In 1984, she won an Olympic gold medal as head coach of the women’s basketball team. “(Summitt) was, you know. she was gonna win”.
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“Competition got me off the farm and trained me to seek out challenges and to endure setbacks”, she said shortly after her diagnosis.
“I always think I have something to teach them”, she said smiling.
“When I hear some interviews back, I’m like, ‘Wow, that sounded like Pat”, Harper said. Summitt sometimes slapped the court so hard during games, she flattened the rings on her fingers, requiring them to be rounded out again after the season ended.
Berenato reflected on her meetings and conversations with Summitt saying she was just a normal person. She made a real impression on me and certainly so many others. It’s not about you.
“It’s a sad day for women’s basketball, but really a sad day for all of basketball because Pat Summitt paved the way for a lot of coaches and for a lot of student-athletes”.
The young Summitt wore that hat for most of the next year. She’s also the only Division I coach who had every student athlete graduate under her leadership. People came from far and wide to be there in her presence for one last time, hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.
“This past weekend, I had an opportunity to just tell her how much I loved her and how much she meant to me”, McCray-Penson said, “and that I was very grateful to have her in my life and just everything that she has done for me”.
Wagner got to know Summitt when he was the girls basketball coach at Springfield with one of the nation’s top recruits in Russell, a 6-foot-6 All-American who just completed her redshirt sophomore season with the Volunteers. Her motto of offense sells tickets, defense wins games and rebounding wins championships will continue to impact coaches.
When she showed up in Knoxville in the fall of 1974, Title IX was in its infancy. She changed the way I looked at life. While her goal of playing for the legendary coach didn’t happen, she did compete against Summitt’s teams while playing at Georgia. “Any time I’d see her in July then, she remembered my name, and I’d be able to talk to her”. She modeled her coaching style after the principles Summitt used to build her Lady Vol program.
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Houston was a new coach at the time, eager to learn from one of the greats. “She had the vision”, Gamble said.
