PEELER: 25 Things About Late Coach Kay Yow
1/28/2009 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
BY TIM PEELER
RALEIGH, N.C. Ask anyone who ever crossed paths with NC State women’s basketball coach Kay Yow and they will tell you she was an amazing lady.
Many knew about her coaching career and her courageous battle with cancer, which ended Saturday morning when she passed away at the age of 66. And many have honored her accomplishments by making donations to the Kay Yow/WBCA Cancer Fund, which was set up through the V Foundation for Cancer Research to help raise cancer awareness and find a cure.
But how much did you really know Coach Yow, the person?
In reading all the tributes over the last few days, and searching through all the files we keep on Coach Yow, I’ve learned many things I didn’t previously know about Sandra Kay Yow.
And since the coach has multiple Facebook pages devoted to her, in the spirit of that social networking site, here are 25 things about Coach Yow that should be shared.
1. She once scored 52 points in a game for Gibsonville High School.
2. She inherited a love of basketball from her parents, Hilton and Lib Yow, who both played the game in high school as their three daughter and son. The coach cemented her love of the game while attending several Dixie Classic Tournaments with her father at Reynolds Coliseum.
3. Coach Yow was not only hired to be the women’s basketball coach in 1975, she also coached the volleyball team and the softball team. She arrived on July 1, 1975, and did not have time to recruit volleyball players. So she taught the remaining members of the basketball team and her eight basketball recruits how to play volleyball. Many of them had never served, set or spiked before, but the team finished the season with a winning record. “She was a coach’s coach,” said long-time cross country coach Rollie Geiger. “It didn’t matter what the sport was. She knew how to teach it to her players.”
4. She wanted to be an English teacher and librarian when she graduated from East Carolina, because she didn’t think it would be possible to become a coach. She was offered her first job as an English teacher at Allen Jay High School with the stipulation that she had to be the girls basketball coach.
5. At Allen Jay High, she beat her alma mater Gibsonville High School three years in a row for the conference championship. Her younger sister Debbie, who is now the athletics director at Maryland, played for Gibsonville those years and each time she refused to speak to Kay for at least three days after the losses.
6. After her first conference championship at Allen Jay High School in High Point, Yow remembers the lesson she learned from her principal, Doyle Early, who did not congratulate her on the victory. Instead, he said: “We came here with 12 towels, and we better leave here with 12.” She cut short her celebration and started picking up the school property. She learned from that episode to never forget even the smallest details.
7. Kay went back to Gibsonville to be the head coach for one season while completing her Masters degree at UNC Greensboro. Her youngest sister, Susan, was the team’s star player, and never stopped talking to her older sister, for whom she played at Elon and NC State. She was also an assistant under Kay at NC State.
8. All three Yow sisters wore No. 14 at Gibsonville High and it was retired after Susan graduated in 1971.
9. Yow’s mom, Lib, finally stopped playing family pickup games at the age of 46, when she fell and broke both wrists while playing against Kay and Susan in the backyard.
10. Her father Hilton played basketball in high school and for a textile mill team in Gibsonville. He once said of the Yow family: “The girls don't like to lose. Their mama doesn't like to lose. Their daddy don't like to lose."
11. Yow was hired by NC State athletics director Willis Casey on the recommendation of Greensboro Daily News sports editor Smith Barrier, a confidante of legendary NC State men’s basketball coach Everett Case and a long-time proponent of basketball in North Carolina. She was the only candidate interviewed for the job.
12. Coach Yow played for a nationally ranked softball team from Graham, N.C., called the Rubi-Otts, which once finished third at the national championship tournament in Florida. Yow was the team’s pitcher.
13. Yow met Nora Lynn Finch, NC State’s long-time senior associate athletics director and now the ACC Associate Commissioner for Women’s Basketball, when Yow was the volleyball coach at Elon and Finch was the volleyball coach at Wake Forest. At the time, the North Carolina Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women required teams to meet for punch and cookies after every game. The two coaches began talking basketball strategy in the hall way after those games, beginning a friendship that lasted nearly 40 years.
14. She loved to play golf and was close friends with Peggy Kirk Bell, owner of the Pine Needles Resort in Southern Pines, N.C., which has hosted the U.S. Women’s Open three times.
15. Her mom died of breast cancer in 1993, the same year as late NC State basketball coach Jim Valvano. They were both at Duke Hospital. Kay would sit with her mom until she fell asleep, then go visit Coach Valvano for several hours in his room.
16. She wrote a letter of recommendation for Sylvia Hatchell for the head coaching job at North Carolina. After Hatchell got the job, she arrived at a Team USA function wearing lots of light blue. Yow made sure to give her a red shirt.
17. She attended church her entire life, but she didn’t become a committed Christian until her first year at NC State, thanks to the efforts of Lori Moore, the director of the NC State chapter of the Campus Crusade for Christ. Moore visited often with the coach and her team. One day, she pulled Coach Yow aside and said: “Coach Yow, you are a really good person. You are really good to your players. You care about them. You want to try to help them. You try to be fair with them. But do you know [all] good people don’t go to heaven?” That statement had an impact on Yow, and she lived a faithful and devoted life from that point forward.
18. Her favorite book in the Bible was Philippians, and her favorite verse was Philippians 4:13 “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”
19. When she went to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1986 to coach Team USA in the World University Games and the Goodwill Games, Yow smuggled Bibles into the communist country.
20. Just about every Sunday of her adult life, Yow drove to Gibsonville for Sunday afternoon lunch with her extended family.
21. She loved dangly earrings, loud scarves and, for the last couple of years, well-made wigs.
22. Yow could be a matchmaker: At Sidney Lowe’s introductory press conference on May 4, 2006, Yow introduced former Wolfpack basketball player Ernie Myers, who played with Lowe on the 1983 NCAA Championship team, to NC State media relations director Annabelle Vaughan. They were married five months later.
23. There have been two women’s basketball coaches at NC State, R.R. “Peanut” Doak, who was the interim coach for one year in 1974-75, and Yow. Both began their careers against North Carolina. The only men’s coach to begin his career against the arch-rival from Chapel Hill was Chuck Sandborn, the head coach in 1912-13, the third season after the program began. No one since has had to open his NC State career against the school’s biggest rival.
24. The coach was well-recognized and well decorated. In addition to being enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, she is in the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, the Elon College Sports Hall of Fame, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes Hall of Fame, the Athletes In Action Hall of Fame (first female inductee), the East Carolina Sports Hall of Fame and the Guilford County Hall of Fame, among others.
25. Once, while in Greece with her team, Yow was convinced by the repeated requests from her players to go cliff-diving. Reluctant at first, Yow did it anyway and considered it a great accomplishment. Former NC State coach Herb Sendek, after listening to Yow tell that story at a Wolfpack Club function in 2004, said: “Finally, Coach Yow and I have something in common. I’ve been told to jump off a cliff a bunch of times, too.”
You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
