“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