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Summary
Summary
Pat Summitt, the all-time winningest coach in NCAA basketball history and bestselling author of Reach for the Summitt and Raise The Roof , tells for the first time her remarkable story of victory and resilience as well as facing down her greatest challenge: early-onset Alzheimer's disease.
Pat Summitt was only 21 when she became head coach of the Tennessee Vols women's basketball team. For 38 years, she broke records, winning more games than any NCAA team in basketball history. She coached an undefeated season, co-captained the first women's Olympic team, was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, and was named Sports Illustrated 'Sportswoman of the Year'.
She owed her coaching success to her personal struggles and triumphs. She learned to be tough from her strict, demanding father. Motherhood taught her to balance that rigidity with communication and kindness. She was a role model for the many women she coached; 74 of her players have become coaches.
Pat's life took a shocking turn in 2011, when she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, an irreversible brain condition that affects 5 million Americans. Despite her devastating diagnosis, she led the Vols to win their sixteenth SEC championship in March 2012. Pat continued to be a fighter, facing this new challenge the way she's faced every other--with hard work, perseverance, and a sense of humor.
Author Notes
Pat Summitt was born Patricia Sue Head on June 14, 1952 in Clarksville, Tennessee. She graduated from the University of Tennessee at Martin in 1974 and became head coach at the University of Tennessee's flagship campus in Knoxville. She was a co-captain of the 1976 women's Olympic team, which won a silver medal, then was the head coach at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, where the United States won a gold medal. As a head coach, she lead the University of Tennessee woman's team to eight national basketball championships and 1,098 victories, which is more games than any other Division I college coach, male or female.
She was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2000. In 2011, she learned she had early-onset Alzheimer's disease and retired as head coach in 2012. She started the Pat Summitt Foundation to raise awareness about dementia and find a cure for Alzheimer's. She received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the 2012 ESPYs. Her memoir, Sum It Up written with Sally Jenkins, was published in 2013. She died on June 28, 2016 at the age of 64.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
The NCAA's winningest basketball coach opens up about private and public contests that have defined her. While the title of Summitt's latest work (Reach for the Summit, 1998, etc.) is a reflection of her long career as head coach of the University of Tennessee's Lady Vols--eight national championships and 1,098 victories--the substance of this engaging memoir offers an unvarnished look at defining moments behind those incomparable achievements. In 2011, the basketball world was shocked when Summitt, one of the best strategic minds ever to grace the hardwood, revealed she had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. The author tackles the elephant in the room by introducing each historically gauged chapter with snapshots of conversations, between Summitt and co-author Jenkins (co-author: In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving, 2010, etc.), focused squarely on the coach's relation to her illness. Though hardly one to wallow, when asked if she would trade her championships to have her health restored, Summitt admits, "I would give back every one of my trophies to still be coaching." The bulk of the memoir demonstrates why, with detailed recollections plumbing the depths of Summitt's investment in psychological tactics used to help players reach their potential and strategies executed in key games. The author is also quick to show her human side, exploring the drive her rural upbringing and tough-love father instilled in her, the pride she feels over having raised a son, her regret over the breakup of her marriage, her struggles with rheumatoid arthritis and her sense of accomplishment over the 100 percent graduation rate of her players. Frank on sensitive subjects like the inequities women athletes have had to face, Summitt also includes many humorous and touching anecdotes involving some of the biggest names in the women's game. The master of emotional jousting on the court speaks candidly of life challenges off of it--a must-read for basketball junkies, sport fans and any whose lives have been touched by incurable illness.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
COLLEGE coaches have to construct teams - complex organisms - from players who are often just figuring out who they are, as athletes and as adults. They're supposed to remember that the pieces they are fitting together, on the court or the field, are also students. And they have to rebuild again and again, with every graduation. Pat Summitt was one of the best coaches ever, and one of the most enduring. She led the University of Tennessee women's basketball team to a record 1,098 victories during her reign from 1974 to 2012. She helped lift her sport out of an era in which high school girls didn't even play on a full court, saw the number of female college athletes rise from 16,000 to almost 200,000, won eight national titles and graduated 100 percent of the players who completed their eligibility. She did this through force of personality and, in her own telling, with a mix of love, fury and manipulation. "Sometimes I almost wanted to say to a kid, 'I'm going to save you from yourself, and you don't even realize you need it,'" Summitt reflects in her vibrant, sprightly, likable memoir. "I'm going to show you how to live." Summitt credits her own learning of life's lessons primarily to her father, a man who instilled a fear-driven work ethic in his five children on the family's Tennessee farm. "If you disobeyed him, he would come after you with his belt, or a tobacco stick, or a switch, or a milk strap, or whatever else came to hand," Summitt remembers. Richard Head didn't hug his daughter, or directly express love or pride, until she was 43. Her nostalgia for his authoritarian ways would be hard to believe were it