Coach Gives Special Meaning to Pink Zone

From an outside perspective, Saturday night’s women’s basketball game was just another event for breast cancer awareness. Lavietes Pavilion was clad in hues of pink—from shirts to laces to the referees’ whistles—for the fourth annual Pink Zone game. But for those familiar with the story of Harvard coach Kathy Delaney-Smith, including the numerous alumni in the bleachers, this weekend held much more meaning.

Boasting a near-30-year tenure at the helm of the Crimson’s basketball program, Delaney-Smith has seen it all on the court, but she never saw what was coming 11 years ago. That year, on what seemed to be a normal December day, Delaney-Smith was getting a regular physical when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“I had been very healthy up to that point,” Delaney-Smith says. “I was shocked—[my family and I] were all shocked. I didn’t really know anyone prior to my diagnosis who had breast cancer, so I felt I was not informed. It was pretty scary.”

At first, Delaney-Smith wanted to keep her diagnosis within the family. She felt that she could handle it privately without worrying everyone around her, including the 1999-2000 women’s basketball team. But the coach had a change of heart.

FACING THE CRIMSON

Once her doctor told her that she could continue coaching, Delaney-Smith decided to tell the squad about the new development, especially since she would need to coordinate her treatment around Harvard’s regular-season schedule.

“Telling the team was really difficult,” Delaney-Smith remembers. “It was an emotional thing, because I’m sure if I were 18 and this person in my life that I see everyday told me that they had cancer, it would be kind of shocking.”

“We could not even imagine what she was going through,” says team member and co-captain of the 2001-2002 squad Laura Barnard ’02. “She stated from the onset that she was going to do everything she could to be at every practice and at every game. I think she maybe missed one practice and one game, if any at all.”

Delaney-Smith did not wait long to start chemotherapy treatment. Fortunately, winter break was near, so she planned her surgery and initial treatments during the holidays. But because of the future doses of radiation involved with chemotherapy, Delaney-Smith knew that soon she would start showing physical signs of her condition.

HARVARD HAIR SALON

Knowing that she was going to lose her hair, Delaney-Smith decided to take the initiative so her team would not be shocked to see her bald after the break.

“She was like, ‘That’s it, I’m going to cut my hair off.’ She was proactive about it and said, ‘My hair does not define me,’” Barnard recounts. “She had a session where one of our players actually cut off her hair for her. She was like, ‘Cut it really, really short,’ because she knew it was all going to ultimately fall off.”

For the rest of the season, Delaney-Smith often messed around with her wig, twisting it, turning it, or using it as a prop to liven the atmosphere. It was her way of showing the team that she was still the same old coach, and that she had no qualms about fighting this cancer.

“One day, all of the other coaches came in with wigs on—Kathy was all about using humor to deal with everything,” says former Crimson player Sharon Moore ’02. “That’s the way she lives her life. She applied it on the court, she applied it to her life dealing with cancer, and that’s the way that everybody else got through it too.”

The team also had a way of showing its coach that the squad cared about her.

“Actually, a couple of our players cut their hair,” Barnard recalls. “We had a player, Courtney [Egelhoff ’00], and she had long, red hair flowing below her shoulder before she chopped it off to about one-inch length in recognition of our coach and what she was going through.”

THE NEXT STEP

“All of the good news you can get [about breast cancer] I had,” Delaney-Smith says. “It was a slow-growing cancer, it was a common kind of cancer, and it was a very curable kind of cancer.”

But like many treatments, the surgery and chemo had its side effects. During halftime at Cornell that year, the coach stood in front of her team during a locker-room speech when she suddenly forgot what she was saying.

“I got tired,” Delaney-Smith recalls. “I remember we were in the Ivy race until the last weekend, and we lost the title, and that meant we wouldn’t be going on to the postseason. There’s a reason things happen, and the reason was someone didn’t want me to coach for another four weeks; someone wanted me to rest.”

ELEVEN YEARS LATER

Eleven years later, it’s hard to tell that Delaney-Smith ever went through hours of chemotherapy. Since that day in December, the winningest Ivy League women’s basketball coach has appeared in three of her total six NCAA tournaments and five of her total 11 Ivy League Championships.

But what Delaney-Smith and the American Cancer Association are most proud of is her continued presence in the cancer community. Not only was she one of the first to share her personal story with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, she has filmed public service announcements for TV and participates in the annual Harvard Relay for Life and Bench Press for Cancer events, as well as last weekend’s Pink Zone game benefiting the WBCA Kay Yow Cancer Fund.

“I think [Pink Zone] means a lot, and it’s also Alumni Weekend, so you can tell what a great program she’s built when you see all of these really successful women come back,” senior Emma Markley says. “We’ve got over 30 alumni here, and I think that says a lot about who she is, her character, and the impact she has on the players.”

ACT AS IF

While Delaney-Smith’s schedule now includes more events than before her diagnosis, cancer has left the coach with something bigger: a new mantra that starts with the phrase “act as if.”

“She said, ‘OK, if you guys are down by 20, act as if you’re up by 20. If you guys are pegged as the underdog in the Ivy League, act as if you’re pegged as the champion in the Ivy League,’” Barnard explains. “We kind of rolled our eyes at first, but ultimately, it was something that I still carry with me today.”

Delaney-Smith’s motto wasn’t just picked up by her players, but by a film director as well. In 2009, Melissa Johnson ’00 released her short documentary on Delaney-Smith, “Act As If,” which played at various film festivals across the nation.

“Even when the chips are down and the odds are against you and it’s terrible times, you act as if times are better,” Barnard continues. “You have the will inside of you to get you to that level. Kathy started to really embody that and push that on to us as she began to recover because she believed in it.”

STRENGTH TO PLAY

While Delaney-Smith’s “act as if” ideology helped her overcome cancer, she explains it also made her a stronger person in general, as shown last year when her older sister passed away from lung cancer.

“My dad died very young of lung cancer in his early 50s and my mom died of bone marrow cancer,” she says. “My older sister who’s just 10 months older than me just suddenly died of lung cancer last year. My sister and I are both breast cancer survivors, and my brother is a skin cancer survivor, so yeah, my family has been hit hard by cancer.”

Delaney-Smith’s strength can also be seen in those around her, especially in the attitudes of her past and present players both on and off the court.

“There have been times when we’ve been through some pretty bad stuff, and she doesn’t use [her struggle]. She doesn’t throw it out there, but sometimes you can see it, you see it in her face,” Markley says. “She’s relating to us like, I’ve been there, I’ve been down, I’ve seen the bottom, and this is how you get through it, this is how I’ve done it, and this is what strength is.”

For those who were with Delaney-Smith from the beginning, from the shaved head and wigs, seeing her last Saturday in a game benefiting breast cancer research reminded them of how tough Delaney-Smith is.

“I just heard today that she’s going into her 30th year,” Barnard recounts. “I just turned 30, so she was coaching when I was going into diapers—which is pretty amazing. I will always have her in my heart and my mind as my mentor in life.”

—Staff writer Brian A. Campos can be reached at bcampos@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Alex Sopko can be reached at sopko@fas.harvard.edu.