Kay Yow, left, with Pat Summitt after winning the Jimmy V award in 2007. (Chris Carlson/Associated Press)
Sandra Kay Yow passed away today, at the age of 66.
She was better known as Coach Kay Yow, the head coach of the North Carolina State University women’s basketball team, for 33+ years of the 35 years that the program has been in existence. She had also been a cancer survivor for nearly 22 of those years. That battle, which ended today, has been much publicized over the past 4+ years, since her latest recurrence of the disease.
Kay Yow arrived at NCSU in 1975, with 5 years of high school coaching experience and 4 years of college coaching experience, all at Elon College. Title IX had just passed, but it would be another couple of years before the Atlantic Coast Conference decided to adopt women’s basketball as a league sport. Yow was there for the start of it all. In her first year at NCSU, she was not only the head coach for women’s basketball, but also the head coach for women’s softball and volleyball teams–and the coordinator of women’s sports.
She was the first women’s basketball coach in the ACC and the fifth in NCAA history to coach 900 games at the same school. She was also the fourth Division I women’s head coach to surpass 1000 career games on the sideline. Yow was one of only six Division I women’s head coaches to achieve 700 career victories. Her teams participated in 20 of the 27 NCAA Tournaments, made 11 trips to the Sweet Sixteen and went to the Elite Eight and Final Four in the 1998 season. Her NCSU teams collected 5 ACC regular season championships and four ACC tournament championships. She had 29 winning seasons and 21 20-win seasons.
In addition to her college coaching duties, Yow had international experience. She was the head coach of the gold-medal-winning team in Seoul, Korea in 1988. She also coached gold-medal teams at the 1981 World University Games, 1986 Goodwill Games and 1986 World Championship Games. She also served as an assistant coach in numerous other international competitions, from 1976-1986.
Yow is a member of at least 10 Halls of Fame, including the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame and the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. She was named National Coach of the Year eight times by various organizations, including the John and Nellie Wooden Foundation, USA Today, Sports Illustrated and the WBCA.
Despite her obvious achievements in basketball, she is now more widely known for her battles against the cancer that took her life, and the grace and determination that she showed in the fight, remaining at work as much as possible during those years. She herself said that the things that she was most proud of in her life were: helping/caring for others; being a mentor to players and staff; and winning an Olympic gold medal and going to the Final Four.
Kay Yow was widely respected by her peers and rivals, an undisputed success at the career she chose, in short: a winner.
May she rest in peace.
P.S. I don’t know if any plans have been made to acknowledge Yow’s passing at tomorrow’s South Carolina vs. Vanderbilt game, but I hope that at the very least, we will have a moment of silence in her memory, prior to the start of the game. I plan to wear pink, in her honor, and I encourage other Gamecocks fans to do the same.
