Pat Summitt and the Lady Vols
Near Knoxville, Tennessee
Patricia Sue Head was twenty-two years old when she took the head coaching job for the University of Tennessee women's basketball team in nineteen seventy-four. She drove the van. She washed the uniforms, bought the year before with proceeds from a doughnut sale. Her monthly salary was two hundred fifty dollars. Women's college basketball was not yet an NCAA-sanctioned sport. There was no tournament. There was almost no infrastructure. There was the court, the players, and the work.
What she built over the next thirty-eight seasons is without parallel in American coaching history. She never missed the NCAA Tournament after the organization began sponsoring the women's game in nineteen eighty-one. She won eight national championships. In two thousand five she surpassed Dean Smith's record to become the winningest coach in NCAA Division One basketball history, man or woman. Her final career record was one thousand ninety-eight wins and two hundred eight losses.
The numbers matter less than what they meant. When Summitt started coaching, women's athletics operated on the margins of college sports, underfunded, underattended, treated as an afterthought. She refused every available lower standard. She held her players to the graduation rates and conduct standards of a serious academic institution. She was known for a stare that players described as physically uncomfortable. She was also known for calling players at two in the morning to talk through problems and for remembering the names of their parents.
In August of two thousand eleven, she announced that she had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. She continued coaching that season. She retired the following spring. The arena in which she had coached for decades was renamed the Pat Summitt Court. She died on June twenty-eighth, two thousand sixteen, at sixty-four.
She came to Knoxville at twenty-two in a situation that almost no one would have taken seriously. She left it one of the most consequential figures in the history of American athletics.
