Coaches' Corner: Honoring NC State's Basketball Legacy

Andy Walsh recalls his role in founding Coaches' Corner, a sculpture memorial to NC State's basketball legacies.

Interview on 2014-06-06 00:00:00 -0400

Transcript

00:00:00.000 Coaches' Corner was a project that I had just started and honoring our basketball legacy on campus.
00:00:08.303 Obviously in the fall of 2010 we had a bust of Kay Yow that was unveiled next to Reynolds Coliseum. That was a student government initiative.
00:00:17.040 I was really interested in that because I felt like when you hear about UNC-Chapel Hill or you hear about Duke and how great their basketball programs are,
00:00:29.317 while at the time we weren't being successful on the court in terms of winning success we still had an incredible history to tell and an incredible story,
00:00:36.979 when you think about coaches like Everett Case and bringing basketball to the South and really creating the ACC. You think about Norm Sloan winning our first national championship with arguably one of the best college basketball teams in history,
00:00:50.163 with David Thompson, and then Jimmy V and his legacy, not just on the court, and winning an incredible journey through the tournament and becoming kind of the Cinderella story that everybody looks to. That's what makes March Madness. He invented March Madness with that team.
00:01:07.955 But also his legacy off the court and what impact the V Foundation has had on people's lives, raising over a hundred million dollars for cancer research.
00:01:17.582 And obviously Coach Yow, again her impact on the court, winning a gold medal as the head coach, getting to the Final Four, being the second women's coach here and coaching here for thirty years,
00:01:29.897 and then famously-this is well documented-her fight against breast cancer and then ultimately now her foundation doing great strides towards breast cancer awareness and research. One of our great traditions, Hoops for Hope, is now directly related to that fight.
00:01:49.834 So I thought that there are just so many areas that our platform could build on those types of projects, and Coaches' Corner was something that was special to me and I knew it was going to take a lot of attention.