Pat Summitt
Pat Summitt
Patricia Sue "Pat" Summittwas an American college basketball head coach whose 1,098 career wins are the most in NCAA basketball history. She served as the head coach of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team from 1974 to 2012, before retiring at age 59 because of a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. She won eight NCAA championships, a number surpassed only by the 10 titles won by UCLA men's coach John Wooden and the 11 titles won by UConn...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth14 June 1952
CityClarksville, TN
CountryUnited States of America
I want to keep coaching as long as I can. I love teaching and working with student athletes and I love being at the University of Tennessee.
If this team doesn't understand that is has to rebound, then someone is going to drill them and they'll figure it out.
Sylvia and I go back 32 years to when we were in grad school at Tennessee and she coached my junior varsity team. I value her as a dear friend in this profession. When you've been in it this long, you make a lot of people mad.
Yours truly, right here, drove the van. If we took two vans, one was the luggage, the other was the players. Typically, they didn't like to ride with me. I usually drove the luggage, especially if we got beat.
I thought she was tremendous when she settled down.
That was one of the better 40 minutes we have had on the defensive end. In the second half, we got into a better rhythm offensively. At one point, they were right there with us. Then we separated out with our defense and board play.
I think Wendy plays a tougher schedule than I do.
I think it inspired the team so much. You could feel it in the gym.
Her wheels -- the spokes sometimes seem to come out. I always look to see what she grabs.
It'll be interesting to see how we respond after a tough loss.
She responded maybe even better than I had anticipated. I thought it was important for her to get some quality minutes and as things played out, I wanted to give her more. I had gone in thinking maybe 12 minutes, and she played 17 minutes.
I think for the most part in our program, we've had a lot of success just through how we've gone about recruiting and making decisions not to recruit kids on the front end that we didn't think would be a good fit. But obviously, we've had our mistakes, too.
I don't think you can say that a coach that hasn't won a championship isn't a great coach. You have to have breaks along the way, and you have to have a dominant player.
She made playing basketball fun due to her ability to connect with her players. Personally, I am going to miss her tremendously and I know the game is going to miss her.