At Alabama Rick Moody earned 310 career victories making him the winningest coach of the program.
In the Mood for Basketball
8/21/2007 8:57:00 AM | Women's Basketball
By Gloria Nantulya
When new assistant women’s basketball coach Rick Moody retired at the end of the 2004-2005 season as the head women’s basketball coach at the University of Alabama, he never thought he would return to the world of coaching. But when Quentin Hillsman, the head coach of the Syracuse women’s basketball team called him in January, he knew that he couldn’t let this opportunity pass.
“Coach Hillsman is one of my best friends in this business. He is one of the people in the business that I felt like I could really enjoy working with,” said Moody about his former assistant coach during his final coaching season at Alabama. “He gave me an opportunity to come work with him at an institution that I believe in my heart is fixing to bust wide open with women’s basketball.”
Moody had ended his successful coaching career as the winningest coach in University of Alabama history and the only Alabama coach, men or women’s, to reach 300 wins at the Capstone.
Having been a three-sport athlete in high school and a college basketball player, choosing which sport to coach was not easy for Moody. Fortunately for him, Mother Nature made that decision for him.
It was at his first coaching job as the head football coach at Clifford Meigs Junior High in Shalimar, Fla. that Moody decided that coaching basketball was right for him. After having a great season with his team due to the passing ability of its quarterback, the team found itself in the championship game that year. However pouring rain, courtesy of Mother Nature, put an end to the passing game, and Clifford Meigs Junior High lost the championship to a team Moody believes was not as good as his.
The loss of that championship game as well as the injury of his best pitcher due to cold weather that spring when he was coaching baseball had a profound effect on Moody.
“I decided that the elements in the gymnasium were a little bit more constant,” he said. “I liked the controlled environment. You’ve got a thermostat in the gym and you can control the lighting, so that really made my decision for me. I never coached football or baseball again after my very first year in coaching.”
After coaching basketball at the high school level, Moody quickly decided that he wanted to become a college basketball coach. From coaching basketball at Clifford Meigs Junior High, he went on to coach at two other high schools in Florida before becoming the assistant women’s basketball coach at the University of Alabama in 1981. After three years as an assistant at Alabama followed by a five-year return to coaching at a high school in Guntersville, Ala., Moody became the head women’s basketball coach at Alabama in 1989. Sixteen seasons later he retired.
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