Pat Summitt landed the top women's basketball coaching job at the University of Tennessee Martin in 1974. But it wasn't much to celebrate at the time.
Summitt got unexpectedly promoted from assistant when the head coach quit. She was just 22 years old — roughly the same age as many of her players. Success was far from a slam dunk. She had little experience. There was no budget for women's basketball. And women only played offense or defense on one half of the court — since they were supposedly so delicate.
But Summitt would ultimately usher in a new era of respect for women's college basketball. And Summitt ultimately won eight Division I championships as coach, the third highest in NCAA history for women's or men's basketball. In 2009, Sporting News ranked her No. 11 on its list of the 50 greatest coaches of all time — the only woman on the list.
See A Bigger Future For Your Field
Summitt saw a future where women's basketball could be much more.
That started for the 1981-1982 seasons, when the University of Tennessee Knoxville Lady Volunteers hired her as head coach. But she'd soon see, and usher in change. An NCAA for women started for 1981-82 school year. Also that year players could finally play the full court.
And that's the year the "Lady Vols" upset top-seeded University of Southern California 91-90 in overtime to advance to the Final Four. A dynasty was in the making. The team won its first national title five years later. Eventually, Summitt hauled in 1,098 victories, a record when she retired in 2012.
"I worked with her for three decades and her teams won eight nationals and went 18 times to the Final Four," said Joan Cronan, women's athletic director emeritus at the University of Tennessee and author of "Sport Is Life with the Volume Turned Up."
"She was a great coach and teacher who set ambitious goals and stuck to them, always remaining focused," Cronan said. "She taught her team members that they needed to play with maximum commitment to excellence, no matter whether the result was that they won or lost, and the same is true of life in general."
Develop A Strong Work Ethic Like Coach Summitt
Patricia Sue Head was born in Clarksville, Tenn., in 1952. She grew up on a farm with four older brothers and a younger sister.
When she was a baby, the family lived in a two-room log cabin. But her parents saved the $1 they received per chicken to buy their first cow and eventually had 64 cows on 1,000 acres. They added a general store, a dry cleaner, gas pump, feed mill and other businesses.
"No job was too big or too small, and we were living crop to crop, though there was plenty on the table," she wrote with Sally Jenkins in "Reach for the Summitt: The Definite Dozen System for Succeeding at Whatever You Do."
"Everybody had to do their part and we worked all day every day, except when we went to school and church," Summitt wrote. "My dad and brothers wouldn't do any work around the house and I helped my mother with everything from cooking and milking to gardening and working in the store."
As coach, she took that multitasking further. Eventually she used a Franklin Planner to schedule her crammed days and nights. That included everything from answering piles of letters and overseeing a three-hour practice to speaking at a Rotary Club and calling potential recruits. She wrote that while she loved her job, a third of the time it was unpleasant and she decided to do the difficult things first, which made the results fun.
"See yourself as self-employed, since we essentially work for ourselves, no matter who signs the paycheck," she wrote.
Learn More From Failure Than Success
Teased for being a tall and skinny tomboy, Summitt excelled at basketball. She was such a standout, her family moved to Henrietta, Tenn. when she was in high school. That way she could play on the women's team.
That's not the last time she'd jump at opportunity. While earning a degree in physical education at UT Martin in 1972, the U.S. Olympic team offered Summitt a chance to try out for the group going to Montreal in 1976. That's when women's basketball would be played for the first time in the Olympics. She co-captained the team that won the silver medal.
Upon switching to coaching full-time, though, she didn't see instant success. It seemed the Lady Vols always fell short despite a promising rise from the late 1970s through the early 1990s.
Then the 1995-96 team finally earned its first national championship. But instead of finding itself on the top again, the next season the team suffered an abysmal record. So Summitt went back to basics, making the practices tougher than any actual game. The teams ended with the championship and an HBO documentary, "A Cinderella Season: The Lady Vols Fight Back."
"Sometimes you learn more from losing than winning, because failure forces you to reexamine what you are doing," Summitt wrote. "Success lulls you into being complacent. It's also harder to stay on top and you need to constantly seek new goals."
Keep Improving Your Communication Skills
Summitt carefully minded messages she was sending to her team, even when she wasn't talking.
"We communicate all the time, even when we don't realize it," Summitt wrote. "Be aware of body language, your facial expression, and make good eye contact. When you communicate the right way, it avoids confusion and mistakes."
To make sure players understood what she told them, Summitt asked everyone to take written notes. That included diagraming plays, which helped players to both remember and understand others' roles.
Sometimes, to be effective, Summitt needed to yell, she admitted. But other times silence was the appropriate form of communication. In the 1977 season, she heard the team partied until 4 a.m., despite knowing they had an early practice. She brought out trash cans in case they needed to throw up as she made them practice for four hours. And she never said a word about their night out.
Listening, she knew, was key to understanding her players. And she also studied personality profiles and had a sports psychologist coach them on how to talk with each other.
Be Willing To Change And Have A Winning Attitude
Summitt made winning look like a constant. But she knew reaching top results requires refining your technique over time.
"We resist change because we're afraid, lazy, cautious, or it makes us feel things are out of control," Summitt wrote.
But willingness to change gives you the opportunity to focus on turning your weaknesses into strengths, she advised. It's easy to fall into a comfort zone and lose a winning attitude.
The ultimate challenge for Summitt came in 2011, when she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. She sought out every possible way to stave off the impact, while sharing responsibility for coaching with Holly Warwick, an assistant coach that later became head coach.
"I went back to work and made myself useful and the players took my mind off my health issues," Summitt wrote (with Jenkins) in "Sum It Up." She retired after the 2011-12 season and died at age 64 in 2016.
"She had so much impact because she loved the sport, created opportunities women had never had before, and made such a difference in so many young lives," Cronan said. "But if she were alive today she would say that what she was most proud of was the fact that every one of her team members who stayed the four years graduated."
Pat Summitt's Keys
- Head Coach of NCAA women's basketball champions the Tennessee Lady Volunteers from 1974 to 2012.
- Overcame: Becoming the women's basketball head coach without experience, a budget, or even the opportunity to play the full-court game.
- Lesson: "You can't always be the most talented person in the room, but you can be the most competitive."
