By Jonathan Tannenwald
Philly.com
The news broke a bit before 9 a.m. Eastern Time, just as those of us in this part of the country who decided to sleep in this morning were waking up.
RALEIGH, N.C. - North Carolina State's Kay Yow, the Hall of Fame women's basketball coach who won more than 700 games while earning fans with her decades-long fight against breast cancer, died on Saturday. She was 66.
The Associated Press and the Raleigh News and Observer have both posted obituary stories that are worth reading, as well as retrospective photo galleries.
I also have this quote from Yale women's basketball coach Chris Gobrecht, whose team beat N.C. State back on Nov. 22 in Minneapolis. Gobrecth was speaking during the Ivy League women's basketball coaches teleconference on Jan. 14, and I asked her what it was like to play and beat Yow's team.
That was a very special experience and it was one of those things that when the game was over I turned to my assistants and said there's probably 100 coaches in this country that I would have rather beaten than Kay Yow.
I had a chance to talk to her before the game and she's just in such a good place with everything she's dealing with. She's a tremendous individual. I think she's very proud of all the good that's come out of the circumstances she's had to endure. Her team just loves her and you can just feel it, everything that goes on. She's got a really wonderful group of players.
They had every reason to be pretty ticked off that an Ivy League team would come in and play like that against them, and they just handled themselves with so much class. There wasn't a single attitude or uppityness about any of those players. It's just a class program and she's one of the great, great women in America, not just in basketball.
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