COLLEGE PARK -- Debbie Yow always has been a little claustrophobic when it comes to life's experiences, whether it meant becoming a cheerleader in an athletic family when she was growing up or becoming an administrator at the height of her career as a college basketball coach 20 years later.
It has led Yow down a different path throughout most of her 44 years and ultimately brought her here, to the University of Maryland, where she was hired as athletic director three weeks ago, becoming the first woman named to the job in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
"I think, being the middle child, you have to carve out your own identity," Yow said last week in her Cole Field House office. "I didn't like being put into that little box and people saying, 'This is who you are, and this is what you have to be.' "
Not quite the middle child in a family with four kids, she was the second of Hilton and Elizabeth "Lib" Yow's three daughters. Eight years younger than Kay, now going into her 20th season as women's basketball coach at N.C. State; four years older than Susan, in her second year at North Carolina-Wilmington after stints at Kansas State, Drake and East Tennessee State.
Following her big sister was never easy, first as a basketball star in Gibsonville, N.C., a small, tobacco-mill town between Greensboro and Chapel Hill, or later as a high school and college coach. When Yow feels the walls closing around her, she has a tendency to push them aside to see what else is there.
It happened initially when she was 12.
"Debbie was in junior high, and she came home one day and said she wanted to be a cheerleader," recalled Susan, who was 8 at the time. "Nobody in our family had ever been a cheerleader before. But Kay had been such a big basketball star, I think she wanted to do something different."
The Yows long had been a basketball family. Hilton and Lib, who died last year after a 6 1/2 -year battle with cancer, got their jobs in the mills by playing on the local AAU team. A cousin, Virgil, coached at High Point College and put a woman on the men's team in 1948.
In ninth grade, school rules changed, making Debbie Yow choose between leading the cheers or getting them. She picked the latter, going on to become a star herself.
"Debbie was always a competitor," recalled Kay, who was coaching at a rival high school at the time. "She was never the type who'd look at the other team and think, 'They're too tough.' She was an awesome team player."
Flower child; then an abortion
But this conformity thing could last only so long. The walls began closing in again during Yow's two years at East Carolina.
It was the late 1960s, when some colleges began getting reputations as "party schools." The Yows always had stressed to their children -- including Ronnie, who went to Clemson to play football -- the importance of a college education. Debbie Yow enjoyed East Carolina, maybe a little too much.
"I was a wild child," said Yow.
And maybe a bit of a flower child as well. In a 1991 interview, Yow admitted to recreational drug use ("it was part of my generation," she said). She dropped out when her parents refused to pay her tuition because of poor grades. After a brief trip to California -- where else? -- she wound up moving back home, working menial jobs for a couple of years before she finally figured out what she wanted to do.
"I wanted to teach English and coach," she said.
So she joined Kay, by then coaching at Elon College near Greensboro. She graduated in three years with honors. For the ** last two years there, the Yows were joined by their little sister. The team went 24-0 in 1973-74 before losing in the regionals of the AIAW tournament. The star of the team was Susan; the heart of the team was Debbie.
"It was one of the most special years I've coached," Kay said. "I have more memories from that team than just about any I've coached. Debbie was an example for the players on that team. She'd do anything to win."
Those years helped smooth the relationship that had developed bumps when the high school teams Kay had coached never lost to Debbie's Gibsonville squads. It was during her first year at Elon that Debbie went through another experience that would have a dramatic effect on her life: She had an abortion.
"I had an abortion at a time when there was no counseling available," Yow told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1991, a few months after becoming the athletic director at Saint Louis University, a Jesuit school. "No one ever explained the process or went over any of the options. I don't know what I would have done if anyone had talked to me about the alternatives, but I still can't believe no one did."
It is something that Yow, who has been married for 10 years to educational consultant Bill Bowden but has no children, says she thinks about often. It was partly responsible for Yow's taking stock of her life at Elon and becoming a Christian. It also was one of the reasons she got her master's degree in counseling from Liberty as well as a doctorate from Baptist.
What some might consider baggage that could sabatoge a fast-moving career, Yow thinks of as an advantage she has over others, though she is hesitant to talk about it.
