Hatchell amongst four honored with HOF benches

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

  Close

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

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

1985 NCAA championship, while Young took the Rutgers Scarlet Knights to the 1976 males’s Final 4 and Yow guided the NC State Wolfpack to the 1998 ladies’s Last Four.Yow, whose long fight versus breast cancer introduced the ongoing Kay Yow Cancer Fund, passed away in 2009. Massimino passed away in 2017 and Young in 2022. Hatchell, 71, started her coaching profession in 1974. She won AIAW and NAIA national championships at Francis Marion University in 1982 and 1986 before taking control of 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 inductees in the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Massimino is in the College Basketball Hall of Popularity in Kansas City.The Naismith Coaches Circle program began in 2015, released by Hall of Famers John Calipari of

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