Virginia Union University is mourning the death of VUU Hall of Famer Robert Moore.  Moore passed away at age 73 on Sunday, October 11, in Charlotte, N.C.

Moore played football and basketball at VUU and also coached the men's basketball team from 1973 until 1978, compiling a record of 90 wins and 44 losses in five seasons.  His 1976-77 squad won 25 games and captured the Northern Division Championship of the CIAA.

Moore was inducted into the VUU Hall of Fame in 2009.

Moore coached at Atkins High School from 1967-1971, passed away in his home Sunday morning at the age of 74 due to natural causes.[Click here!]In 1969, Moore was the first African-American men's basketball coach to win the North Carolina 4-A State Championship. He was also, in the same year, the first African-American to be voted North Carolina Coach of the Year.

In addition to men's basketball, Moore served as the head coach for track & field, as well as an assistant for the football team during his five years at Atkins. Moore coached at West Forsyth High School from 1971-1973, after Atkins shifted from a high school to a middle school.

During his local high school coaching career, Moore had a long list of impressive accomplishments. He was named Conference Coach of the Year four consecutive years from 1967-1970 and also coached four individual state champions in track & field.

Stephen Joyner, who played basketball under Moore at Atkins and was the second leading scorer on the 1969 state championship team, has been the head men's basketball coach at Johnson C. Smith University for the past 27 seasons. Joyner credits Atkins' success to Moore's fast-paced coaching style that was unusual in the late-1960s.

"He was a tough coach when he was in the gym," Joyner said. "He instituted a style of full-court pressing and a run-and-gun type of basketball that demanded a lot from his players. But at that time, he could still get out on the court and play with you, so he would get out there and be physical with you himself."

"He pushed himself really hard to excel," said Robert Moore Jr., a 1987 North Mecklenburg High graduate who followed his father into coaching. "His thing was not the victories and state championships. His thing was always sending kids to (graduation). He had a resume with 80 pages and most of it was the kids he sent off to college and are professionals now. That was his biggest thing."

Moore was adept at breathing life into struggling programs – first at Atkins, then in the college ranks where he pushed Virginia Union to respectability when he won a CIAA North title in 1977. That success built the foundation for the Panthers' 1980 Division II national championship team – the first of four coached by his successor, Dave Robbins.

"When you look at the teams Dave Robbins first inherited at Virginia Union, most of those student-athletes were young people Bob Moore recruited," said Joyner, who has three CIAA championships and is J.C. Smith's career wins leader with 497. "The same thing happened here at Smith and other places he'd been."

The Atkins basketball team won greater than 83 percent of its games with an average margin of victory of 17.4 points per game under Moore, according to the Winston-Salem Sportsmen Club.

Moore was inducted into the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County High School Sports Hall of Fame in 2005 and later inducted into the Atkins Sports Hall of Fame in 2011.

In his Atkins Hall of Fame profile, Moore is referred to as "arguably the greatest coach in Atkins High School history."

Moore is survived by his three sons, Robert D. Moore Jr., 46, Clarence Moore, 42, and Rayner Moore, 38. Moore Jr., who was the head boys' basketball coach at Atkins from 2006-2012, said that coaching is a passion that has been passed down for multiple generations in the Moore family.

"My grandfather was also a Hall of Fame coach and he passed it down to my dad," Moore Jr. said. "So, coaching is just in my family. It was what my dad did his whole life, and it was obviously the only logical route for me to go."

However, more than his success between the lines, Moore. was always most proud of helping his players beyond the field of athletics, said Robert Moore Jr. According to Atkins' records, over 90 percent of Moore's players graduated and attended post-secondary institutions.

"His biggest accomplishment didn't have anything to do with athletics," Robert Moore Jr. said. "His biggest accomplishment has always been just all the kids that he sent to college and went on to have productive lives. He was so proud of his graduation percentage."

Joyner remembers not only how important academics were to Robert Moore Sr., but also how willing his coach was to go above and beyond to help both his athletes and his students.

"He was just a person who opened himself to not only student-athletes, but also every student he came in contact with," Joyner said. "He was such a person that cared more about others than he really cared about himself. He was looking to move people along and move people to college."

Attending college was important to Moore Sr., as he had played both basketball and football at Virginia Union University for four years before graduating in 1962. The two-sport athlete was a member of the 1958 undefeated football team, while also playing on the CIAA men's basketball championship team in 1960.

Moore coached the men's basketball team at Johnson C. Smith University from 1977-1987, before returning to the high school ranks in 1988. He coached at Harding High School in Charlotte from 1988-1991 and then at Asheville High School from 1991-2003.