North Carolina State University Athletics
PEELER: Yow's Last Gift to Her Team
1/27/2009 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
BY TIM PEELER
RALEIGH, N.C. They went, armed with a bear and expecting the worst, to see the coach who had recruited and signed each of them to play for NC State.
The coaching staff, who had visited Wolfpack coach Kay Yow at Western Wake Hospital in Cary since the day she was admitted a week-and-a-half before, tried to prepare the team for what they might see.
The players, who had been somewhat shielded from their coach’s circumstances, didn’t know what to expect last Wednesday afternoon as they piled into Yow’s room in the cancer ward.
When they opened the door, there she sat, full of life, awaiting the arrival of her team, looking not much different than the way they remembered her in the five weeks since she left the team. For Stephanie Glance and the other members of the coaching staff, it was a great shock. Yow had been extremely weak and barely responsive in recent days. When the team arrived, she looked positively vibrant.
For about 20 minutes, she sat talking, smiling, telling little jokes and accepting all the get-well wishes. It was the same positive, optimistic person that basketball fans, cancer survivors and supporters had come to know so well over the last five years.
“The players were actually encouraged, because she looked so good,” Glance said Tuesday afternoon, in her first press conference since Yow’s death Saturday morning. “It was like Coach Yow’s last gift to them. Even in the final days, she was still giving and she still found within herself, with the Lord’s help, to have that kind of strength to speak to them and give them that.
“It was an amazing, incredible thing. She must have mustered up all the energy she had left for that visit.”
The team was on its way to Miami for Thursday night’s game. They were back by Friday, hoping to see an even better Coach Yow.
“It was her, the normal Coach Yow,” junior Tia Bell said of that last visit. “I think she did muster up a lot of her energy. Once again, it just showed how she put others before herself. She was the same strong, uplifting Coach Yow.”
Bell and a few of her teammates gave the coach their last gift, a stuffed bear they made at the mall. It was fuschia with white hearts, a pink hat, a pink breast-cancer awareness ribbon and a jazzy pink purse, in which every member of the team stuffed a little get-well wish. They included an audio chip of themselves shouting what the team shouts at midcourt before every game: “Wolfpack Women, on the way to No. 1 together! Wolf-pack!”
They named it Faith Yow.
It made the coach smile, even as she shed tears of joy while visiting with each player and staff member. They didn’t know it was their last visit with the coach, but she probably did.
“She was able to fight back most of her tears,” said guard Shayla Fields, the team's only senior. “I know she wanted to cry a river, but it was more like a little pond.”
Yow peacefully slipped away about 54 hours later, her long battle with cancer finally over. Regardless of the final outcome, she did fend off cancer twice before, first in 1987 and again in 2004. Along the way, she inspired her players, her staff and millions of others who watched her gracious struggle.
The impact that Coach Yow has had on each of us is incredible,” said Glance, who has served as the interim head coach twice before in Yow’s absence and will continue in that role. “It runs so deep and it touches so many lives.
“She has always been such a giver, and everyone on the team feels very blessed to have been on the receiving end of so many gifts that she left for us.”
That includes the final gift of seeing their coach sitting in the chair with a smile on her face, full of life.
You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
