Pat Summitt, the women’s college basketball coach who won more games than anyone to have led a program at the Division I level, died Tuesday at age 64.
The long-tenured head honcho at the University of Tennessee was a perpetual benchmark, setting new standards for women’s basketball from the time her career began in 1974 and achieving unprecedented success that her peers still use as a measuring stick to this day.
“From a competitive standpoint, it was the one program, the one game that you … each year you kinda measured yourself and your team. ‘Hey, when we play that game, we’ll know if we’re good enough to win a national championship or not,’ ” said her long-time archrival Geno Auriemma, who leads the University of Connecticut’s indomitable women’s hoops squad.
“From all the different aspects of looking at what her career was, there were a lot of things that she was the first. There were other people that did it, but nobody did it better or did it longer.”
Thirty-eight years, in fact. From the ’70s until her last hurrah in 2012, Summitt compiled 1,098 wins, 16 Southeastern Conference titles in the regular season and tournament each, and eight national championships. She wasn’t finished capturing any of those crowns by the time she was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2000—her final two NCAA-winning teams took home the trophy in 2007 and 2008, and the Lady Vols got one last SEC tourney title in Summitt’s final season.
That was her second biggest honor that year. She was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.
As President Obama noted at the time, she had already been diagnosed by then with the dementia that led to her deteriorating health. “She’s still getting up every day and doing what she does best, which is teaching,” Obama said at the medal ceremony. “‘The players,’ she says, ‘are my best medicine.'”
And she was their best mentor. Summitt was as famous for her intensity on the sidelines as for the loyalty and love she earned from her student-athletes. Chamique Holdsclaw, Summitt’s most accomplished player, credited the coach—her “superhero”—for helping her through depression and legal woes.
“When I say she’s been a superhero—I could tell you a million stories about how she’s impacted me, but [her] 160-something players probably have similar stories,” Holdsclaw said Tuesday. “The people that worked in the cafeteria where she went to go eat at every day have similar stories. Coach Summitt built an amazing legacy.”
It was one built through consistency and dogged commitment—sometimes in the extreme. Former Sports Illustrated master scribe Gary Smith wrote his profile of Summitt through the lens of recruit and eventual Lady Vol Michelle Marciniak, who Summitt visited in 1990 even though she was pregnant with her son Ross. To borrow from Bob Dylan, here comes the story of the hurricane:
Ross Tyler Summitt announced his mother’s passing Tuesday.
“She’ll be remembered as the all-time winningest D-1 basketball coach in NCAA history, but she was more than a coach to so many – she was a hero and a mentor, especially to me, her family, her friends, her Tennessee Lady Volunteer staff and the 161 Lady Vol student-athletes she coached during her 38-year tenure.”
