Deep roots
It’s always great to be invited to the UNC women’s basketball alumni game. There’s nothing like chatting with players whose experience stretches across the six decades since Title IX – and even with a few who played prior to the landmark law.
The state of North Carolina has an especially deep tradition of women’s basketball success – one that started long before the Tar Heel women captured their 1994 national title.
In the mid-1930s, the teams from Greensboro’s Bennett College regularly beat all comers among the nation’s HBCU teams. They were widely acclaimed as the best Black college team in the country.
At the time, leaders at most predominantly white colleges saw competitive sports as unladylike. Black college leaders had far broader visions about women’s capabilities, and about the qualities they would need to develop to effectively serve their communities. Women’s basketball thrived.
Women’s industrial basketball also flourished. Companies that depended on female workers often sponsored women’s teams, to advertise their products and bolster employee morale. Southern textile mills, which had always employed women, developed a particularly strong basketball culture.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Winston Salem’s Hanes Hosiery hired noted men’s coach Virgil Yow to build up its women’s team. Scouring the South for top recruits, Yow created a powerhouse squad. Hanes captured the Amateur Athletic Union title, considered the women’s national championship, in 1951, 1952 and 1953.
The daughter of one of Virgil Yow’s cousins, Kay Yow, would make her own history as a pioneering coach at Elon College and N.C State.At Elon, she was the most successful women’s coach in the state when Title IX emerged. N.C. State Athletic Director Everett Case hired Yow to build a fledgling Wolfpack team into a national contender, and she did. She also coached the 1988 U.S. Olympic team to the gold medal at the Seoul Olympics.
The cheering crowd that filled Carmichael Arena at this year’s alumni game testified to the game’s enduring roots and its promising future (although the team lost a heartbreaking contest to Florida State and its dazzling star T’Naya Latson on a buzzer-beating basket).
We can’t wait to see what history gets made next.
Susan graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in 1976. A journalism major, she was the Daily Tar Heel’s first female sports editor. Pamela earned her Ph.D. from the UNC history department in 1997.
Images: Susan with Sylvia Crawley (right) and Charlotte Smith at the 2024 alumni game; Bennett College team, 1935; Hanes Hoisery team, 1953; Kay Yow at Elon College, 1960s; Alumni game, 2025; Pam and Susan, 2025.
