USA Women's Pan American Team

The Pan American Team is one of the teams under the auspices of the USA Basketball organization. The Pan American Games are held every four years in the year before the Olympics. The first Pan American Games were held in 1951, but those games were men only. The second Pan American games in 1955 included women's teams. Eligible teams are the members of FIBA Americas. The USA has participated every year since the 1955 event, except for 1995, when the game were canceled, due to too few teams committed to play.

Participants in the Pan American games included the very best ever to be part of the sport–ten players ended up in the Naismith Hall of Fame, including Cheryl Miller, Nancy Lieberman and Lusia Harris. Hall of Fame members Jody Conradt, Billie Moore, Cathy Rush, C. Vivian Stringer and Kay Yow were coaches for Pan American teams, while Denise Curry and Pat Summitt participated both as players and coaches.

In the early years of the Pan American (Pan Am) games, the players came from the AAU teams. The players for the 1955 team were drawn primarily from Hanes Hosiery Mills, Wayland College Flying Queens, the Dons, and Dowells Dolls. These four teams played each other in a tournament to help select the players for the Pan Am team. Hanes Hosiery came in first ahead of Wayland Baptist. This result would not be surprising, as these were the two dominant teams of the era. Hanes Hosiery won the AAU national championship in 1951, 1952, and 1953, beating Wayland two of those three years, and Wayland would go on to win the national championship the net four years 1954–1957. Not surprisingly, the twelve player Pan American team was dominated by these two teams, with six Wayland Baptist players and three from Hanes Hosiery. While Wayland provided the largest number of players, Hanes provided the captain, Lurlyne Greer Mealhouse, who would score over 18 points per game, more than twice the second highest scorer, and still the third highest scoring average in Pan American history. Greer was considered to be the best AAU player of her era.

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