At Old Dominion, she helped build the Lady Monarchs into a national powerhouse, winning back-to-back Wade Trophies in 1978 and 1979 as the nation's best women's college basketball player. But the boundaries of women's basketball were never going to hold her. In 1986, she became the first woman to play in a men's professional basketball league when she joined the United States Basketball League — not as a novelty, but as a point guard who had spent her whole career competing against whoever was in the gym. She later became the first woman to coach a men's professional basketball team. These weren't symbolic gestures. They were the logical extension of a career that had always measured itself against the highest competition available, regardless of what that required.

The full shape of Lieberman's life in basketball is harder to categorize than any single milestone. She has been a player, broadcaster, head coach, general manager, and mentor — and has held positions in each role that no woman had held before her. Inducted into both the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame, she has spent decades in the sport without ever settling into a single lane. Her charitable work, advocacy, and direct investment in developing the next generation of players reflect the same instinct that sent her onto those Brooklyn courts as a kid: find where the game is being played at its best, and find a way to be part of it. The opportunities that feel ordinary for women in basketball today were made ordinary, in no small part, by Lieberman deciding they should be.