The Yakima Valley and high school sports lost a good friend earlier this week.

Louise Adams – teacher, coach, scorekeeper, announcer with an omnipresent smile accompanying a ‘how are you?’ – died Tuesday morning after suffering a stroke. She was 80.

While many will remember Adams for her cordial nature and voice over the Yakima Valley SunDome sound system during state tournaments, she also was a pioneer for girls sports in Central Washington.

A 1964 graduate of Zillah High School, she returned to her hometown after earning her teaching degree from Central Washington University to teach in the district.

A few years later with the 1972 passage of Title IX, which prohibited sex-based discrimination in school or education programs that receive federal funds, she became an integral part of Zillah’s founding of varsity programs for girls and their success.

Adams was the Leopards first basketball coach, and guided them to a runner-up finish in the inaugural Class A-B state tournament at CWU in 1976. She also helped launch the volleyball program, which would win state titles in 1977 and ’78.

LOUISE ADAMS AND DOUG DAVIS TALK ABOUT THE 1976 ZILLAH GIRLS TEAM

With positivity while asking only for the players’ top effort, Adams was impactful.

“I was reflecting with a teammate, and we don’t remember her ever yelling or being demeaning,” said Cheryl Holden, a sophomore on the second-place basketball team, and a senior on the first championship volleyball team.

“It was always encouraging, with the expectation to do your best,” she said.

Holden, who coached the 2001 West Valley girls team to the 3A state championship and followed that with a Hall of Fame stint leading Columbia Basin College to four NWAC championships in 13 years, used a similar approach on the sidelines.

“I feel like I carried with me three things: That she was always caring, she was always honest even if it was hard to hear, and all of us were her kids,” she said.

When  Adams hung up the whistle, she stayed near the game, whether at the  scorers table or press box, and often alongside fellow Zillah grad Doug Davis, who also was one of her students and whose mother taught in the room next door to Miss Adams.

“I can't count the number of games, parades, even cable access television broadcasts we have announced together, but I always considered it a privilege to do it with her,” Davis posted on his ZillahSports.com website. “She was always the star and I was the goofy sidekick.”

As the Yakima Valley became a hub for state tournaments, Adams helped make the events special.

“Over the past several decades, if you participated in or watched a state championship in the Yakima Valley, odds are Louise worked the game or scheduled it,” Yakima Valley Sports Commission director of sports development Rich Austin said. “She was one of a kind and a legend.”

Yakima Valley College athletic director and former men’s basketball coach Ray Funk also recruited Adams to take the mic at Yaks basketball games, broadening her impact and allowing her to reconnect with coaches and athletes, such as Holden.

“She was always dependable, loyal, cheerful, and did a great job,” Funk said.

Funeral arrangements haven’t been announced, Zillah athletic director Lance Den Boer said. The remembrances, though, are plentiful on social media, from former students and players of hers, to many others from Zillah and afar.

“She was the epitome of, 'Once a Leopard, Always a Leopard,'” Holden said. “We’re going to miss her and the entire Valley is going to miss her.”