Waner Honors Yow In N&O Remembrance

Abby Waner has written about basketball before, describing team trips and the life of an athlete in blog posts for GoDuke.com over the past four years. But the senior guard's eloquent tribute to late N.C. State head coach Kay Yow, who died of breast cancer Saturday, on the front page of The (Raleigh) News & Observer's sports section Tuesday puts the rest of her published writing to shame.

Waner, an English major, reminisces about Duke's loss to the Wolfpack in the 2007 ACC Tournament. Yow was forced to sit for long stretches of the game, and her voice was raspy and weak in the post-game press conference, but she inspired her team to hand the Blue Devils their first defeat of the season. Waner admits that N.C. State was a better team that day, and she's absolutely right.

But given the beginning of Waner's essay, it's not hard to understand why the Wolfpack seemed to feed off of Yow's presence on the bench. After Duke's loss in the 2006 national championship, Yow passed along a phrase–"What is delayed is not denied"—to former head coach Gail Goestenkors, who used it as fuel for her Blue Devils the rest of the season.

Yow's tip motivated one of N.C. State's rivals. Her words prompted Duke's first undefeated regular season in history.

Waner pays her respect back to Yow in print, but she also details how she discovered more about Yow's impact on all of women's basketball, not just N.C. State or her players:

This past Saturday, I stood among 9,033 other people as the Duke men's team prepared to take on Maryland. Before the game, a moment of silence for Kay Yow was preceded by a collective intake of breath as the sold-out arena was shocked by the announcement of her death. The tremor that circulated throughout that gym had made its way from the N.C. State women's team to all of college basketball. While this day was delayed for 20 years during her fight with breast cancer, that which is never to be denied is her strength and courage kept alive by those she touched.