VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. _ It’s a warm January afternoon, with sunlight streaming in a window at Chick’s Oyster Bar. Despite the nice weather, it’s still winter in this popular summer-vacation city, so there’s no lunchtime crowd.

But even if there had been a wait instead of your choice of tables, Wendy Larry wouldn’t have minded. For the first time in her adult life, she can casually spend time chatting on a weekday during basketball season. There is no practice to prepare, or meeting to run, or luncheon to speak at, or film to watch.

In May, she resigned after 24 seasons and 559-203 record as head coach at Old Dominion. A contract dispute with athletic director Wood Selig – Larry was entering her final year, and Selig wouldn’t give her an extension – was unpleasantly played out publicly.

Long the primary face of ODU’s athletic success, Larry opted to resign rather than muddle through what she felt would be a perfunctory season before being let go. She is getting her last year of salary, but she no longer has a real role in the athletic department, and her ties to ODU are severed. At least for now.

Maybe the wound will be repaired with time. Or maybe it won’t. She wasn’t planning to leave and never imagined ODU’s 72-55 CAA tournament quarterfinal loss to Delaware would be her last on the sidelines of her alma mater.

I went to the Tidewater area recently as part of ESPNW’s “Hoops Across America” project, and wrote about the past, present and future at Old Dominion. But there was more to say specifically about Larry and how her situation reflects where women’s basketball is now.
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The first time I went to Stillwater, Okla., I drove by myself on a rainy Saturday in February 1987. It was Valentine’s Day, and the Missouri women’s basketball team was playing a late afternoon game at Oklahoma State. I didn’t go to cover it; I just wanted to watch. In those days, Missouri’s women were literally never on television. Very few women’s teams ever were, especially not in the regular season.

I was a senior at the University of Missouri then, a few months from graduation and what I hoped was a future covering sports for a newspaper. But I already was well aware that what I wanted most to cover – women’s basketball – was not valued by the majority of people who ran newspaper sports departments.
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Some very sad news was reported by colleague Mel Greenberg last week about the death of former N.C. State player Linda Page. She was 48 and a former Philadelphia high school star.

It reminded me of a story I wrote about the late Wolfpack coach Kay Yow in 2003, before she went into the Naismith Hall of Fame. It ended with a recounting of a conversation I’d had with Page in the mid-1990s about about Yow’s influence:

From ESPN.com, September 2003:

Ever had laryngitis? Not froggy throat, or hoarseness or cough-every-time-you-talk. Flat-out laryngitis, where you can open your mouth and try to scream and absolutely no noise comes out.

I had it for one day in May 1984. I didn’t really believe you could completely lose your voice _ I thought it only happened on sitcoms, like suddenly being allergic to your brother _ until I woke up, back home for the summer from college, and couldn’t even begin the usual monologue over breakfast/newspaper: “Oh, God, I bet Mondale’s not even going to win Minnesota ….”  No words. Nothing.

So years later, I was empathizing while watching Kay Yow coach her North Carolina State team while having laryngitis. She gestured and paced, her eyes got big, her hands clenched. She had a dry-erase board, and she’d scribble messages for her assistants.  She was pretty quiet in the post-game interview, too. Har-har-har.

“Coach, what did you think of Chasity Melvin’s performance tonight?” was the question. And Yow would nod vigorously. One of her assistants, if memory serves, provided the sound, saying, “Well, Coach Yow thinks Chasity played very well tonight …”

Truth is, though, I’ve never heard Yow actually scream even when she did have her voice. Yell just a little to be heard over the din of a game, maybe. But scream? I’m not saying it’s never happened, it’s just hard to picture.   Yow, with that soft North Carolina lilt, doesn’t have a coach’s voice. She has a “Did you want to check out this book for two weeks?” voice.

And yet she is the consummate coach. Her record, combining her days at Elon and North Carolina State, is 625-268. She will go into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame this week, along with Larry Brown, Lute Olson, Magic Johnson, the late Drazen Petrovic and the Harlem Globetrotters team.  Yet you won’t find a person so successful who makes less of a fuss about herself.  She has overcome breast cancer. She has overcome all the changes in her sport that have ended the coaching careers of many of her fellow “pioneers.”

She’s about as square as Sponge Bob, but she still finds ways to relate to kids who listen to music that hurts her ears.  Some people knock over barriers with their bulldozer personalities, and good for them. They’re needed. But others, like Yow, do it another way. They’re persistent at chipping the mortar and the blocks that heed progress; even when you think they should be tired, they somehow aren’t.

Yow so often looks serious that you might not know she has a sense of humor, albeit a gentle one. She has been friend and teacher and coach to so many young women.

A favorite Yow story? One of her many stars, Linda Page, once told me about running into Yow by chance in Philadelphia outside a department store in the mid-1990s. Page lived in Philly; Yow was visiting someone in town.  Page had scored 2,307 points in her career at N.C. State, from 1982-85. Her college days seemed far in her past, though.

And yet seeing her former coach brought back a rush of everything good that had happened to Page during those four years in Raleigh _ and how much it had shaped the person she now was.

So they stood talking and laughing and remembering, and Page thought how lucky it was that they’d happened to be in the same place at the same time for another day.  Then Page realized that Yow _ and all she taught _ had, in fact, been with her all along.