Three finalists for the Basketball Hall of Fame have black college connections. Al Attles (N.C. A&T), Cynthia Cooper-Dyke (Prairie View A&M) and C. Vivian Stringer (Cheyney) are up for induction this year in a class that could include Michael Jordan, John Stockton and David Robinson

Attles, a 1960 A&T grad who played guard for Philadelphia and San Francisco from 1960-70, is one of five Warriors to have his jersey number retired. He averaged 8.9 points per game, but made his real mark as a coach when he led the Golden State Warriors to the 1974-75 NBA title in an upset of the Washington Bullets. Attles coached the Warriors from 1970-83, going 557-518 with six playoff berths. He moved from coaching to executive with the Warriors and now serves as a community ambassador - a 49-year run with the franchise.

Cooper-Dyke, a two-time WNBA most valuable player and the glue to the Houston Comets' dominance in the league's early years, has been head women's coach at Prairie View since 2005. "It feels great to be considered a finalist and the first thing I thought of is how proud my mother would be if she was still here," said Cooper-Dyke, who led Southern California to national championships in 1983 and '84. 'When you're a kid, you grow up dreaming of things like this and it's even more exciting because I didn't even know I was being considered, plus I'm more in awe than anything that they would consider me and my career." Cooper-Dyke coached the Panthers to back-to-back SWAC regular season conference championships, the best season in school history with 22 wins and a berth in the 2008 Women's National Invitational Tournament. She was named SWAC co-coach of the year after leading the Panthers to their first winning season in program history. Prairie View won the conference tournament in 2007 and earned a berth in the NCAA tournament.

Stringer, the first coach of either gender to lead three programs to the Final Four, started her career at Cheyney in 1971. Although women's athletics programs remained woefully underfunded after Title IX became law in 1972, Stringer's Wolves emerged as a national power. In 1982, Cheyney advanced to the finals in the NCAA's first women's tournament, losing to Louisiana Tech. By the time Stringer left for Iowa in 1983, she had compiled a 281-51 mark at Cheyney. Stringer has 819 wins, second among active women's coaches.