Hidden Valley High School girls basketball coach Brenda King died Tuesday night.

King, 45, was diagnosed with stage 4 cervical cancer in October. This was to be her first season as Hidden Valley coach, but she never got to coach in a game. Randy Bush, an assistant football coach for the Titans and a former boys' basketball assistant, and Bob Beecher, a former men's basketball star at Virginia Tech, guided the girls into today's Group AA Division 4 state semifinals against Turner Ashby. The Titans lost 57-45.

King was hired at Hidden Valley in late May after spending the previous two seasons as the girls' head coach at Pulaski County, where she won 35 games and took the Cougars to two regional tournaments.

King coached Radford to a pair of Group AA titles and a runner-up finish between 1988-90. She also became the first woman to coach a boys' varsity basketball team in Virginia since World War II when she took over the Radford program at age 29 in 1991. She coached Radford's boys' program for two seasons.

King's husband, Danny, died of lymphoma in September 2005.

Her daughter, Kelly, is an eighth-grader. Her son, Jared, is a former star athlete at Pulaski County who is a freshman baseball player at Virginia.