There are few people in life who can say they were there at the advent of movement, fewer still who actually started it.

Women's basketball might have gotten to this stage on its own, but what Cathy Rush did in her six seasons at Immaculata put the sport in fast-forward.

Which is why she will be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame tonight in Springfield, Mass.

"I still can't believe it," Rush said Tuesday, the night before she headed to Springfield.

It has been more than three decades since Immaculata won those three consecutive AIAW championships and played in five championship games.

Rush was a Hall finalist six times. The record of her Immaculata teams looks like a misprint, 149-15. Apparently, she hadn't coached long enough for some voters.

"It was like keeping Sandy Koufax out of the Baseball Hall of Fame saying he didn't pitch long enough," said Saint Joseph's coach Phil Martelli, whose wife Judy played for Rush at Immaculata.

Rush played the game with two boy cousins in her West Atlantic City neighborhood, playing at a hoop on a garage two doors from her house. She played varsity in her freshman year in high school, leading Atlantic County in scoring.

When Rush returned for her sophomore year, her school had dropped sports for girls.

She asked her mother if anybody protested and her mother said, "I don't think anybody complained."

This was the early 1960s. Immaculata was still a decade away. Probably seemed like a century.

"Times are so different," Rush said. "I was a '60s woman. I graduated from college on a Sunday, got married the following Saturday. I was going to teach for 3 years and never work again."

Didn't happen exactly that way. She taught junior high while coaching at Immaculata. After changing a sport, she got on with the rest of her life. It involved working.

Rush, who lives in Sarasota, Fla., and has a place at the Jersey Shore, has been running all-sport camps for more than 30 years.

Seymour Smith, a retired sports writer from the Baltimore Sun, had been writing notes to Rush for 15 years, saying he had nominated her for the Hall. Smith would write her another note each time she didn't make it. When she finally did make it, they spoke on the phone for the first time. Rush went to Massachusetts on Wednesday hoping to meet the man who had been so kind to her for so long.

Rush had never been to any Hall of Fame until last month when she visited the Hall in Springfield for the first time. Tonight, she will be in the Basketball Hall of Fame. And she will stay there forever.

Agenda

What: 2008 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame induction ceremony

Where: Springfield, Mass.

When: Tonight

TV: ESPN Classic, 7:30

Inductees: Cathy Rush, Adrian Dantley, Patrick Ewing, Hakeem Olajuwon, Pat Riley, Dick Vitale, William Davidson.