Hall of Fame Celtics coach Fitch dies at 89

Bill Fitch helped turn bad NBA teams into winners, and the Celtics back into champions.

A two-time coach of the year who guided Boston to one of its championships during a Hall of Fame coaching career spanning three decades, Fitch died Wednesday at his home in Lake Conroe, Texas. He was 89.

Fitch coached for 25 seasons in the NBA, starting with the expansion Cleveland Cavaliers in 1970. He was Larry Bird’s first pro coach in 1979, won a title with the Celtics in 1981 and spent time with Houston, New Jersey and the Los Angeles Clippers.

Fitch went 242-86 in his four seasons in Boston. He went from there to Houston for five seasons (1983-88), taking the Rockets to the Finals in 1986 with a team powered by Hakeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson.

⏩ Robin Herman, 70, a gender barrier-breaking reporter for the New York Times who was the first female journalist to interview players in the locker room after an NHL game, died Tuesday at her home in Waltham, Mass., from ovarian cancer.

Herman was a hockey reporter covering the New York Islanders when she and another female reporter were allowed to interview players in the locker room — as their male counterparts were commonly permitted to do — following the 1975 All-Star Game in Montreal.

Herman, in a piece for the Times a few weeks later, recalled how she’d hoped her “mini sports history” moment would go quietly unnoticed. Instead, the locker room quickly devolved into a “circus scene” as “players scrambled for towels and photographers scrambled for cameras” and the two female reporters suddenly were “the news of the hour,” she wrote.

Herman went on to other assignments at the Times, later wrote for the International Herald Tribune and worked at the Washington Post in its health section. She also wrote the 1990 book “Fusion: The Search for Endless Energy.”

Born in 1951 in New York City, Herman was also part of the first Princeton University class that admitted women.

WNBA: League commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced the closing on a new $75 million capital investment for the league, the largest-ever capital raise in any women’s league in the country.

Engelbert declined to reveal how much each of the 27 investors put in, but the pool includes former NBA player Pau Gasol, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former New York Liberty standout Swin Cash, who is the New Orleans Pelicans’ vice president of basketball operations and team development.

The funds from the new capital raise will go towards marketing, building the league’s global presence and fan engagement.

Soccer: The independent U.S. Soccer Foundation, which had never previously endorsed a candidate for U.S. Soccer Federation president, is urging voters to reelect Cindy Parlow Cone rather than restore former head Carlos Cordeiro.

Cordeiro, a former Goldman Sachs partner who headed the federation from 2018-20, resigned in March 2020 after federation lawyers filed legal papers claiming women’s national team players had less physical ability and responsibility than their male counterparts.

Parlow Cone, a former national team player, was vice president at

the time and succeeded him. The USSF national council meets in Atlanta on March 5 to vote on a four-year term.