Steve Christiliaw: Legendary coach Pat Summitt raised the bar for women’s basketball
Her passing came much too soon.
Summitt, 64, was the winningest major college basketball coach in the history of the game. Men’s basketball or women’s. More than Dean Smith. More than Adolph Rupp or John Wooden.
Summitt spent 38 seasons as head coach at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, winning 1,098 games. She was a groundbreaker and a trailblazer.
Pat Summitt had an on-court glare that could turn your blood to ice and a way of inspiring young women that gave them the wings they needed to soar. She was tough, and she set the bar extremely high. And then she set about helping you clear the bar with room to spare.
Along with storied programs like Stanford, Louisiana Tech, Old Dominion and Texas, Summitt and Tennessee put women’s basketball on the map.
I heard the news while packing the car for a drive from Memphis to Nashville as a weeklong vacation winds down. As you can expect, the news hit the state of Tennessee hard. The Summitt family tried to cushion the blow by releasing a statement Monday, saying the legendary coach was in failing health and had taken a turn for the worse.
Early-onset dementia, Alzheimer’s type, forced Summitt to step down as head coach of the beloved Lady Vols.
A healthy Pat Summitt could have stayed at the end of the Tennessee bench for who knows how long. She should have, if for no other reason than to see women’s college basketball reach levels she helped forge.
Four decades ago, when a graduate assistant named Pat Head took the reins in Knoxville, the game was dismissed as “distaff” basketball. Those who used to cling to that term, I must point out, are mostly gone.
You had to admire the way Summitt coached the game.
She coached basketball. Not women’s basketball. Basketball. Man or woman, you played the game with intensity and by the same fundamentals.
It’s safe to say that, without a Pat Summitt, it would have been much harder to find a Muffet McGraw (Notre Dame), a C. Vivian Stringer or a Lisa Fortier.
When Summitt got the head job, women coaching women’s basketball wasn’t exactly a novelty, but it wasn’t that far removed from it. And it was still a rarity for a major college to entrust its program with a female coach.
Before Summitt retired, there were volunteer alums who wistfully hoped she might take over coaching the men’s team.
“Pat was the one voice in women’s basketball that everyone respected,” McGraw wrote Tuesday morning. “She only cared about what was good for the game and how we could make it better. She raised the bar for women and showed us what it meant to be a leader, not just in coaching but in life. We have lost an icon in our game.”
It was a big day when Summitt swooped into Spokane Valley to attend a University High School game to watch Angie Bjorklund play.
Bjorklund went on to have a fine career at Tennessee and is now an assistant coach at Santa Clara – a fitting legacy.
I will admit that I lost some respect for Summitt in 2006. Tennessee had a very good team that year, and the coach felt her Lady Vols should have been a No. 1 seed in one of the tournament’s four regions. Instead, they were seeded No. 2 and opened the tournament that year against the No. 15 seed and Patriot League champion, Army.
Summitt made no secret about her disappointment and promised to show the selection committee just how wrong they were.
Tennessee and its coach took their ire out on an Army team making its first appearance in the NCAA tournament. Candace Parker, the star of that Tennessee team, dunked on the Cadets twice in the game en route to a 102-54 rout. It was the first time a women’s player had dunked twice in the same game.
I may be alone in this opinion, but I thought humiliating a military academy and its first-year coach, Maggie Dixon, was beneath a “legend.” I thought it lacked the class I had always attributed to Pat Summitt.
It didn’t help matters that just weeks later, Dixon collapsed and died from what her brother, Pittsburgh coach Jamie Dixon, described as an “arrhythmic episode to her heart.”
To call the episode “bad timing” is an understatement.
There are few sporting legends who make it through a career without taking a ding or two to their reputation.
And, on reflection, it says something uniquely positive about what Pat Summitt brought to the game of major college women’s basketball that, in my mind, I hold her to the same standard to which I would hold any coach.
Man or woman.
This may be her greatest legacy: Pat Summitt made the title “coach” genderless.