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College basketball lost a great coach when Kay Yow died last weekend.

Debbie Ryan lost a friend.

Ryan has steered the Virginia women's basketball team since the 1977-78 season, taking the reins just two seasons after Yow took over at North Carolina State.

Yow, a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, died of breast cancer Saturday at the age of 66.

"I will remember Kay as being one of the kindest, gentlest coaches I've ever been around," Ryan said Tuesday. "She was also a great role model for young coaches. I was a very young coach coming into this league and she was someone who sort of shepherded me as I grew in the profession.

"She taught me a lot about being a professional in the sport of basketball. She was someone who taught me how you can be very, very competitive yet remain humble, and ... remain friends. That's a gift she gave to a lot of people in this profession."

Yow was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1987; her disease returned during the 2004-05 season. Ryan had surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2000.

"We always had a friendly relationship ... but obviously the cancers -- the re-emergence for her and the diagnosis for me -- gave us eight years where we had another special bond that brought us even closer together than we were as coaches," Ryan said.

Ryan visited with Yow a week before she died.

"I was actually relieved when she passed away," Ryan said. "She had suffered tremendously over these last several months. It was really a blessing in that she no longer had to go through the worst side effects of the cancer treatments, along with the actual disease itself."

During UVa's win at Clemson on Monday, Ryan honored Yow by wearing a pink sweater with a pink ribbon.

Ryan gets calls from cancer patients around the world. She said "there isn't a day or a week that doesn't go by" when she doesn't hear from a cancer survivor who wants to talk to her.

"You don't ever beat cancer," Ryan said. "You work hard to get it in remission and to keep it away, but I don't think anybody truly ever beats it.

"I've just been very, very fortunate that it no longer wanted to be around me."

Knight 3-0 vs. Hokies

A coaching legend will be at Cassell Coliseum on Thursday -- on press row.

Bob Knight will be the analyst for the ESPN2 telecast of Virginia Tech's game against Clemson.

Knight never coached at Cassell, but he was 3-0 against the Hokies during his coaching career.

Indiana was ranked No. 1 when the Hoosiers squashed Tech 101-74 in the title game of the Indiana Classic in December 1975. Both teams wound up in the NCAA tournament that season, with the Hoosiers becoming the last unbeaten NCAA champ.

The Hoosiers featured Scott May, Kent Benson, Quinn Buckner and Bobby Wilkerson. Knight did not play his starters for the final nine minutes.

Tech was coached by Don DeVoe, who had played with Knight at Ohio State and served under him at Army.

"That was probably my best basketball team at Virginia Tech in many ways," DeVoe said this week. "We just could not do anything to get going against Indiana. They were just so long, and so good defensively. They were just an awesome, awesome group of basketball players."

Current William Fleming assistant coach Marshall Ashford scored six points for Tech in that game.

The Hoosiers and Hokies met again in the second round of the 1980 NCAA tournament, with Indiana winning 68-59 in Bowling Green, Ky.

Indiana, which won the NCAA crown a year later, got 17 points from freshman Isiah Thomas. That squad also included Butch Carter, Mike Woodson and Ray Tolbert. Coach Charlie Moir's Hokies featured Wayne Robinson, Dale Solomon and Les Henson.

"We got a call that really hurt us late in the ballgame -- a goaltending call," said Moir, recalling the ruling that extended IU's lead to seven points with 6:42 to go. "That cost us the ballgame."

When he was Army's coach, Knight steered his team to a 57-55 win over Tech in the third-place game of the Gator Bowl tournament in December 1969.

Thursday won't be Knight's first time in Blacksburg. DeVoe said Knight spoke at a prep coaches' clinic at Tech in 1971 and stayed at DeVoe's house on that visit.

Wake hosts Duke tonight

Wake Forest (16-1, 3-1 ACC), which has been idle since losing to Virginia Tech last Wednesday, returns to the court tonight to host the team that has replaced it as No. 1 -- Duke (18-1, 5-0).

Wake coach Dino Gaudio hopes his team plays better defense than it did against the Hokies.

"When you take the floor some nights, you just see you don't have that same little bounce in your step," Gaudio said. "I don't know whether it was the pressure of being No. 1 at the time, or the prior ... three games that we had that were all emotional games. But Virginia Tech deserves all the credit. They played harder than us."

The Demon Deacons will be a "huge test" for the Blue Devils, Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said.

"They're not just big, but they're good athletes," he said. "They're good basketball players who happen to be big."