Success Hasn’t Made Summit Complacent Tennessee Coach Keeps Up Her Hard Work In Quest For Title

It’s a very hot, sunny Saturday afternoon in August. Tennessee coach Pat Summitt climbs into the rear seat of a little hatchback for a quick ride over to Kemper Arena.

Good time to go look at the future.

Coach, you don’t have to sit in the back, she is told. Summitt laughs.

“Oh, it’s not a problem,” she says, “I don’t mind.”

Here’s a woman who flat out cherishes her job. She’s in Kansas City for a coaches’ clinic on this humid late-summer day, which happens to be her 17th wedding anniversary. She has a cute, little blond boy named Tyler back home in Knoxville, Tenn., who can’t wait until Mom returns.

There are also five NCAA championship trophies in Knoxville. Summitt has done it all in women’s basketball. And if someone has the right to kick back and start big-timing people, it’s Summitt.

“I love the game, I love what I do,” Summitt said. “I know plenty of people who are miserable doing what they do, but I get paid to do something I absolutely love.”

And so on this day - two months before basketball practice for the 1997-98 season will start, before she’s actually had a chance to watch the much-hyped recruits who join her team, before the season’s first death gaze at a ref - Summitt takes a look at the building she hopes to celebrate in come March.

This was all before Tennessee’s 33-0 run to an NCAA No. 1 seed, the wire-to-wire top ranking in both The Associated Press and coaches’ polls.

It was before Summitt’s vaunted freshman class proved it was as good as advertised, before Tennessee lost sophomore Kyra Elzy to a knee injury but kept steamrolling people.

Before all the chatter about whether this Tennessee team is the best in women’s college basketball history, before Summitt was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, being called the “Wizard of Knoxville.”

In August, Summitt could visualize what kind of team she was going to have, but the only things for certain then were: Tennessee was the defending national champion, had a great recruiting class coming in and had no real depth or experience in the low block.

Summitt had dismissed Tiffani Johnson, an accomplished post player who would have been a senior, because of violations of team policy. She hadn’t yet seen the fab freshmen - Tamika Catchings, Semeka Randall, Kristen Clement and Teresa Geter - actually on court together as her players.

But she had a pretty good idea of what they would be like.

As it has turned out, Summitt maybe couldn’t have envisioned just how well those players would mesh. Catchings and Randall, in particular, immediately became players on the highest level.

They joined junior Chamique Holdsclaw, the favorite to be consensus national player of the year.

One after another - big names like Connecticut and Georgia, small names like Vermont and Akron - they all lined up to get pressed to death by Tennessee.

And the record stayed perfect, and the legend continued to build.

Now, as Tennessee prepares for the NCAA Tournament, Summitt may not remind her team about the goal to go to Kansas City.

“In October, you know you’re working for Kansas City,” she said way back in August, when March Madness seemed so far away. “So we’ll talk about Kansas City a lot.

“And yet as we get closer and closer to the playoffs, we talk less and less about Kansas City. Because then we focus on what we’ve got to do.”

She won’t have to say it. Everyone will know what she’s talking about.