"You can't drown in sorrow – you have just swish your feet a little, then get out and move on."

Many times over the past two years, ever since NC State women's basketball coach Kay Yow learned the breast cancer she had first been diagnosed with 21 years ago had become Stage 4, she used that phrase – not just to describe her own feelings about her condition, but to verbalize a philosophy she carried with her throughout her remarkable life.

And so I am going to try and minimize the tears that I shed this morning – for the first time since my own father died 10 years ago – when I heard that Coach Yow's long battle with cancer ended this morning.

I have been a sportswriter now for more than 32 years. I have had the incredible fortune to have talked to, and written about, some of the most iconic figures in athletics: Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes, golfing legend Jack Nicklaus, NBA all-star LeBron James. to name a few.

But I can say, with complete certainty and honesty, that no individual ever made the impression on me that Kay Yow did during the all-too-brief six years that I came to know and work with her while covering Wolfpack women's basketball for The Wolfpacker.

I remember my first interview with her, in her office in the Case Center, in the fall of 2004 – and how nervous I was sitting outside, waiting to walk in. Despite hundreds of similar interviews with coaches, players and administrators from all levels of athletics, I just wasn't 100 percent at ease knowing I was about to speak to an icon, a woman whose name was not only synonymous with NC State, but the world of women's college basketball.

One hour later, I felt like I'd been talking to a favorite aunt.

That will be one of my strongest memories of Kay Yow – her approachability, her genuine humility and lack of haughtiness. She may have been a legend on a basketball court, but she always thought of herself, as she told me in one of our last talks, as "just Kay Yow, a girl from Gibsonville."

She was one of a handful of trail-blazing women who helped take the women's game from an obscure addition to college athletic programs to satisfy Title IX to a multi-million dollar showcase capable of packing arenas, attracting millions of TV viewers and spawning a women's professional league.

She coached more years at one school – 34 – than any other active coach except long-time friend and colleague Pat Summitt of Tennessee, with whom she shared Olympic gold in 1984 and 1988. But the many numbers on her resume: 737 wins, sixth all-time; 21 20-win seasons, 20 NCAA appearances; four ACC Tournament championships; final four appearances in 1998 (NCAA) and 2008 (WNIT), only measure the by-product of Kay Yow's talents as a coach and mentor of young women.

Her influence, and reach, went well beyond Reynolds Coliseum and extended to everyone fortunate enough to have known her on some level. Former players kept her phone number long after they left Raleigh, regularly touching base to keep her up to date on their progress through life.

Her work with the coaches association and other national groups made her hundreds of new friends, including people who would face her across the hardwood, determined to overcome her best efforts to defeat them. But in spite of the competitiveness – and ego – that comes with most college coaching jobs, Yow was truly beloved by her rivals.

UConn coach Geno Auriemma, who has engendered his fair share of hard feelings among his peers over the years, said of Yow, "She has a unique position in all of coaching, because there isn't a single coach out there who will say anything negative about her. Everyone loves her."

She could be as demanding as any coach accustomed to winning, willing to go nose-to-nose with a player who failed to live up to the first rule of NC State women's basketball: to give 100 percent no matter what the situation. But she never showed up a player on the court, never called attention to herself with the animated theatrics so many coaches display nowadays.

She taught the old school way – quietly, behind the closed doors of practices or private meetings in her office, away from the prying eyes of fans and a media looking more for sensational story lines than those of less dramatic personal progress. The approach obviously worked – in every feature article I have done in my six years of covering the Wolfpack women, when asked what factors influenced a high school star from Connecticut, or Pennsylvania, or Georgia, or a small town in state, to come to Raleigh, there has always been one common response.

"Coach Yow."

They were more than just coaches and players wearing red and white – and more recently, pink. They were a family, with the 66-year-old women in their midst their surrogate mother, or grandmother, or aunt, however they chose to view her. She taught them how to box out on defense, run a fast break – or cope with a failing grade, a broken relationship with a boyfriend or the loss of a loved one.

She unashamedly proclaimed her faith in God, carrying it as a beacon of strength and hope in her own life, a source of inspiration and motivation not only for herself but for all who relied on her example of how to "let life, when it kicks you, kick you forward" – an example she set up to the very moment that God, in his goodness and mercy, called her home on Jan. 24, her long fight finally done.

Sandra Kay Yow leaves two sisters, a brother, many other relatives, and a grieving family of past and present players, coaches, colleagues, fans and friends that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. She leaves a legacy of accomplishment in sports that few can match.

But it is off the court, in the arena of life, that Kay Yow, in my opinion, made her greatest mark – by showing us all how to compete, how to overcome pitfalls with steady grace and a positive outlook – and, ultimately, how to win.

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