not for two redeeming facts. Head built his children a basketball court in the hayloft. And when his daughter couldn't play for the local high school because it didn't have a girls' team, he said, "Well, we'll just move." Head kept his word, and Summitt, who was 5 feet 9 inches in third grade and grew two more inches, developed into "a physical, hard-working slasher who carried my elbows up around my ears." She had the good timing to play for the United States in the first Olympics with women's basketball, in 1976. At 22 she was hired to coach at the University of Tennessee, and her rise coincided with Title IX, the law that requires schools to give equal backing to men's and women's sports. In her first year as a coach, Summitt had no staff, no scholarship money and an old pokey gym to play in. When the effects of Title IX kicked in, "I was suddenly in the middle of a gold rush," she writes, with a budget to recruit from around the country and access to the new sparkling arena built for the men's team. It's an example of how the scope of this memoir often expands to a broader telling of women's history. Not that Summitt styled herself a feminist. Like many ambitious women of her era, she ducked the word and its whiff of activism, preferring to emphasize finesse. Summitt likes the saying "You don't cut what you can untie," and she deployed it to court powerful male allies. "I wanted to be equal, certainly. But I liked the word lady," she writes. The Southern gloss Summitt gave to hard-charging athletics surely explains how she turned her team - the Lady Vols - into a statewide attraction that regularly drew tens of thousands of fans. The most gripping parts of the book are close-ups of Summitt's trying moments on the sidelines, as she willed one group of tricky players after another to come together. In the early years, she was all tough and no love. "When we lost, my van was a miserable place to be," she writes. "Don't wilt!" she would shout at her players on the court. "It was the Richard in me." To her credit, Summitt says she had to change. Otherwise, "the kids would have all quit and I'd have burned out, fast." She began accommodating the needs of different players, including a hearing-impaired pre-med student, Becky Clark, who made the team in 1980. "Although I'm now deaf, I can still hear her urging me on with one simple word, 'Anticipate,'" Clark remembers, in one of the book's many well-placed quotations from former Lady Vols. Summitt says she mellowed more after she became a mother - her son, Tyler, grew up traveling with the team. Still, she continued to rip into particular players, like Michelle Marciniak, a 1990s point guard. When Summitt got caught by a photographer grabbing Marciniak's jersey and twisting it, she realized she had crossed a line - "It looked like the Wicked Witch talking to Spinderella." But she didn't ease up on the mind games. After a painful national championship loss to Tennessee's archrival, the University of Connecticut and its own legendary coach, Geno Auriemma, Summitt blamed Marciniak in front of the whole team. "You didn't show up," she fumed. "If you had shown up, we'd have won." Summitt calls her treatment of Marciniak brutal, but not cruel. "The standard conventional coaching manual says you don't 'embarrass' players in front of their teammates, but I disagreed," she explains. "Dishonest teams don't win the big one. They cover up their losses with rationalizations and excuses that soothe their eggshell egos, and they keep making the same mistakes." Great teams, on the other hand, use honesty, however painful, as "the diagnostic tool that leads to a solution." If the defeat was Marciniak's fault, then she was the piece that needed retooling. The following season, Summitt threatened to take her starting position away, then asked if she really wanted to be on the team. "I pushed Michelle to the brink - unapologetically." I'm not sure I'm ready to rewrite the coaching manual. But the story works because the year after their big defeat, Marciniak was named most valuable player of the Final Four as Tennessee won it all. "I was like, I'm gonna show you," Marciniak says, with a notable lack of bitterness. "And that's why she did it." The night of the big victory, Summitt gave Marciniak the hug she had been withholding for years. And somehow, that was also the night when she got her own first embrace from her father, waiting for her in the stands. If it's true that stinting on praise is the best medicine, perhaps I shouldn't mention the outpouring of appreciation for Summitt when she retired last year. As scandals and player lawsuits make college sports seem increasingly ruthless and suspect, Summitt is often held up as a rare example of dignity and class. Even her least popular decision - to cancel the regular-season game against UConn even though the matchup had hatched a classic rivalry and elevated the television presence of women's basketball - looks good for the sport, now that teams like Notre Dame and Stanford have stepped up to expand the game beyond a two-team duel. I'm ending on this note, even if Summitt would say I've gone soft, because she left her beloved post sometime after learning, at just 59, that she had Alzheimer's. Now is the time to assess her contribution. Each chapter of the memoir begins with a brief question from Summitt's co-writer, Sally Jenkins, that allows Summitt to narrate the course of her disease and her feelings about it. By the end, Alzheimer's is taking its grinding toll, but Summitt can still say of her own best seller, "What better way to kick a memory-wasting disease in the teeth?" Pat Summitt won through force of personality and, in her own telling, with a mix of love, fury and manipulation. Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Slate and the author of "Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy."
Table of Contents
| 1 Footprints in the Sand | p. 3 |
| 2 Country Girl | p. 23 |
| 3 Miss Chi Omega | p. 55 |
| 4 Olympian | p. 89 |
| 5 Bridesmaid and Bride | p. 119 |
| 6 Professional Woman | p. 157 |
| 7 Working Mother | p. 193 |
| 8 Champion, Part I | p. 227 |
| 9 Champion, Part II | p. 263 |
| 10 Single Mother | p. 297 |
| 11 Patient | p. 339 |
| Where Some of Them Are Now | p. 377 |
| Appendix | p. 383 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 389 |
| Photograph Credits | p. 391 |
| Index | p. 393 |