Legendary Tennessee coach Pat Summitt dies

Pat Summitt, who was at the forefront of a broad ascendance of women’s sports, winning eight national basketball championships at the University of Tennessee and more games than any other Division I college coach, male or female, died Tuesday. She was 64.

Her death was confirmed on the website of the Pat Summitt Foundation.

Summitt stepped down after 38 seasons and 1,098 victories at Tennessee in April 2012, at 59, less than a year after she learned she had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

Over nearly four decades, Summitt helped transform women’s college basketball from a sport ignored by the National Collegiate Athletic Association into one that drew national television audiences and paid its most successful coaches more than $1 million a year.

“In modern history, there are two figures that belong on the Mount Rushmore of women’s sports — Billie Jean King and Pat Summitt,” Mary Jo Kane, a sports sociologist at the University of Minnesota, said in 2011. “No one else is close to third.”

Summitt, who was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2000, was a trailblazer, ambas- sador and missionary. She was a co-captain of the 1976 women’s Olympic team, which won a silver medal, then guided the United States to gold as head coach at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. All of her players who completed their eligibility at Tennessee also graduated, school officials said.

Through much of her tenure at Tennessee, Summitt was willing to play any opponent, on any court, at any time.