The women’s basketball office is quickly running out of space — and coach Kay Yow is to blame. In the front office, her belongings are everywhere — on shelves, tables, even the front desk. In her personal office, two walls and even the floor are cluttered with her stuff.

But you won’t find anyone on the staff complaining. And that’s because the space is filled with all of Yow’s accolades. In the tightly-packed workplace in Reynolds Coliseum, the women’s basketball office is almost a Hall of Fame suite of some sort.

Her trophies are everywhere — a Final Four trophy, coaching recognition trophies and, most recently, an ESPY.

“And you’re not going to believe this, but we have a lot that are downstairs stored,” Yow said with a smile. “We got to make decisions here.”

The ESPY she won this summer was the inaugural Jimmy V ESPY for Perseverance. It was an award that already meant a lot, but means more because it’s named after former men’s basketball coach Jim Valvano, Yow said.

The two legendary coaches are tied together in many ways. They are both known for their motivational tactics, their time at State and their battles with cancer. But Yow remembers him for more than that.

“I tell you, Jimmy V — he was a special guy and coach. He was extraordinarily positive and upbeat. And just really was a no-limit person,” Yow said. “I don’t think there was anything he thought couldn’t be accomplished. He was very creative. He was very inspiring — very motivated.”

Vivid memories of Valvano During Yow’s first bout with cancer, one time Valvano called Yow and told her he and his staff were coming to visit her at her house.

Her house wasn’t ready. She didn’t feel like preparing a table. And she’d been out of the hospital for less than a week and sure didn’t feel well enough to have company. But none of that mattered.

“He came with his whole staff — his whole staff knocked on my door. They had called and told me they were coming,” Yow said. “They called about an hour earlier and said they were going to pick up food and bring it to my house, and that was it.”

The men’s coaches had stopped at Amedeo’s to pick up something to eat. And they made sure to leave no one hungry.

“I can’t tell you all they brought in,” Yow said. “They had stopped by Amedeo’s. It’s like they got a dish of everything Amedeo’s had.”

Immediately, Valvano wanted to know where her dishes were. But Yow wanted to grab everything for them.

“I wanted to get it, but they told me to sit down. And they went and did everything,” Yow said. “They brought it to the dining room table and got it all ready.”

During the whole meal, Valvano was “talking a mile a minute.”

“He’s always so funny — he makes everyday life funny,” she said with a smile.

He spent the dinner updating Yow on nearly everything that was happening at school, but “all from his point of view,” she said.

“It’s the first time I’d probably laughed for about an hour straight. I was so sore. It hurt so much to laugh,” Yow said. “It hurt to laugh, to jar. It hurt to move around.”

Yow had a tube that was used to drain fluid, and Yow had a lot of pain in the place where the tube was. But Valvano never stopped.

When the group finished dinner, Valvano and his staff started gathering dishes and putting everything in the dishwasher.

“That was sort of scary,” Yow said.

And spotless?

“Well, pretty much so,” Yow said while laughing. “A few finishing touches here and there.”

That dinner is one that Yow said helped with her recovery.

“They did a great job, and it was a really great time. It certainly lifted my spirits,” she said.

Yow and the Italians While the women’s basketball team works out of Reynolds Coliseum these days, the majority of the coaches used to have offices in Case Athletic Center. The way Yow remembers, it was her and a bunch of Italians — wrestling coach Bob Guzzo, baseball coach Sam Esposito and Valvano.

The men would “gather, smoke cigars and have pow-wows,” according to Yow. The group would typically meet in Esposito’s office, and the talk usually revolved around sports in some manner, Yow recalls.

Yow knew immediately when the group was together.

“Oh, we could hear them,” Yow said with a laugh. “If you just walked downstairs, you could hear them — Esposito’s office was downstairs. My office was upstairs, and Jim’s was right across from me. And so we were right there. If you just walk outside your door, you could hear them all. If you went down to anyone’s office downstairs, you could hear them — and you could smell the smoke.”

Yow would occasionally make a visit. As she talked about getting together with the group of Italians, a smirk found its way onto her face — she recalled how sometimes it was scary for a lady to enter the room.

“You could just hear them laughing so hard about something,” Yow said. “But it was dangerous going in there — it was a group of guys, you know.”

Scheduling conflictsYow and Valvano rarely talked strategy, but the two did talk about other topics regarding basketball.

“I watched a lot of his practices. We talked more about motivation,” Yow said. “We both majored in English — we just had a love for reading sports stories, and just for even poetry — motivational things. We used to share those kinds of stories.”

While Yow did watch a lot of his practices, one day she remembers when the two had a scheduling conflict. Both teams practiced at Carmichael Gymnasium sporadically, and one time the teams were scheduled for the same time.

In two days, the women’s team had North Carolina. The men’s team had a nonconference opponent.

“I saw immediately that we had a problem. I know we’re going to have to work it out,” Yow said. “We’re probably going to split the time, and the thing is, we need more time than that.”

Valvano, who also recognized the problem, went to Yow to talk with her. He told her his next game was Northwestern, and hers was UNC. Valvano told Yow to just “give him 30 minutes” and then he would be off.

“I’m not saying that I was asking other coaches to do that, because I understand their team is just as important to them as mine is to me,” Yow said. “It’s not that I expected him to do that — he just did it. And I said, ‘Are you sure?’ He said, ‘Oh, absolutely. If I was playing UNC … ‘ I just appreciated his attitude about things like that. That’s the way he thought, and that’s just an extension of a lot of the things he did.”

And that’s one of many reasons why Yow and Valvano had the relationship they did.

“He just did things that other coaches wouldn’t do,” she said.