Hatchell among 4 bestowed HOF benches

• M.A. Voepel, ESPN.comAug 11, 2023, 03:54 PM ET

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  M.A. Voepel covers the WNBA, females’s college basketball, and other college sports for espnW. Voepel began covering women’s basketball in 1984, and has been with ESPN considering that 1996.

Sylvia Hatchell, who led the North Carolina Tar Heels ladies’s team to the 1994 NCAA title, and the late Rollie Massimino, Tom Young and Kay Yow are being bestowed benches at the Naismith Hall of Popularity Coaches Circle in Springfield, Massachusetts.It’s part of the Hall of Popularity’s induction weekend, with the bench dedication event Saturday.Massimino guided the Villanova Wildcats guys’s group to the

1985 NCAA championship, while Young took the Rutgers Scarlet Knights to the 1976 men’s Final 4 and Yow guided the NC State Wolfpack to the 1998 women’s Final Four.Yow, whose long fight versus breast cancer launched the continuous Kay Yow Cancer Fund, died in 2009. Massimino died in 2017 and Young in 2022. Hatchell, 71, began her training profession in 1974. She won AIAW and NAIA championship games at Francis Marion University in 1982 and 1986 before taking over at North Carolina, where she coached from 1986 to 2019. Hatchell was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame in 2013, Yow in 2002.

Both are also conscripts in the Women’s Basketball Hall of Popularity in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Massimino is in the College Basketball Hall of Fame in Kansas City.The Naismith Coaches Circle program began in 2015, launched by Hall of Famers John Calipari of

the Kentucky Wildcats, Jerry Colangelo and George Raveling. The program is planned to commemorate basketball’s very first coach, James Naismith, and the core values he instilled in his players.