Kay Yow was a four-time MVP on her high-school basketball team, notched 737 career wins as a coach in the college ranks, guided the 1988 U.S. women’s Olympic basketball team to a gold medal, and became the fifth woman inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

But if, in that stellar résumé, there could possibly be one thing missing, it was only that Coach Yow, as she was known, never had the opportunity to play in college herself.

Ms. Yow, the longtime women’s basketball coach at North Carolina State University and one of the architects of the modern women’s college game, died on Saturday in a Raleigh, N.C., hospital after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 66.

Her death has prompted a rush of tributes from the college-basketball community, in which she was widely regarded as a gifted coach, mentor, and tireless advocate for women’s athletics. At N.C. State, where Ms. Yow spent 34 of her 38 seasons as a coach, tonight’s women’s game, against Wake Forest University, was postponed to a later date.

Ms. Yow’s coaching career was legendary not just for its achievements — the 29 winning seasons, the gold medal, the 20 NCAA tournament appearances, the 1998 Final Four — but also for its reflection of the growth of women’s sports. Her career spanned a time of extraordinary change in women’s college basketball, from humble beginnings to its current status as an enormously popular sport with a professional league and sellout crowds at its NCAA tournaments.

When N.C. State hired her to coach its women’s team, in 1975, Title IX, the law that prohibits sex discrimination at institutions that receive federal funds, was only three years old, and the first NCAA tournament in women’s basketball was still seven years away.

“I want a team and program that are worthy of respect,” Ms. Yow said shortly after taking the job, according to the university’s Web site. “We want to strive for excellence in all areas.”

By all accounts, she did. —Libby Sander