two-on-two game broke out, with Long and Moore on one team and Hatchell on the other with Moore’s younger brother Jeffrey.

“And, of course, you know we beat them,” Moore said.

Hatchell was in her first season of a 44-year coaching career that took her to North Carolina, where she won a national championship and eight ACC tournament titles, appeared in three Final Fours and earned induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

“Whenever she wanted to come home, I couldn’t wait to get her because she was something else,” Hatchell said of Moore. “She started my career off good, I’ll tell you.”

Pearl Moore’s desire to be close to home led to her playing collegiately at Francis Marion.

In a Francis Marion uniform, Moore played basketball like a woman who had been teleported from a future generation.

She drained shots from distance with an effortless jumper, then blew by defenders when they came out to guard her. If she had a smaller defender on her, Moore would take them to school in the post.

“I was blessed highly by my heavenly Father to have done all of those things,” Moore said.

By the time she graduated, her 4,061 points were an Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women small-school record. The NCAA didn’t offer a women’s basketball tournament until 1982, and the AIAW was the main governing sports body that oversaw women’s sports through the 1970s.

The NCAA does not include AIAW scoring in its record book, which is why Clark and Moore hold different records. Lynette Woodard of Kansas holds the AIAW large-school scoring record at 3,649 points, and Pete Maravich of LSU holds the NCAA men’s scoring record at 3,667 points. Clark, a senior at Iowa, probably won’t surpass Moore’s numbers unless she returns to play for a fifth season next year.

Even in an era before the 3-point line, Moore found creative ways to score three points with regularity.

“She used to get the ball and take off down the court, and if she had the layup with no defense, a lot of the time she’d wait on the defense to catch up so she could throw her hip into them and then score so she could get on the foul line,” Hatchell said. “I saw her do that many times. She’d wait for the defense to catch up so she could get three points. So ahead of her time.”

She finished her college career with three 50-point games, including a 60-point outing. She averaged 30.6 points per game and scored more than 1,000 points in three of her four seasons, and she did it all without the 3-point line.

Plus, women weren’t yet playing with smaller basketballs but rather with the men’s size.

“She is as good a women’s basketball player as has ever been out there,” said Michael Hawkins, who has worked within Francis Marion’s athletic department since 1981.

“Just a scoring machine.”

If Moore had a 3-point line, Hawkins suggested, she might have added as many as 400 more points to her career total. Hatchell said “she probably would’ve had another 1,000.”

“Right now, we are all over Caitlin Clark as she’s scored 3,500 or something close to that. And that’s incredible, too. But just to think about someone back in the day who didn’t have a 3-point line and didn’t have those things … for her to go in every night and just perform at the level that she performed, 4,000 points is incredible, and I don’t know if anyone will ever break that,” said Alabama starting point Loyal McQueen, who also grew up in Florence.

The highlight of Moore’s time at Francis Marion might have come in her junior season, when she scored 60 points against Eastern Washington State College in the 1978 AIAW Small College National Tournament.

Moore said she had no clue how many points she had that night.

“I didn’t even know I had 60 points. I don’t think I played for some seven or eight minutes,” Moore said. “And so the game was over and they announced it. But if we didn’t win, what good was scoring 60 points?”

They won. Decades later, Hatchell still shakes her head about taking Moore out for stretches in that game.

“I mean, Pearl was just scoring at will. I think she had 12 assists also in that game, and gosh, I took her out,” Hatchell said. “Can you believe that? I took her out. But if I had known then that it was the record, I would’ve left her in there. I was trying to respect the other team and not run the score up. But I took her out with probably about three or four minutes to go, and she already had the 60 points.”

But Moore is too humble to share all the details she remembers from that night and too competitive to look back on her Francis Marion days with contentment.

This is a woman who still gets annoyed thinking about a high school game in which she scored 50 points but her team lost 60-56. Moore said she would’ve rather lost by 60.

“I really enjoyed playing basketball there,” she said about Francis Marion. “The career that I had there was stellar. It would’ve been even better if I could’ve won a championship in the AIAW. That’s the only thing I’m lacking.”

McQueen vividly remembers meeting Moore for the first time.

