When Harvard women's basketball coach Kathy Delaney-Smith was diagnosed with breast cancer last winter, her immediate instinct--after recovering from the initial shock, of course--was to keep her condition a secret.

"My first perception was to tell no one, just my assistants and my husband," said Delaney-Smith, now entering her 19th year at the Harvard helm. "I told them it was going to be private and no one was going to know."

But once Delaney-Smith learned the full extent of her illness, the threat of losing her hair and missing practices in order to go for treatment cast doubt on exactly how well she could hide her illness.

Finally, on the same night she won her 150th career Ivy League game, Delaney-Smith rather spontaneously broke her silence in a TV interview conducted before the Crimson's televised contest against Dartmouth last Jan. 7.

"I was just really tired of lying," she said. "So I just blurted it out one day [with] no forethought. I blurted it out before the Dartmouth game, which was three weeks after the diagnosis."

It was then that Delaney-Smith received a key piece of advice that would change her entire approach to her illness.

"One of the TV women who I blurted it out to convinced me to go public," Delaney-Smith said. "I just remember her message: 'You can help a lot of women.' That was probably the defining comment that made me go public, because I really didn't want to."

After that night, Delaney-Smith unofficially began her fight on behalf of breast cancer awareness, a battle she waged as she was simultaneously undergoing treatment for her own condition.