UNCASVILLE, Conn. — Maya Moore has been to the mountaintop of women’s basketball more than almost anyone else in the history of the sport. She’s known the euphoria of seeing confetti fall after a grueling NCAA tournament run; of battling through the best in the world to hoist a WNBA championship trophy; of hearing the national anthem play on the podium at the Olympic Games.

But Moore’s playing days are long behind her now, and she doesn’t yearn for the highs that came with being on the court. At 36, she finds the same spark in watching her three-year-old son pick up the basics of potty training.

“He had his first successful poopoo in the potty recently, and it’s just like, this is it. This is like, championship-level joy,” Moore said with a smile as she sat for her Naismith Hall of Fame press conference at Mohegan Sun on Friday. “You just don’t realize how important poopy comes until you become a parent. So yeah, the next challenge is just continuing to figure out how my family can thrive in each season of life … just continuing to make sure that I’m taking care of myself and not running myself too thin.

“We have the opportunity to do everything, but that doesn’t mean we should, so just balance, just continuing to find balance.”

Moore, fellow UConn alum Sue Bird along with seven other individuals and one team will be part of the induction ceremonies that began Friday with the bestowing of Hall of Fame rings and jackets. It continues on Saturday night with actual enshrinement into the Hall in Springfield.

It’s been three years since Moore officially retired from the professional basketball but seven since she played her final WNBA game in the first round of the 2018 playoffs. In the prime of her career at 29 years old, less than two years removed from winning her fourth championship with the Minnesota Lynx, Moore walked away from the sport to follow a new calling. She dedicated the next two years of her life to criminal justice reform, specifically the case of Jonathan Irons, now her husband who spent more than two decades wrongfully imprisoned in Moore’s home state of Missouri.

In March 2020, after two years of Moore’s undivided support, Irons’s conviction was finally overturned by a Missouri judge. In a career decorated with every accolade a basketball player can earn, that victory is the greatest of her life.

“I really, really do think stepping away from the game and the long haul of the justice system and how it’s not set up to bring justice quickly, it gave me the endurance to realize this is a season,” Moore said, “We’re going to get through this. There’s ups, there’s downs. There’s so many ways — Jonathan lost 11 appeals. Eleven. No one, not two, 11 before the 12th one set him free.”

Anyone who played with Moore describes her first and foremost as a winner, and she has the trophies to prove it. She won four consecutive state championships in high school at Collins Hill in Suwanee, Ga., then led UConn to back-to-back NCAA titles in 2009 and ’10. She helped build the Lynx into one of the greatest dynasties in WNBA history, winning four league championships in six seasons and taking the franchise to the finals six times in her eight-year career.

Moore is one of the most prolific scorers women’s basketball has ever seen, and she still holds the Huskies’ program record for points with 3,036 from 2007-11. A four-time All-American and two-time unanimous national player of the year, Moore also ranks first all-time at UConn in field goals made, second in rebounds and third in double-doubles.

She joined the Lynx as the No. 1 overall draft pick in 2011 and earned rookie of the year honors, then went on to lead the WNBA in scoring and earn league MVP in 2014. Her 4,984 career points are the second-most by any WNBA player to appear in fewer than 300 games, behind only three-time reigning MVP A’ja Wilson. Moore also holds four gold medals representing Team USA, two from the Olympic Games and two from FIBA World Cups.

That resume is the reason Moore is being inducted into the Hall of Fame, but her impact looms far larger than the game. Tina Charles, who played with Moore from from 2007-10 at UConn and is now in her 14th WNBA season, was never shocked by Moore’s decision to pursue a path beyond basketball.

“Maya is someone who moves as the spirit moves her. … She felt that the Lord’s will at that time was for her to go in a different direction, and she trusted that versus what the norm would be,” Charles said. “Maya’s legacy is that basketball is what you do, it’s not who you are, and she would always say that. … She made it very clear what was more important was just the impact on others, to have a winning mentality not just on the court but also off of it.”

Fellow UConn legend Bird still remembers the hurricane of emotions she felt when she learned that Moore was stepping away from basketball. The competitor in Bird was relieved that she wouldn’t have to see Moore on the court anymore, but she also worried that the game was losing its biggest star at a moment when women’s basketball was just beginning to grow.

“They had just done the Jordan Wings poster of her, and in terms of the business building, she was a really important part of that, so it was a little bittersweet to have this specific player walk away,” Bird said. “But then when you hear her talk and you listen to the reasons why and you see the impact — you see the work, and then you see the impact, all of that just kind of fades away. You see that she had something pulling her and calling to her much bigger than basketball ever did.”

Though her career was shorter than anyone anticipated, Moore’s legacy is alive in the next generation of WNBA stars, many of whom fell in love with the league because of her. Former Huskies superstar Paige Bueckers and Indiana Fever phenom Caitlin Clark, the 2025 and ’24 No.1 picks in the WNBA draft, both cite Moore as their favorite women’s basketball player growing up.

Connecticut Sun center Olivia Nelson-Ododa said Moore was the reason she committed to play for UConn after growing up less than 30 miles from Moore’s high school. Nelson-Ododa was a middle schooler when she first met Moore at a youth camp she hosted back in Georgia, and the former Huskies center said she still has the sneakers Moore signed for her at her family home.

“I don’t even know if she realized it, but she was just such a huge inspiration for young women,” Nelson-Ododa said. “The lasting impact now that I’m older that I see is just her faith … You see your favorite player, who you could say had everything at the time, have the ability to step away from the game and continue on her own journey with Christ. That just speaks volumes to me personally, because she’s really a testament to how you want to carry yourself on and off the floor.”

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