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Kay Yow, who began playing basketball on a dirt court in Gibsonville and ended up being one of the most important people in the game, died Saturday morning after a long fight with cancer. Her life was basketball, but her legacy will be the fight.

She became an internationally known coach at N.C. State, taking teams to the women's Final Four and winning Olympic gold medals and more than 700 games before leaving the bench last month after 38 years of coaching.

Yow was 66.

She was the first full-time women's college basketball coach in the history of this state, taking the job at Elon before she'd even coached a game herself at the college level. That was in 1971, after she'd built girls high school programs at Allen Jay in High Point and at Gibsonville. Yow was a local legend who would eventually be given the state's highest sporting honor, the Laurel Wreath Award.

"Kay Yow was one of the most influential figures in the history of women's basketball," said NCAA President Myles Brand, who is fighting pancreatic cancer himself. "In the way she approached life, she touched thousands of lives directly through her legendary coaching career, but millions more have and will benefit from her courage in the face of great illness."

Even after all her accomplishments, the championships and medals and awards, it was the news that her cancer had returned in 2004 that started a national story that swept up the sport and every female basketball player in America. Players took up her cause, wearing pink shoelaces during WNBA games and college and high school games and even middle school and youth games. Coaches wore the pink ribbon, the national symbol for the fight against breast cancer. And the Wolfpack team that endured the battle with Yow wore pink uniforms in her honor during a game in February 2008, each with the name "Yow" stitched across the back of the jersey.

She was tough as a player and even tougher as a coach. Yow's players didn't just play hard. They played fearlessly and with the voice of their coach ringing in their ears. After the 2007 ACC women's tournament final in Greensboro, a game the Wolfpack lost 60-54 to North Carolina, Yow ripped into one of her players while on the podium facing the media afterward.

The game came at the end of a long, courageous run by State's entire team, near the end of a season in which Yow left the bench for a second time to undergo chemotherapy and protracted hospital stays. One of the players that day had complained of not feeling well, and Yow yanked her from the game.

"After all we've been through!" Yow said, gasping for breath as she continued to rant in the hallway long after the game ended. "And she's not feeling well? I don't want to hear it."

She was as tough as any coach we'll ever see, a pioneer of the defensive tactics once thought impossible for women to execute. Yow instructed her players to use the entire floor and turn defensive steals into transition baskets. She also demanded that her teams play physically inside.

"You get five fouls for a reason," she once said. "I expect you to use them."

Yow got 66 years, and she used them for a reason. She said in 2007 her life would be meaningless if she weren't able to use her talents to teach others. By then, she was no longer talking about basketball. The cancer that was first diagnosed in 1987 returned in 2004 and forced her to take two months away from the team during the 2006-07 season. During this period, she rededicated herself to her program and her fight against breast cancer.

A woman who taught generations of girls how to play basketball, who won more than 700 games as a coach, who won four ACC tournament titles and two Olympic gold medals and was named national coach of the year eight times by various organizations will ultimately be remembered for having grace under the greatest pressure imaginable. She coached basketball and fought cancer, and then she coached some more and fought until she could fight no more.

"We're all put here for a reason," Yow said two years ago. "Basketball's not the only reason God put me here."

She was competitive in everything, a former high school librarian who was a champion at horseshoes and marbles and who proudly spoke of a statue of Bach she won in a piano competition growing up. Inducted as part of the Guilford County Sports Hall of Fame's first class in 2005, however, she had no desire to retire to the rocking chair she received that night.

"That can wait," she said. "I have too much more to do."

Sandra Kay Yow lived her life to the very end as a teacher, a coach and an inspiration to all who play the game and to all who battle to live another day.

They named a basketball court after her in Raleigh. And they named a cancer fund in her honor.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com