"In one way, having gone through those experiences has made me a better professional," said Yow, one of four female athletic directors in Division I-A. "Having to deal with a student-athlete going through something like that, I feel I can empathize more than somebody who hasn't. I might not be proud of it, but it is who I am."
Going her own way
But it wasn't until 1985 that Yow's professional life permanently strayed from the path her sister Kay had paved and her sister Susan was following as well. After becoming a high school coach in North Carolina because it was the only way to teach senior English, Yow suddenly was becoming a big name herself. At 26, she was hired as head coach at the University of Kentucky.
Though not as well-known as her big sister, who would become the gold-medal-winning U.S. Olympic coach in 1988, Yow became the first Division I coach to lead three different schools -- Kentucky, Oral Roberts and Florida -- into the Top 20. It was in Gainesville that Yow broke down the walls again.
The coaching Yows were now down to two.
"I think they're both coaching purists," Yow said of her sisters. "They enjoy coaching -- period. I enjoyed it, and I was challenged by it. If you look at the world of athletics as being so big, then women's basketball is an important but small part of it. What interested me was to see what everyone else was doing."
Her move into administration, as a major-donor fund-raiser for Florida's Gator Club, came as Yow's personal life finally was coming back together. Having put her first marriage (to former Iowa State and Washington basketball coach Lynn Nance) behind her, Yow met Bowden, a man nine years her senior, while at Oral Roberts.
"On our first date, we went down to the gym and shot H-O-R-S-E," said Bowden. "I think it fascinated her that an old English professor could beat her."
But this was more than what Bowden kiddingly has called "love at first dribble." Some, including her sister Susan, believe that it was Bowden who got Yow to take a wider view of life.
/# "He's had a tremendous impact,"
said Susan. "I think he's less surprised than Debbie that she became an athletic director."
Said Debbie: "He encouraged it. You might have a talent, but you also might have self-doubts. You can never underestimate the significance of a spouse. They're either going to support you and make it more enjoyable or they're going to be negative and make your life even more miserable. He likes to stay in the background. A lot of men couldn't handle this kind of role reversal."
Yow needed that support throughout her four years as athletic director at Saint Louis, and likely will, to the same extent, in the coming months at Maryland. The perception in 1990 was that Yow, who had gone to North Carolina-Greensboro in 1987 as an associate athletic director for public affairs, got the job because she came cheap, and the school's mostly male, Midwest conservative constituency believed she wouldn't last long.
"I remember being at the press conference when she got the job, and hearing a prominent booster say, 'She'll get eaten up in the city,' " recalled Jamie Pollard, who last week resigned as the school's acting athletic director to join Yow at Maryland. "We had some tough times, and there were times some of them wanted her head on a platter, but many of the same people were very upset when she left for Maryland."
The Maryland challenge
The problems at Maryland are different: It's not so much finding an athletic identity for the school as changing what has been a losing image for much of the past decade. But with the deficit in College Park larger than the budget was in St. Louis -- $6.7 million compared with less than $5 million -- Yow has to persuade vocal supporters to become financial ones.
At Yow's first official function, for some 1,000 people, Bowden overheard a couple of longtime boosters talking about the school's new athletic director. "One of them was saying he was going to wait and see," recalled Bowden. "The other told him, 'You'd better get on board, because this train is leaving the station.' "
The immediate reaction at the time of her surprise hiring last month to succeed Andy Geiger was that Yow was Maryland's third or fourth choice, but she ultimately might prove the best fit. Certainly part of the sentiment against hiring Yow, both here and at Saint Louis, was that she was decidedly different from the other candidates.
"She's just a very talented person with tremendous drive and vision who happens to be female," said university president William E. Kirwan.
Yow knows that her agenda will change later on in her life, that the feeling of professional claustrophobia will one day find its way back, that she will feel herself boxed in again, looking to make a new path. She doesn't foresee being in this job when she's ready to join AARP and someday would like to put her doctorate to better use.
But that day can wait.
As sister Kay said recently: "She's not looking for shortcuts. She wants to do it first-class. She wants to be a part of something great."
In a life that has taken some interesting turns and surprising twists, it wouldn't be the first time.