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Weekly 150: Pat Head Summitt

Queen of the Lady Vols

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One of the most distinguished and memorable females in Tennessee history has to be Pat Summitt. From her stare that sends chills down your spine to her eight national championships coaching the Lady Vols basketball team, Summitt was the epitome of class on and off the court. The legendary status of a coach is upheld by her list of accolades which include membership in the Basketball Hall of Fame, coach of the year, coach of the century, winningest coach, mentor and philanthropist.

She was born Patricia Sue Head on June 14, 1952, in Clarksville, Tennessee, to Richard and Hazel Albright Head. Her family moved to nearby Henrietta so she could play basketball in Cheatham County because Clarksville did not have a girls’ team. From there, Summitt went to the University of Tennessee at Martin, where she won All-American honors playing for UT–Martin’s first women’s basketball coach, Nadine Gearin.

Each of Summitt’s brothers had received athletic scholarships, but her parents paid her way to college. She later co-captained the United States Women’s National basketball team as a player at the inaugural women’s tournament in the 1976 Summer Olympics, winning the silver medal. Eight years later in 1984, she coached the U.S. women’s team to an Olympic gold medal, becoming the first U.S. Olympian to win a basketball medal and coach a medal-winning team.

In a letter courting her to move to UT Knoxville from West Tennessee, the physical education department chair, Dr. Helen Watson, wrote, “We have an excellent potential team, and I believe that they would be happy to have you as their coach.” She agreed to join the program as a graduate assistant for the 1974–75 season. Before the season began, twenty-two-year-old Summitt became the head coach of the Lady Vols after Coach Margaret Hutson requested a sabbatical to pursue her doctorate degree.

Summitt earned $250 monthly and washed the players’ uniforms; uniforms purchased the previous year with proceeds from a doughnut sale. She was quoted about the early days of coaching and playing, “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, and we had our little sleeping bags. When I was a player at the University of Tennessee at 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.”

Joan Cronan, former UT women’s athletics director, said of Summitt, “The woman who would one day hold the winningest coaching record in all of Division I basketball – men’s or women’s – was shy. When mentors called her Pat, she never corrected them that she was actually called Tricia or Trish. She answered to the nickname of Pat and, of course, by the end, that’s what the whole world called her.”

In her second season, Summitt coached the Lady Vols to a 16–11 record while earning her 1976 master’s degree in physical education and training as the co-captain of the 1976 U.S. Women’s Olympic basketball team that won a silver medal in Montreal.

Starting with the 1976–77 season, Summitt directed two 20-win teams, winning back-to-back Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) Region II championships. The Lady Vols defeated 3-time AIAW champion Delta State by 20 points in 1978 and earned Tennessee its first number-one ranking. Tennessee closed the 1970s by winning the first-ever SEC tournament and returning to the AIAW Final Four, where they finished runner-up to Old Dominion, 68–53.

The 1981–82 season featured the first NCAA women’s basketball tournament. The Lady Vols were one of 32 teams invited and named a two-seed in their region. Summitt’s Lady Vols upset top-seeded USC 91–90 in overtime to advance to the Final Four. They lost to Louisiana Tech, who won the tournament.

During the 1986–87, Summitt earned her 300th win, an 87–66 victory over North Carolina. Tennessee defeated Louisiana Tech 67–44 to win the Lady Vols’ first national title. Two years later, the Lady Vols reached the Final Four for the fourth straight year and faced SEC rival Auburn for the national title. Tennessee took home its second title in three years with a 76–60 victory. It was Tennessee’s best season yet; the Lady Vols won 35 games while losing only two regular season contests to Auburn and Texas. The Lady Vols won every NCAA tournament game by at least 12 points.

The Lady Vols would go on to win the National Championship in 1991, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2007 and 2008. Under Summitt’s helm, the program had 32 combined Southeastern Conference titles. On August 23, 2011, Summitt revealed she was suffering from early-onset dementia. She concluded her 38-year tenure with the Lady Vols on April 18, 2012, with a 1,098-208 overall record.

The gym she played in at Cheatham County High School is named in her honor. When Summitt brought her team to play at the University of Tennessee at Martin in 1997, her alma mater spent the weekend honoring her by designating a street on campus, “Pat Head Summitt Drive,” and naming the basketball court in the Skyhawk Arena, the Pat Head Summitt Court.

UT Knoxville also named a campus street after Summitt and to commemorate reaching the top of the all-time coaching wins list with 880 victories, the University of Tennessee named its basketball court at the Thompson-Boling Arena, “The Summitt,” in a surprise postgame ceremony following the win over Purdue on March 22, 2005. She is the only person to have two basketball courts utilized by Division I basketball teams named in her honor.

Summitt died on June 28, 2016, two weeks after her 64th birthday, at a senior living facility in Knoxville.