And now, the coach — whose homespun, open-hearted ways soon would come with Hall of Fame distinction, too — was trying to embrace what just had happened.
She was trying to explain how a girl who grew up the daughter of textile workers on North Carolina’s Tobacco Road and started out as a barely paid high school librarian, English teacher and hoops coach had found her way to the promised land.
“If you hang around long enough,” she finally said, “dawn will come to you.”
And it is that lesson that Stephanie Zonars — a former Fairmont High School, Wittenberg University and Athletes in Action basketball player, and current “team-building” coach who has worked with several Ohio colleges and high schools — learned herself, thanks to Yow.
Profound lessons
Zonars was organizing the U.S. and overseas tours of the AIA women’s team when she first met Yow in 1993. And while their initial associations were friendly but brief, Zonars developed a deep admiration for the coach.
“There’s a proverb that says, ‘Walk with the wise and become wise,’ ” the 42-year-old Zonars said. “And Coach Yow was just a really wise person. I had seen from a distance how she treated people, how she inspired them and how they responded to her.
“She was a simple country woman — it was never rocket science with the things she talked about — but her lessons always were profound.”
In the later years of her life — as she battled the recurrence of her breast cancer — Yow became more involved in the Xenia-based Athletes in Action.
And then in 2006, she and Anthony Muñoz — in a gala night where Ohio State’s Jim Tressel was the keynote speaker — were inducted the AIA’s Hall of Faith. The following year — still coaching the Wolfpack, but battling stage 4 breast cancer — Yow returned to Xenia to help with the next inductions.
“We were sitting at the Bob Evans having breakfast and I said, ‘Coach Yow, when are you going to write a book?’ ” Zonars said.
But with all the basketball and health issues, Yow said she just didn’t have time for that. And back then Zonars said she didn’t have the confidence to say, “Well, I’ll help you.”
Five months later, Zonars said she gathered her courage, called Yow and made the book pitch: “She thought about it again and prayed about it ... and said ‘no.’ ”
Undaunted, Zonars was perusing the Internet after that and came across a book written about a college lacrosse coach — who had died of cancer — that was done from the perspective of the players and what they had learned from him.
“A light bulb went on,” Zonars said. “I thought this would be a way to do the book where Coach Yow wouldn’t have to do anything. I called her again and after a couple of weeks she agreed with one stipulation. She wanted me to write stories about the lessons each player talked about and tie them to Scripture.”
Thirty-five players wrote accounts of their time with Yow and in December 2008, a month before the 66-year-old coach died, Zonars gave her the letters to read.
After that, Zonars developed the biblical links to the stories and six months ago “Leader of the Pack: The Legacy of Legendary Coach Kay Yow” was published.
Unforgettable mentor
In reading the personalized accounts, Zonars was brought to tears by the one from LySchale Jones, who, as a high school senior, had lost her own mother to cancer.
“She came to N.C. State very angry and justifiably so,” Zonars said. “And in workouts and conditioning, she began to act out and that got her some 6 a.m. appointments in the gym with Coach Yow.”
While almost any other head coach would send an assistant to conduct those predawn running sessions, Yow handled them herself.
“After the running was done, Coach Yow would go to breakfast with her,” Zonars said. “She’d spend time and mentor her and LySchale said the power of those moments are something she’s never forgotten. They forever shaped her life.”
These days Zonars uses some of those same lessons in the team-building workshops she’s conducted with college hoops teams at Cincinnati, Toledo and several others, as well as with the Alter High girls, who just played in the state title game.
Her workshops are about temperament assessment, communication, building trust and emotional support — all things she said build the undergirding for what goes on on the court.
No one was better at that than Yow. Proof of that, Zonars said, came the year before the coach died: “They had a Hoops for Hope gathering and something like 125 of the 150 players she had coached at N.C. State showed up. They all loved her.”
That’s what Zonars wanted to capture in the book, and from the response of an Australian woman, it seems she has.
“She called me up a couple of weeks ago,” Zonars said. “She told me, ‘I got through the introductions and the pictures and had to put it down because I was crying. A couple of weeks later I picked it up again and now the whole book is highlighted and marked up. She was an amazing woman and now I’m telling everybody they need to get it and learn about her.’ ”
Thanks to Zonars, Kay Yow — even 14 months after her death — still delivers the dawn.
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