Michele Timms
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Michele Margaret Timms (born June 28, 1965), and better known plainly as Michele Timms, is an Australian basketball player who played for the Phoenix Mercury in the Women's National Basketball Association. Many consider the Melbourne, Victoria native to be one of Australia's greatest female basketball players in history. In addition to playing basketball, she has also parachuted off an airplane, played Australian rules football with her brothers, as well as criquet.
Timms began her professional basketball career in 1984 in Australia, where women's basketball is very popular. In 1989, she became the first Australian woman to play internationally when she went to Germany to play with the Lotus München team. While playing in Germany, she got a chance to play alongside Marlies Askamp, who would later also play with her on the Mercury. While there, she was named the Women's International Player of The Year in 1994 and 1996.
Also in 1996, she helped the Australian national women's basketball team earn their first Olympic medal, earning Bronze at the Atlanta competition.
At the onset of the WNBA in 1997, she went to the Mercury, where she played in the WNBA finals in 1998, losing to the Houston Comets. In 2001, she announced her retirement and almost inmedately she joined the Mercury's television broadcasting crew, a job which she held only for that season. She averaged 4.0 assists and 4.6 points per game with the Mercury, her highest scoring average in one season being 12.1 points per game in 1997. On August 7, 2002, her jersey, number 7, became the first jersey to be retired by the Mercury. Upon her retirement, she was the Phoenix Mercury's career leader in assists.
In July of 2003, she announced she was pregnant, and on January 25, 2004 she had a daughter named Kalsie Patricia.
In February of 2005, the Phoenix Mercury announced that she had been signed as an assistant coach under fellow Australian and Mercury head coach Carrie Graf.