Kay Yow’s record:
In a collegiate coaching career dating to 1971, when women’s basketball was barely noticed as a national sport, Yow won 737 games, No. 6 on the women’s career list. She coached North Carolina State to four Atlantic Coast Conference tournament championships, 20 appearances in the N.C.A.A. tournament and one Final Four, in 1998.
Yow 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 received the Wooden award as the Division I women’s basketball coach of the year in 2000 and was inducted as the fifth women’s coach in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame at Springfield, Mass., in 2002. Her career record was 737-344.
I’m sure it was tough only making the Final Four once in an illustrious 34-year career, but I’m sure winning the gold medal — in the same Olympics where the men were taken down fair and square — more than made up for it.