Twelve years before McQueen became the highest-ranked high school recruit in South Carolina, she was a 6-year-old attending her first basketball camp, hosted by Moore in their hometown. McQueen and the other young kids were sent to practice on smaller hoops upstairs, away from the bigger hoops in the main gym. But after McQueen crushed the rest of the youngsters, the counselors said she needed to be brought downstairs to face the 9- and 10-year-olds.

“Well downstairs, that’s where Pearl was,” McQueen said. “And then I started killing the 9-year-olds, so she came up to me, and she was just like, ‘Keep working.’ And she gave me some love, but she also gave me some tough love, and I mean at 6.”

Nearly two decades later, McQueen is starring in the SEC but still remembers that walk down the stairs and the shocked look on Moore’s face. After that camp, McQueen went home and researched Moore. McQueen attended the camp annually from then on, and the two have kept in touch.

She saw Moore’s impact on her community firsthand. At Wilson, where McQueen’s dad was the coach before becoming the athletic director, Moore has always been a regular supporter in the stands.

“She’s definitely somebody that I look up to, and I hope one day that I can make an impact just as big as what she made in Florence,” McQueen said.

When McQueen was considering transferring from Georgia Tech in 2021, it was Moore who encouraged her to go make a name for herself at Alabama. Their relationship has transitioned from “a basketball thing” into a mentorship, McQueen said.

“It’s so good to be able to talk to someone that experienced something and went through the things that you’re going through now. So it’s always great to get good advice, especially from someone that’s a legend,” McQueen said.

“I’m just so grateful and so blessed to be able to have a relationship with her and to know her on a deeper level.”

Moore said she wasn’t watching Feb. 15, the night Clark scored 49 points against Michigan and surpassed Plum, but those who saw Moore play say the two strike a stunning resemblance in how they could control a game.

“They’re very similar, especially both were great shooters but also had ballhandling skills, and they had a lot of assists,” Hatchell said. “For Pearl, it was a joy for her to play and to watch her play because she just smiled all the time and had her teammates laughing because she was the kid that everyone loved playing with. She made it so much fun. That’s sort of like Caitlin. They’re great because they love the game.”

With or without a comparison to Clark, Moore has loved watching the recent growth of women’s basketball and cherishes her place in the game’s history alongside legends like Lieberman, Meyers and Woodard.

“There are so many trailblazers in the game that have laid the foundation for the game to have grown,” Moore said. “When we were coming up, we didn’t have any women to emulate because we didn’t see it on TV.”

The rapid growth of the women’s game has made it hard to compare players of different generations, but Hawkins said each name played a significant role in getting the game to where it is today.

“There were those who played in the 1970s: Ann Meyers, Carol Blazejowski, Pearl Moore. And then in the ’80s, it was a different era with Lynette Woodard and Cheryl Miller,” Hawkins said. “But Moore, certainly she is as good a women’s basketball player as has ever been out there.”

McQueen, who received a scholarship offer from South Carolina and Dawn Staley in eighth grade, thinks Moore could still hang.

“I think she would always be able to play (in any era) because, from what I was told, she played extremely hard,” she said. “Whenever she played, she played at full speed.”

Moore remains in Florence today, ever the homebody.

Toward the end of her time at Francis Marion, she received multiple offers to compete for the upstart Women’s Pro Basketball League. She played for the New York Stars in 1979-80 and the St. Louis Streak in 1980-81 before the league folded in 1981. Her dominance immediately translated to the professional level, leading the Stars to a championship in her first year.

She was inducted into the Francis Marion Athletic Hall of Fame in 1992, the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2011 and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2021.

When she got the call from the Naismith Hall of Fame, Hatchell said Moore told her, “I don’t deserve this.”

“But I said, ‘Pearl, you do deserve this for all you’ve done for the game,'” Hatchell said. “And all the greats of the game, especially all of the great men of the NBA there, they all loved her.”

These days, the gym at Wilson High, the Florence community center and various local promotions for clinics and training sessions bear Moore’s name.

“When I think about Florence, Pearl is the first person that comes to mind,” McQueen said.

Moore works at the town’s post office, continuing to love the community where she found success. And despite all her accolades, it’s the local honors that mean the most.

“Out of my college career, I got three rings,” she said. “I’ve got the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame ring and my Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame Ring. But I’ve also got my college graduation ring, and this is the ring I’m most proud of.”