CLEVELAND — Wes Moore had just finished having dinner with Debbie Yow on that spring evening in 2013 when he turned to her and blurted out a question.
“So,” Yow recalls Moore asking. “Are you gonna hire me?”
Yow was caught a bit off guard. As the athletic director at NC State at the time, she was in charge of hiring the next coach for the women’s basketball program — one her sister, Kay, spent her career nurturing as an eventual Hall of Famer before she died of breast cancer in 2009.
Moore — who at the time had spent 15 years as the coach at Chattanooga — was a strong candidate for the job. He’d won 12 SoCon regular-season titles and nine conference championships for NCAA Tournament berths. Still, he had a full day of interviews to go through, starting the next morning. It was still relatively early in the process.
“I just figured you probably already know if you’re gonna do it or not,” Yow remembers Moore, again bluntly, wondering aloud.
“I did have a very good idea, but I didn’t say that at the time,” Yow said Thursday, laughing. “We’ve teased him about that a few times since then. But he was the right person, and I’m very grateful he accepted the position.”
Under Moore’s direction, NC State is back in the Final Four this weekend for the…
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