North Carolina State University Athletics
PEELER: First Game Back Difficult For Pack Women
1/29/2009 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
BY TIM PEELER
RALEIGH, N.C. The players and coaches know they won’t get any more phone calls or messages that have inspired them since they arrived at NC State to play for late Wolfpack coach Kay Yow. Interim head coach Stephanie Glance knows she can’t call the coach for pre-game advice or post-game analysis.
“I will really miss that,” Glance admitted.
And that’s what making returning to action Thursday night at Reynolds Coliseum so difficult for a team that is still mourning the loss of their Hall of Fame coach, who died Saturday morning and will eulogized Friday at her funeral in Cary.
This is not the first time the Wolfpack has been without Yow, who took two leaves of absence over the last four years to battle a recurrence of the cancer that eventually took her life and had not been with the team since mid-December.
“But this was completely different,” Glance said. “We were all feeling it.”
The team had practiced only once before Thursday’s return to action, which ended in a 62-51 loss to Boston College in front of 4,117 supportive fans. It was obviously rusty, hitting just five of 34 shots in the first half. They fell behind by as many as 23 points before halftime, and the Eagles took a 36-15 lead into intermission.
But an amazing thing happened when the team fell behind 50-19. The crowd started cheering even louder. Those shouts and hollers reached a crescendo as the Pack went on a 24-4 run that cut the lead down to 11 points in the final moments.
“I thought the team gave a tremendous effort to overcome that kind of deficit and those kinds of broken hearts,” Glance said. “They want to win this game more than probably any game in their entire life.”
But it wasn’t just about winning the first game after Yow’s passing. It was getting back to the game the coach loved and grew from a handful of seeds.
“It was nice to get back out there and play,” said Shayla Fields, who scored a team-high 17 points for the Wolfpack. “I know if Coach Yow were here, she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. And if she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, neither would I.
“We know she is not coming back this time, and that makes this more emotional.”
Most of all, Fields knows the coach wouldn’t want her players to bring self-pity onto the floor that was named Kay Yow two years ago.
“She always told us, though, not to take that kind of stuff onto the floor,” Fields said. “So I tried my hardest to play basketball, to go out and give it my all.”
Thursday, the emotions were still just too raw to think about winning. It was more about getting back to a sense of normalcy. That was practically impossible on a night when every corner of Reynolds was a not-so-subtle reminder of Yow, with the championship banners and retired jerseys hanging from the rafters to the homemade signs that declared “You made the world a better place.”
Pink, the official color of breast cancer awareness, was everywhere, from the neon-colored pompons of the dancing team to the fish-shaped ribbons in the bells of the pep band tubas to the whistles in the mouths of the game’s three officials. Dozens of former players were in the stands to watch the game. And there was a long moment of silence that brought all the raw emotions to the surface just before tip-off.
“This was the first step of a long journey, to come out and play on Kay Yow Court and to represent her,” Glance said. “Coach Yow would have been proud of her team tonight. We are going to keep playing through this and walking through this emotion together. We are going to keep getting better on the floor.
“We are going to keep grieving and having emotion and doing all the things we need to do to move on as people first, and as players and coaches second.”
You make contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
