Nightmare Year for a Coach : Yow Puts Problems Aside to Select an Olympic Team

Who better to lead the United States Olympic women’s basketball team--as raggedy and limping a group as has been seen outside a war zone--than Kay Yow, who herself has battled her share of adversity this year.

Yow is presiding over the women’s basketball trials here, where a popular sideline pastime has been counting the knee braces among the 50 players.

In addition, six key players are not here because of medical waivers. They must be considered when the squad is cut to 18 or 20 players Sunday.

To Yow, the fact that her team barely has a leg to stand on is not in the least daunting.

“Yes, we are injury-plagued,” Yow said. “That doesn’t frighten me. That doesn’t back me off.”

Small wonder, considering what battles Yow has seen this year. In August, Yow, 45, was diagnosed as having breast cancer. She immediately underwent a modified radical mastectomy. Her mother, Lib, has also been stricken with the disease.

In the fall, Yow resumed her duties as women’s basketball coach at North Carolina State. Yow had taken the Wolfpack to postseason play in 12 consecutive seasons before this one.

This season was different as injuries devastated her team.

“This has been a tough year for adversity,” Yow said Friday at the U.S. Olympic Training Center. “My team has been a small part of that. We played without seven scholarship players. Our record was 10-17, my first losing season.

“It was an up-and-down season. Our injury situation stayed the same all year. As soon as one player got back, another would go down. We ended up with four walk-ons. I had a player from our soccer team playing for me. She was pretty good, too.”

At one point, the Wolfpack didn’t have enough players to conduct a five-on-five scrimmage.

“We learned. We all had to accept our part. We had to deal with it, face it square in the face. We are all stronger for it.”

Yow says her religious faith has sustained her.

“When you battle cancer, and you have the kind of year I’ve gone through . . . I’ll tell you, if these things are meaningless, I don’t know how I would survive,” she said. “I search for meaning. I search for meaning with my own battle with cancer. I search for meaning in a losing season. I search for meaning with my mother’s very difficult battle with cancer.

“You find hope, and you find purpose. My hope is in my faith.”

More and more, Yow’s purpose has been working with the American Cancer Society. Yow had made commercials about cancer awareness before she was diagnosed as having the disease. She has put aside basketball rivalries and has become the honorary chairwoman for a cancer research center at the University of North Carolina.

They are campaigning to raise $1 million.

Yow’s faith led to controversy in 1986, when she was caught smuggling Bibles into the Soviet Union. The U.S. team has won the World Championships in Moscow a month before and would win the Goodwill Games, too.

Coaches here have remarked that Yow, always an intense and frantic coach, has mellowed, perhaps as a result of her experiences this year.

“I think the game is in perspective,” she said. “I’ve learned more. I learned how not to let the urgent get in the way of the important. That’s a very important principle for me as a human being.

“The important things to me are faith, family, friends. I used to be taking care of the urgent. There is a balance and perspective now.

“They say that you learn through adversity and losing. I used to say, ‘Lord, I’m telling you that I can learn prosperity and winning.’ I used to believe that. I look at it and see that I learned maybe this much,” Yow said, holding her thumb and index finger about an inch apart.

“I’ve learned that with losing and adversity, that only increases it a hundredfold. It comes through pain and it comes through trials. That’s how it happens. I know that now.”