Coach took women’s basketball into national prominence
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.”
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.
In Tennessee, girls used to play six-on-six, half-court basketball designed to protect them from getting hurt. Summitt, who took her Lady Vols to four AIAW Final Fours, refused to recruit Tennessee players. Tennessee high schools switched to five-on-five rules starting with the 1979-80 season.
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 Four either in the AIAW or NCAA, she said, “Well, the monkey’s off my back.”
The Lady Vols became must-see TV in the sport as Summitt put the women’s game on the national stage with six national titles in the span of 12 years.
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, and received a new contract that boosted her annual salary to $1.4 million, far removed from the $8,900 of her first season.
She never got to the 40th season in that contract, 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).