On March 22, 2005, Pat Summitt, coach of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team, won her 880
th game to become the winningest basketball coach in NCAA history, passing the legendary Dean Smith of North Carolina. It was the latest milestone in a career super-stellar in grandeur and mythic in proportion. The celebrants tried to focus on her accomplishments, but all Summitt could talk about was her players and coaches. “You win in life with people," she said, "and if you think you can do this alone, you're wrong.”
It would be utterly impossible to overstate Summitt’s achievements at Tennessee. Besides her victories (now 913), she has also won more conference championships and taken more teams to the NCAA Final Four than any other coach, male or female, and she trails only the great John Wooden of UCLA in national championships – she owns six to Wooden’s unbelievable ten. The list of her players who became All-Americans, Olympians, and professionals, dwarfs her closest competitor. There is no second place. There is only Summitt, and the others.
Yet anyone trying to get Summitt to talk about herself or her career will have the same experience as those commemorating her landmark win – they will hear instead about players, coaches, friends, and other partners. Summitt never stops thinking about the people around her, and especially about the real focus of her job – the young women in her charge. “When you talk about statistics,” she has observed, “you can talk about national championships, but I like to talk about graduation rates and career opportunities for our young women.”
Summitt strives above all else to instill in her players a sense of supreme confidence and an absolute refusal to accept less than excellence in themselves. She credits her allegiance to these values to her rural Tennessee upbringing where her chores and the milk cows came before breakfast. “I look back now and I think that just made me who I am, in terms of my drive and my work ethic.” That drive has been transplanted into the hearts of many young women over the past three decades; young women who know what real winning looks like; young women who will never forget their tough, hard-nosed, loving Coach Pat.
“I just can’t relate to people who don’t want to be at the top of their game every day and don't want to compete on every play.” –
Pat SummittJoe Markiewicz, “To learn more about Pat Summitt’s amazing career at Tennessee, check out her biography at the
Lady Vols website.”
About columnist Joe Markiewicz
Leading Business News Editor Note:
The people we've chosen to write about have/had their quota of human failings and foibles just like the rest of us... But they share leadership qualities: All of them in some way, at some time, acted courageously. We appreciate columnist, Joe Markiewicz , focusing on Coach Summitt’s challenges as well as her accomplishments in field of building people who become champions because this better equips us to lead
