Dust for fingerprints on NC State’s historic basketball runs and you’ll find Debbie Yow’s

Debbie Yow wasn’t in Portland on Sunday. Nor was she in Dallas. She was at home, with her husband, watching on television, but her presence was felt in both places.

It was felt in Portland, where the women’s basketball coach she hired in 2013 got N.C. State to its first Final Four since 1998, when Yow’s sister took the Wolfpack there, to go with the three ACC titles N.C. State has won under Wes Moore.

And then it was felt in Dallas, where the men’s basketball coach she hired in 2017 got N.C. State to its first Final Four since 1983, Kevin Keatts already having removed any doubt about his future under Yow’s successor as N.C. State athletic director, Boo Corrigan, with the Wolfpack’s first ACC title since 1987.

So many of the coaches Yow hired during her tenure are still at N.C. State, winning ACC titles, making NCAA Tournament runs.

Five years after she retired, her fingerprints are still all over N.C. State’s success.

“First of all, I’m exhausted,” Yow said. “Moreso from men’s basketball than women’s basketball, I guess because Wes has done so well in the past. But it’s a nice type of exhaustion. I’m relieved, exhausted, thrilled for everybody, from the chancellor, our AD, our fans, everybody, the players, everybody. It’s just thrilling to me.

“We just had lunch in an outdoor cafe, and I just need to be able to eat lunch without all the congratulations, but this is great. I went to the gym this morning, and a woman comes off the pickleball court and opens the door and yells at me, ‘I love those hires!’ What’s not to like?”

The funny thing is, while Keatts and Moore are getting all the attention right now, and for good reason, they’re really just a fraction of Yow’s long-lasting impact on N.C. State athletics.

In one 22-month stretch in 2011, 2012 and 2013, Yow hired Pat Popolizio (seven ACC wrestling titles, including six straight), Braden Holloway (11 ACC men’s and women’s swimming titles), Tim Santoro (five NCAA tournament appearances in women’s soccer after a decade-long gap), Dave Doeren (the school’s all-time winningest football coach) and Moore.

There were others after that: Simon Earnshaw’s women’s tennis team won the ACC title last year and came within a match of an NCAA title. Kim Landrus led the Wolfpack to the resurrected ACC gymnastics title this spring, back-to-back ACC championships 40 years apart. And Keatts was her last major hire before turning things over to Corrigan.

“They’re all good people. And have stayed,” Yow said. “I believe this: I believe N.C. State has now become a destination, a destination spot for coaches. It’s not a job you take and build on so you can leave. That’s really useful. Because hiring is so stressful. There are a lot of ways to go wrong and I have gone wrong before. I’m glad the majority of them turned out well and they’ve stayed and brought a tremendous sense of stability.”

Athletic directors are inevitably judged, for posterity, in two categories: facilities and championships in football and basketball. Yow oversaw the long-overdue renovation of Reynolds Coliseum into a rejuvenated, revitalized arena and hired Doeren, Keatts, Moore and Mark Gottfried — who might have gotten the program in NCAA trouble and flamed out spectacularly, but did deliver a pair of Sweet 16 appearances first, injecting some life into a program that was moribund under Sidney Lowe.

Yow’s willing to take the blame for that one. As the options to replace Lowe dwindled, she trusted Gottfried, who she had known for 30 years, and got burned. But the others are all still here, still kicking, still winning, as narrow an escape as it may have been for Keatts in March.

Doeren hasn’t played for an ACC title or gone to the Orange Bowl, but his longevity speaks for itself, and he certainly appears to have made a deeper connection to the Wolfpack fan base over the past few years. The 2023 season was unquestionably the best coaching job of his N.C. State tenure, rallying a team that was dead in the water in October to a third-place finish in the ACC.

Moore has built a dynasty, a perennial ACC title contender, and if N.C. State deserved to go to the Final Four in 2022, when it was royally shafted by the NCAA playing a road game in Connecticut as the No. 1 seed, it earned this trip in 2024.

And Keatts now has the same number of Final Four appearances at N.C. State as Everett Case, Norm Sloan and Jim Valvano. There are many reasons for the Wolfpack’s sudden emergence as an unbeatable basketball team, but Keatts’ positivity and willingness to adapt — unlike Virginia or Wake Forest, N.C. State is comfortable in any kind of game; they’re just as happy beating you at yours — have proven indispensable.

“That’s Kevin Keatts,” N.C. State assistant coach Joel Justus said. “That’s not anybody but him. When you get into a tournament, you’ve seen everything that people are going to throw against you. In those couple days (before the ACC Tournament), he regrouped and talked about all of our strengths that we have going into D.C. How do we play to our strengths? How do we avoid the lapses? How do we avoid being ourselves? The last nine games, we haven’t beaten ourselves. And nobody else has beaten us either.”

It would be easy for Yow to say she saw all of this coming, but she as well as anyone knows the inherent risk in these major hires. You’re entrusting someone with your own job, your own reputation. It’s a professional marriage with all the pitfalls of the actual kind, and with only the briefest of courtships. You’re going to have misses. You’re going to make mistakes, for all the right reasons.

But the hits can change the entire direction of an athletic department, of a university, with reverberations that rumble for generations. What’s happened over the past few weeks had roots in the past years, and will pay dividends for years.

“I’m so happy for State, the school as a whole,” Yow said. “It was time.”

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