LSU Women's Program Hires Caldwell

BATON ROUGE — Nikki Caldwell, who won national championships as both a player and an assistant coach at Tennessee and turned UCLA into a national power in just three years, has been named the head women's basketball coach at LSU, vice chancellor and director of athletics Joe Alleva announced on Saturday.

 A press conference to formally introduce Caldwell as LSU's seventh coach will be held at 2 p.m. on Monday at the Athletic Administration Building. 

 Caldwell, widely recognized as one of the nation's top assistant coaches during stints at Tennessee and Virginia, took over at UCLA in 2008. In three years with the Bruins, she turned around a UCLA program that had won only one NCAA Tournament game in the nine years prior to her arrival. 

Memphis: Larry Finch, who led Memphis' college basketball team to the 1973 NCAA title game before the Tigers fell to the Bill Walton-led UCLA Bruins and who then went on to coach his alma mater for 11 years, died Saturday at age 60. Memphis Tigers spokesman Lamar Chance said Finch died at Saint Francis Hospital. The cause of death was not immediately known.

Finch suffered a debilitating stroke in 2002 at age 51. In October 2010, he was hospitalized for treatment of pneumonia.