It’s a sign that while young women are enjoying the same benefits from playing sports that their male counterparts have known for many more years — getting into shape and staying fit, the self-esteem that comes with mastering skills and accomplishing goals — the debate still rages over whether the cutthroat competitiveness that boys learn at an early age should be part of girls’ games.

Embarrassed by the margin of victory in that Dallas-area high school game, officials at The Covenant School apologized and asked conference officials that the game be recorded as a forfeit.

“It is shameful ... that this happened,” Kyle Queal, the head of the school, said in a statement. He added the forfeit was requested because “a victory without honor is a great loss.”

Anybody who knew Yow knew exactly what he was talking about. She had a headstart on many of her contemporaries, growing up in a corner of North Carolina where women’s basketball had taken root well before Title IX and once scored 52 points in a high school game herself.

But Yow always considered herself a teacher first and a coach second; standing out was always less important to her than pulling up everyone else struggling alongside. She never forgot the days when dollars for women’s sports were so tight that she had to account for every towel her team took on the road.

When cancer intruded into her life, beginning in 1987 and stealing her strength, time, family and friends. she fought it without giving quarter or complaint. Such was Yow’s standing among her peers that after she began the Kay Yow-WBCA Cancer Fund, she convinced both Summit and her archrival, UConn coach Geno Auriemma, to serve on the board of directors. Yow’s longtime oncologist, Dr. Mark Graham, would have been surprised by anything less.

Impressive as her accomplishment on the court were — 700 wins in college, a gold medal of her own at the 1988 Olympics, induction into the Hall of Fame — they may be overshadowed by her tireless contributions to the fight against cancer. Naturally, Yow conducted that campaign the same way she coached.

“She could have tried to come into the clinic and be completely anonymous,” Graham said. “She just wanted to be another patient. She was very open to sharing her experiences with others and being encouraging to others.”

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Mark J. Terrill / AP

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