There are champions and there are championships. In Avery County, N.C., they’re both about square dancing and it’s just about the best  you’ve ever seen anywhere.

 

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If Kay Burleson Wilkins had been a football coach, there’d be a stadium and a lot of kids named after her. If she’d coached in Texas, there’d be a town called Miss Kay, Texas. In Oklahoma, they’d have named oil wells for her and in Knoxville, Tenn., she’d have rated at least a street, same as famous Lady-Vols basketball coach Pat Summitt.

But she didn’t coach football. She coached square dancing. She coached about as well as anyone ever has, but outside a poor, isolated county in northwest North Carolina, she’s not only unknown, and she was never paid as a coach. Not a penny. More’s the pity.