North Carolina State University Athletics
In Coach Yow's Memory, A Day Of Inspiration
1/30/2011 12:00:00 AM | Pack Athletics
Jan. 30, 2011
Pack Falls to Florida State, 76-69
Box Score | Hoops 4 Hope Photo Gallery
RALEIGH, N.C. – Of the hundreds of survivor stories Sunday afternoon at the sixth-annual Hoops 4 Hope, Jeanne Spangler’s was one of many that hit close to home.
Not only is Spangler’s granddaughter, Emili Tasler, a junior on the NC State women’s basketball team, but Spangler has, like late Wolfpack coach Kay Yow, twice been diagnosed with breast cancer.
Spangler, a resident of Rocky Mount, N.C., for the last 23 years, was first diagnosed in 1996. She recovered with radiation and hormone replacement treatments that were available at the time, but after a 13-year hiatus, the breast cancer returned shortly before Yow’s death on Jan. 24, 2009.
She’s gone through more chemotherapy and radiation treatments that have been effective in fighting the disease. So as the parade of survivors walked onto Kay Yow Court at Reynolds Coliseum at halftime of Sunday’s game between NC State and Florida State, Spangler happily walked arm-in-arm with Ms. Wuf to celebrate 15 years of being a cancer survivor.
“Walking in this parade, being here, is very helpful,” Spangler said. “I like to touch everyone who’s a long-term survivor. It’s nice to know that it can be done. “It takes away some of the fear.”
Spangler was walking near Fannie Holt of Wendell, who was walking in her fifth consecutive Hoops 4 Hope survivor parade. She first had surgery to remove a lump from her breast in 1981 and has not had a recurrence since. But she likes to be part of this annual event begun by Yow in 2006 to help raise funds and awareness for the disease, which first occurred in the coach in 1987 and returned in 2004.
“As soon as I find out the day for it, I have my daughter go online and buy tickets,” Holt said. “I like to be here with other survivors.”
For Spangler, Hoops 4 Hope is always a day of therapy – but so is watching her granddaughter play for the Wolfpack, even though Tasler is currently sidelined with a leg injury. For years, when Tasler and her parents lived in Iowa, she would spend a month during the summer with her grandparents in Rocky Mount.
One of those weeks was always devoted to attending Yow’s summer basketball camp. By the time Tasler and her family moved to Apex to finish her high school career, the Wolfpack coaching staff was familiar with her game enough to offer her a chance to play for the Wolfpack.
And now, seeing her grandmother on the court at Hoops 4 Hope is an inspiration for the young player.
“I think it’s awesome, just for her to be out there,” Tasler said. “A big part of the reason that I wanted to come here was because of Coach Yow and what she went through. My grandma was going through kind of the same thing that Coach Yow did – she beat it the first time and then it came back.
“It’s an awesome event for her. It’s an inspiration to everybody.”
As always, the sixth edition of Hoops 4 Hope was inspiring for the season-best 6,127 spectators at Reynolds Coliseum. The school, with corporate partner Time-Warner Cable of Raleigh, raised nearly $53,000 to contribute to the Kay Yow Cancer Fund, through various other events and the popular pregame silent auction, which raised more than $15,000 on its own.
In addition, Sof Sole made a $35,000 corporate donation to the fund in honor of the event and former Wolfpack players collected $5,000 to contribute in memory of the late Kaye Young Cowher, who died of cancer last summer.
In the end, the day is about raising awareness and raising money to help fight cancer. That’s part of the message NC State graduate Adrienne Core helped spread last week when she represented North Carolina at the Miss America pageant in Las Vegas. Her preferred charity, which she chose in honor of her late father, is the Jimmy V Foundation, with which the Kay Yow Cancer Fund is affiliated.
Core’s father died of multiple myeloma, the same form of rare blood cancer that claimed the life of Hall of Fame men’s basketball coach Everett Case.
“Everything I did in sports was because of my dad,” Core said. “I played volleyball, basketball and softball and he was at all my games, throughout his sickness. And we were a Wolfpack family from the day I was born.”
Before leaving for the NHL All-Star Game at the RBC Center, Core spent the early part of the afternoon participating in the Walk 4 Kay, in which more than a dozen NC State personalities helped raise money for the Yow fund by walking on treadmills with fans that made donations on their behalf. Among those who participated were quarterback Russell Wilson, football coach Tom O’Brien, men’s basketball coach Sidney Lowe and Chancellor Randy Woodson.
The first three Hoops 4 Hope benefitted other charities, but this is the third consecutive year that all funds raised went directly to the Kay Yow Cancer Fund, which is the preferred charity for the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association, ACC women’s basketball and NC State athletics. In three years, the fund has raised nearly $3 million for cancer research, according to Marsha Sharp, executive director of the organization.
In each of the last three years, funds raised at Hoops 4 Hope make up the largest annual donation to the research fund, Sharp said. Now that those monies have begun to accumulate, the organization has begun to give research grants to help fight breast cancer.
It made its first significant grant of $1 million to Johns Hopkins University for a breast cancer research project and will make its third consecutive $100,000 grant this year during the Final Four in Indianapolis. At Yow’s request, beginning with the 2009 Final Four in St. Louis and the 2010 Final Four in San Antonio, the fund gives a similar research grant to an organization based in the host city of the women’s championship weekend.
“This is certainly the most special event we have for the fund, because this one is Kay’s,” Sharp said. “It is surrounded by all the people who loved her so much. It’s an amazing day. It kind of perpetuates everything else that is done all over the country.”
• By Tim Peeler, tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
