The “Y” Behind the Cause
On the top shelf of my closet sits a pink straw cowboy hat. It’s the pretend kind with a floppy brim and a chin tie, and it has a Kay Yow Cancer Fund Logo on the front. We all wore them like crowns at the inaugural Kay Yow Cancer Fund Golf Tournament in Dallas in 2008, our first ever fundraiser for the organization that continues the public fight that Coach Yow started privately in 1987. People came from everywhere to play. Bill Self came from Kansas. Geno from the east coast. Roy from North Carolina. Jody and Marsha from the Lone Star State. A nation of basketball coaches rose and gathered, just like Kay had dreamed they would. Not for her, but for the fight she had become the poster child for, a gig for which she didn’t volunteer but when drafted carried the flag like Patton at the Battle of the Bulge.
A nation of basketball coaches rose and gathered, just like Kay had dreamed they would. Not for her, but for the fight she had become the poster child for, a gig for which she didn’t volunteer but when drafted carried the flag like Patton at the Battle of the Bulge.
Sandra Kay Yow was born in Gibsonville, North Carolina. She went to school in Greenville, North Carolina. She coached in Raleigh, North Carolina. And she died in Cary, North Carolina in the winter of 2009. Her roots grew deeply tangled through a stretch of 200 miles or so, along and shooting off of Highway 264. But that was just home base. From there Kay spiraled off in all directions like an oscillating sprinkler scattering basketball knowledge and good deeds and faith of the easily digestible kind.
Kay did a lot of things in her brief 66 years—all well documented on the KYCF website and her Wikipedia page. That’s the stuff that gave her a platform, but who she was is why it worked. I always thought her innocence was her magic. Her way with people was as authentic as her Carolina drawl. She didn’t know how to not be who she was.
The story of the Kay Yow Cancer Fund is almost as unlikely as Kay’s own tale of international sports success. The cancer fund grew out of the Women’s Basketball Coaches’ Association. In the working world we would call that a non-profit birthing a non-profit. I’m still not sure how you do that or even why you would, if you were choosing, but that’s what happened in 2007. Since a thing like this had never really been done before, there was no operating manual and thus no footsteps to follow, so we just all kind of held hands and formed a chain as we stepped slowly together through the dark. And we bumped into a lot of things we couldn’t see.
So much had to go right early on to even get the concept off the ground. It was miraculous, really, that we survived those first days when our outsides were so much bigger than our insides. We literally ran to catch up with ourselves. But there was this groundswell of support from basketball coaches that fueled us. Even when things were cockeyed, we found a way to stay on course. It was as if every time we hit an impasse, Coach Yow’s spirit took the wheel and jerked us back on the road.
The fund’s beginning was greased by angels, humans who wouldn’t take no for an answer, people in powerful positions who knew Kay personally and were fighting for her and the cause. The ‘V Foundation’ was a Godsend. Jimmy V and Kay had been close friends so there was great synergy between the ‘V’ and the fund. They helped us get our arms around the set up and gave us the cliff notes they’d developed through years of journeying down this road. And with them came their driver, the armored truck called ESPN. While that relationship came with lots of clauses and more than a little red tape, it also came with people who believed in where we were going. Carol Stiff, Rosa Gatti, and George Bodenheimer championed the fund’s cause at every turn. I remember Rosa in the room when the Kay Yow Cancer Fund was born. She pulled a checkbook out of her purse, signed her name across the bottom of one and slid it across the table. The check was personal and so was her commitment. Rosa—Carol, George, and many just like them-- fought for the fund with corporate, but they also had skin in the game.
Nike, too, jumped in with both air maxes, landing on two feet like they teach you to do in track. They contributed product and partnership, and clout when the Kay Yow Cancer Fund desperately needed all three. This wasn’t really the sort of thing Nike did. But then again, Kay Yow wasn’t really the sort of person you said ‘no’ to, so people got creative and found a way to make it work. It hasn’t always been easy and it’s never been simple, but Nike has been in the Kay Yow Cancer Fund’s corner since the word ‘go’. We couldn’t have asked for a better forever friend. A few years back when the world went cuckoo for a bit over crazy colored socks, our pink ones with the ‘Y’ became an accidental bonus for everybody. We all laughed under our breath thinking about Kay flipping invisible switches from somewhere way behind the scenes.
That’s the thing we have discovered. Coach is never very far away.
In about six weeks, the 12th annual Kay Yow Cancer Fund Golf Tournament will be held at Pinehurst in North Carolina. Lifers with the fund will gather along with corporate sponsors and coaches and referees and survivors of this dreadful disease. We’ll have great food and great music and good and bad golf, and we’ll drive the mission Kay created and tip our hat to her before we leave.
The Kay Yow Cancer Fund has, to date, awarded over 7.78 million dollars to the fight against all cancers affecting women. Over the past 5 years the fund has shown a 41% increase in net assets. This includes the global pandemic when everybody everywhere had to suck in and squeeze. In June of 2021, the fund received two grants from Gilead Sciences totaling $425,000 to be used to address health disparities in underserved women. The specific focus of the undertaking is triple negative breast cancer--finding it, treating it, caring for the women and the families it attacks. The fund, in true Coach Yow fashion, continues to doctor the branches while ruthlessly striking at the root. And the fund just keeps on growing despite the craziest odds.
The Kay Yow Cancer Fund has, no doubt, navigated the world’s curve balls as well as it has because of the wisdom and leadership of CEO Stephanie Glance and her remarkable team of relentless believers. You don’t just luck into growth while the world falls apart. You wiggle and stretch and pivot…and you pray a lot in the space in between. But when the world went dark a year and a half ago, it was like the fund had an ally in the shadows. A back-up generator around the corner of the house. The lights may have flickered for a minute, but we had juice from an alternate source. Kay just kept her feet on the pedals and never stopped riding the bike.
Nobody can see her but, make no mistake about it, she is always there.
Sherri Coale
P.S.