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It started with a shoestring, just one, and all these years later Stephanie Glance continues to be amazed at how many lives have been tied together.

Such a simple idea started such an enormous movement. The life and death of her friend, Kay Yow, seems now to be a perfect metaphor.

"It was 2004 when she was diagnosed again, and we wanted to show support as a team," Glance said. "The players all wanted to do it, to wear one pink shoestring on their right shoe because Kay's cancer was on the right side."

And so it began.

The groundswell that became a national cause continues to amaze Glance, the trusted assistant and best friend of the late N.C. State women's basketball coach. The idea of making breast cancer awareness a part of the team's consciousness has now become something larger than anyone imagined.

"It started with one pink shoestring that caught on right away with a few schools, and then some 200 schools that first year doing something in some form," Glance said. "And then the next year it grew to 1,200 schools, just in leaps and bounds across the country and into the high schools and even the middle schools."

Out of that sprang what has become the most successful start-up charity in recent memory, the Kay Yow/WBCA Cancer Fund. The initiative was the first taken up by the Women's Basketball Coaches of America, of which Yow was a past president and a founding member, and has had the strange effect of using women's basketball as inspiration for cancer research.

"It was her vision that this would unite women's basketball and the basketball coaches and fans and then everybody," Glance said. "She saw it as a great way for women's basketball to give back to society."

Glance is president of the fund. She was there at the beginning and admits to being just part of it now because the movement has become to big.

"It's all so amazing," she said.

And it all started with a shoestring.

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