Kay Yow Biography

Kay Yow was a pioneering women's basketball coach whose 737 games won places her at number six on the women's career list. She began coaching women's college basketball in 1971. During her career she won four Atlantic Coast Conference tournament championships with North Carolina State, and her teams appeared in the N.C.A.A. tournament 20 times, with one Final Four appearance in 1998. Yow also coached the United States women's team to gold medals at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the 1986 world championships and the 1986 Goodwill Games. She was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2002. Yow had her first surgery for breast cancer in 1987. In the years since, the disease had recurred at least twice, before it finally took her life on January 24, 2009.