Two Lady Vols coaches get on Harleys to fight cancer

N.C. State coach Kay Yow (left) accepted a check from Tennessee assistants Nikki Caldwell and Holly Warlick during the Hoops for Hopes game -- just one of the many events the WBCA has put on to raise breast cancer awareness. AP

Nikki Caldwell's got 10 weeks to sell Pat Summitt on the sidecar.

Caldwell, a Tennessee assistant, knows the smart thing to do is to just thank her boss for the time off. Unlike when she played for Summitt, Caldwell doesn't have to hide her motorcycling these days. She understands that the Lady Vols' Hall of Fame bites her lip when she -- and fellow assistant -- Holly Warlick -- ride around on a hog. And she readily volunteers it was huge of Summitt to let the pair, Caldwell and Warlick, do a cross-country Harley ride last fall.

After years of hosting staid little charity golf tourneys, Warlick thought of her outrageous grandmother and wanted to do something equally outrageous to shine light on the breast cancer that took the woman she calls her hero. Caldwell said, "I'm in," the magnanimous Summitt let them out of two individual workout days and off they went. From Berkeley, Calif., where Tennessee's football team opened the season, to the Grand Canyon, through New Mexico, Texas and Arkansas and up to Memphis, where Summitt's old sorority sisters were out in full force.

Eleven days -- plus one to, as Caldwell said, "help the Las Vegas economy" -- later and they were back in Knoxville, where men's hoops coach Bruce Pearl and Summitt serenaded the pair with Ride, Sally, Ride.

The song was cool. The bit of media attention they got wasn't bad and the $50,000 they raised definitely rocked. But for this next ride, the one Warlick and Caldwell will kick off May 11 in Knoxville and loop through the Florida Keys and back, the Lady Vols assistants want more. More attention on cancer, more money to combat cancer, more ... Pat Summitt?

"We do need to take it another step," Caldwell said with a giggle. "I keep telling her it's not the bikes that are dangerous."

Warlick can be pretty persuasive. ("Hey, I suckered Nikki into it," she said.) Warlick's offered Summitt a pick of bikes. ("We both have more than one," she said.) Caldwell's said they'll make Summitt over. ("I've got the whole matching jacket and helmet thing," she said.) And they've even said Summitt wouldn't have to drive herself.

"We told her we'd put her in one of those scooters on the side," Caldwell said.

Caldwell giggled again, Warlick did too and even if all this is a desperate longshot and Summitt never actually gets on board with them, these last two weeks have promised these two women that women's basketball already has.

It's been 27 years since the Women's Basketball Coaches Association grew out of a who's who meeting in Syracuse. The WBCA unified coaches and has worked tirelessly to develop women's basketball as a sport and as a community. In all that time, though, the WBCA never undertook any cause outside that. Until last year, when N.C. State coach -- and original founder -- Kay Yow took on breast cancer for the third time in her Hall of Fame career.

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