A driving force for women’s sports
Legendary basketball coach Pat Summitt dies
Needing yet another men’s basketball coach, Tennessee officials turned to the one person they thought would be perfect to take over the Volunteers program. Pat Summitt said no. She wasn’t interested in the job in 1994 after Wade Houston was forced out, and she turned it down again when Jerry Green quit in March 2001. A Tennessee governor once joked he wouldn’t have his job if Summitt ever wanted to run her home state.
Breaking the glass ceiling in the men’s game, political office, that wasn’t Summitt’s motivation. She had the only job she ever really wanted.
“I want to keep doing the right things for women all the time,” Summitt said in June 2011 after being inducted into her fifth Hall of Fame.
Summitt died Tuesday morning at age 64. Tennessee vice- chancellor and athletic director Dave Hart called her “synonymous with Tennessee” and “a global icon who transcended sports and spent her entire life making a difference in other people’s lives.”
Those sentiments were echoed by politicians, former peers and rivals alike, along with legions of Lady Vols f ans and admirers throughout the sporting world. Maryland women’s basketball coach Brenda Frese was among them.
“Just like a lot of young girls, I grew up admiring Coach Summitt, and she’s a big reason I’m in this business,” Frese said in a statement shared by the university. “Her legacy will live on, and she will be missed.”
Indeed, the woman who grew up playing basketball in a Tennessee barn loft against her brothers, and started coaching only a couple years after Title IX was invoked, spent her life working to make women’s basketball the equal of the men’s game.
In the process, Patricia Sue Head Summitt stood among the best coaches in any sport when she retired in April 2012 with more victories (1,098) than any other NCAA coach and second only to John Wooden with eight national championships.
Summitt used the sport and her demand for excellence to empower women and help them believe they can achieve anything, taking no back seat to anyone.
In Tennessee, girls used to play six- on- six, half- court basketball designed to protect them from getting hurt. “We were capable of heavy farmwork, and of absorbing whippings, but for some reason, they didn’t think we could run 94 feet without getting the vapours and passing out or damaging our ovaries,” she said in her 2013 autobiography, Sum It Up: 1,098 Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective.
The NCAA finally started running a national post-season tournament for the women in 1982. At the time, Summitt was known for having “corn-fed chicks” on her roster, big and strong but not talented enough to win national titles. After she won her first national title in 1987 in her eighth Final 4 either in the AIAW or NCAA, she said, “Well, the monkey’s off my back.”
Summitt led gruelling practices that became the stuff of legend. After learning that some of her players had been drinking at a party, she held a practice early in the morning and placed a garbage can at each corner of the court. The women ran laps, one after another, stopping only to vomit into the garbage cans. At least once, after the team played poorly in the second half of a game on the road, Summitt ordered her team to put their sweaty uniforms back on after their bus pulled into Knoxville.
“Now, you’re going to play the half you didn’t play last night,” she said.
Summitt worked to make it impossible to ignore her team or the women’s game. By January 1993, so many people wanted to watch then- No. 2 Tennessee visit topranked Vanderbilt that the contest became the first Southeastern Conference women’s game to sell out in advance.
With children under six allowed in free, having a ticket didn’t guarantee getting through the door; at least 1,000 were turned away at the door, including Vanderbilt’s chancellor. The Lady Vols won 73- 68.
“This was the biggest game in women’s basketball, and that’s what I’ve been waiting 19 years to see,” Summitt said. “I’m glad I stayed around to see it.”
Summitt won her seventh national title in 2007 followed by the eighth in 2008. She became the first NCAA coach to win 1,000 games Feb. 5, 2009.
She never got to the 40th season, her career cruelly and prematurely ended by early onset dementia, Alzheimer’s type.
She finished 1,098-208 with 18 Final Fours, at the time tying the men of UCLA and North Carolina for the most by any college basketball program. On the international stage, she was the first U. S. Olympian to win medals as both a player ( silver, 1976) and coach ( gold, 1984).
Not that numbers define Summitt, who once said, “Records are made to be broken.”
Yes, all marks fade, but no one will eclipse Summitt’s contributions to women’s basketball.
FOR SOME REASON, THEY DIDN’T THINK WE COULD RUN 94 FEET WITHOUT GETTING THE VAPOURS AND PASSING OUT.
— TENNESSEE COACH PAT SUMMITT