Not just a Volunteer but also a pioneer

ready was gone.

So Tennessee simply made it official Wednesday by announcing the departure of the winningest coach in NCAA basketball history, men’s or women’s. Summitt will become the school’s head coach emeritus, which is the least of the honors her state, school and the basketball world should bestow upon her. But, sadly, for her, for her team and for us, she will never stalk the sidelines again. Two months shy of her 60th birthday, this extraordinary sports pioneer and leader is no longer in charge of the game that she created in her own image.

“She’s our John Wooden,” Kim Mulkey, coach of national champion Baylor, said at the women’s Final Four earlier this month. “I’ve said it many times: I don’t care who wins more championships than her, there will never be another Pat Summitt.”

It is fitting that Summitt’s coaching career and the groundbreaking law known as Title IX share almost exactly the same historical space. The law that has brought millions of girls and women into sports was signed by President Richard Nixon in June 1972. Summitt became head coach at Tennessee in May 1974. She earned a salary of $250 a month and among her duties, she had to wash the players’ uniforms, which had been purchased with the profits from a doughnut sale.

In a 2009 interview with Time magazine, Summitt described those days:

“I had to drive the van when I first started coaching. One time, for a road game, we actually slept in the other team’s gym the night before. We had mats, we had our little sleeping bags. When I was a player at the University of Tennessee-martin, we played at Tennessee Tech for three straight games, and we didn’t wash our uniforms. We only had one set. We played because we loved the game. We didn’t think anything about it.”

For 38 years, Summitt did one thing above all else: She won. Her Tennessee teams never missed an NCAA tournament and won eight national championships, the last in 2008, which also turned out to be the last time she would coach in the Final Four.

The previous year at a news conference at the Final Four in Cleveland, I wanted to ask her the one thing that perplexed me about her tremendous record, her insistence on calling her tough, athletic, anything-but-dainty team the “Lady Vols”:

“With all due respect to the brand and what you have created there, is it time to get rid of that adjective and just be the Volunteers, understanding that it could be seen as a bit demeaning or having to need an adjective as making it somewhat less than the whole?”

Her eyes, so bright and ferocious, locked onto mine. “I don’t think that will ever change at Tennessee.”

I tried again: Should you change?

“That started back in ’74. No, no. Because that’s who we’re known as: the Lady Vols. I think our players would be the first to say we don’t want to change it. That’s who we are, that’s how people know us.”

Her glare was intensifying. I was living on borrowed time, but I gave it my final shot: Do you understand, at least, why we should have this conversation?

“Yes, I do. I understand the question and the conversation. But, I mean, I just think within the state of Tennessee and nationally, that logo, the Lady Vols logo, is known throughout this country and throughout the world. I can’t see that changing.”

And with that, my line of questioning was finished. Five years later, that exchange makes me smile. I didn’t get an answer I agreed with, but if I ever needed confirmation of one eternal truth, I received it that day:

You could try all you wanted, but you could never stare down the great Pat Summitt.