RALEIGH, N.C. – North Carolina State’s Kay Yow, the Hall of Fame women’s basketball coach who won more than 700 games while earning fans with her decades-long fight against breast cancer, died yesterday. She was 66.

Yow, first diagnosed with the disease in 1987, died yesterday morning at WakeMed Cary Hospital after being admitted there last week, university spokeswoman Annabelle Myers said.

“Everyone who had the privilege of knowing Kay Yow has a heavy heart today,” N.C. State athletics director Lee Fowler said in a statement. “She faced every opponent, whether on the basketball court of in a hospital room, with dignity and grace. She will be greatly missed.”

The Wolfpack’s game at Wake Forest tomorrow was postponed to Feb. 10. Its next game will be Thursday at home against Boston College. Plans for a memorial service were incomplete.

Yow had a record of 737-344 in 38 years – 34 years with the Wolfpack – in a career filled with countless milestones. She coached the U.S. Olympic team to a gold medal in 1988, won four Atlantic Coast Conference tournament championships, earned 20 NCAA tournament bids and reached the Final Four in 1998. She also was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame in 2002.

But for many fans, Yow was best defined by her unwavering resolve while fighting cancer, from raising awareness and money for research to staying with her team through the debilitating effects of the disease and chemotherapy treatments.

She served on the board of the V Foundation for Cancer Research, which was founded by ESPN and her friend and colleague, former N.C. State men’s coach Jim Valvano, who died of cancer in 1993.

“Obviously [she] left her footprints all over the place with the kids she has taught and molded,” Tennessee coach Pat Summitt told ESPN. “And she is a woman that had fought such a hard fight, but it was always about everyone else, never about Kay.”