Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press
Pat Summitt has coached for 35 seasons at Tennessee.
By KAREN CROUSE
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — It happens to every Lady Volunteers basketball player who has gone into coaching. She’ll be railing about a lazy pass in practice. Glaring at a player who failed to box out an opponent. Lecturing how leadership is about being respected, not liked.
Then it hits her. She has grown up to be just like her coach at Tennessee, Pat Summitt.
“That happens quite often, and it’s quite scary,” said Carla McGhee, who is on the coaching staff at South Carolina. “As a player, I couldn’t see why Pat would get so upset about a lack of effort, why she would say it was disrespecting the game. Now when I see a lack of effort, something about it just grates my nerves, and before I know it, I blow my top, and then, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m Pat.’ ”
Mimicking her is one thing. Matching her success will be a tall order. In 35 seasons at Tennessee, Summitt’s winning percentage is .844. She has guided her current team, which starts four freshmen and has one upperclassman, to a 15-3 record and No. 10 ranking in the Associated Press poll.
The Lady Volunteers, the two-time defending N.C.A.A. champions, will play Sunday at unbeaten and sixth-ranked Auburn, intent on securing career victory No. 999 for Summitt. No coach, man or woman, is within 30 victories of her total.
“People talk about 1,000 wins,” Summitt, 56, said last week in her office. “I remind them that I’ve never scored a basket for the University of Tennessee.”
A better measure of Summitt’s success — in her eyes, anyway — is this: 45 Lady Volunteers, about a third of the players who have passed through her program, have become coaches — from youth leagues to the pros. In her coaching tree, the first ring was formed this season with the arrival of Glory Johnson, whose high school coach was Shelley Sexton-Collier, whose college coach was Summitt.
“This job is all about the relationships,” Summitt said, “so obviously that’s rewarding.”
It is also a relief. When she was handed the reins of the Tennessee program in 1974, Summitt was a 22-year-old graduate student who was training for the Olympics and teaching classes in badminton, tennis and self-defense.
“I’d never coached a day in my life,” she said. “I had no idea what was going to happen to this program.”
She reasons that she must not have messed up too badly, if so many players are following in her footsteps.
“The ones that choose to go into coaching,” Summitt said, “people usually say, ‘Well, there’s a little Pat.’ ”
The sisterhood of traveling Pats includes Nikki Caldwell, who is in her first year at the helm at U.C.L.A. after serving apprenticeships at Virginia Tech and Tennessee, and Tanya Haave, a former all-American in her second year as the coach at San Francisco.
The Lady Volunteers opened this season against Haave’s Dons. The night before the game, Summitt organized a party at her home along the Tennessee River for Haave. Though known for her stare, which is cold enough to freeze time, Summitt is, away from the court, the perfect Southern hostess.
She invited a few women who played alongside Haave in the early 1980s. Over a few beers and some wine, they reminisced past midnight. The next afternoon, Summitt traded her honey glaze for a steely gaze and served Haave a 68-39 defeat.
Equal parts nurturing and schooling, that is the recipe for Summitt’s success. In a game at Rutgers this month, the Lady Volunteers trailed by 20 points at the break. It was the biggest halftime deficit in the program’s history. Huddling with her players, Summitt berated the sophomore guard Angie Bjorklund for not taking enough shots, then growled, “You do not want to go home with me tonight having played this way.”
Message received. Behind Bjorklund’s 12 second-half points, Tennessee rallied for a 55-51 victory.
To play for Summitt is to feel her glare everywhere. She has certain nonnegotiable rules, like requiring her players to sit in the first three rows at class. When they are broken, she has a way of finding out. Even after her players leave, Summitt keeps an eye on them. When Caldwell’s Bruins lost at home to Oregon, 73-56, Summitt called afterward to offer encouragement.
Some coaches come into their athletes’ lives for a few seasons, but when the wind blows, they fall away like leaves. Caldwell said she hoped to emulate Summitt, who lodges into her players’ lives like a root, providing steady nourishment.
“Pat just has a balance,” Caldwell said. “She makes time for people. She treats her players like family. It’s really admirable.”
Suzanne Barbre Singleton, a guard on Summitt’s first four Tennessee teams, planned to be a nurse until she fell under Summitt’s spell. She switched her major to physical education and has spent several years coaching high school, college and Amateur Athletic Union basketball.
In December, after several weeks of tending to her dying father, Barbre Singleton consented to taking him off a ventilator. Ten minutes later, she was outside her father’s room, gathering her emotions, when her cellphone rang. It was Summitt, whom she had not spoken to in a while.
“I just want you to know I’m thinking about you,” said Summitt, whose team was preparing for a game later in the day. Recalling the conversation, Barbre Singleton said, “You don’t know what that meant to me.”
At the start of every season, she sends a media guide to each of her former players, along with a handwritten note. After Haave was named the coach at San Francisco, she received a letter from Summitt saying how proud she was.
The communication goes both ways. Last Tuesday, Summitt and her 83-year-old mother, Hazel, spent the morning opening piles of holiday mail, including 300 Christmas cards. It was the first opportunity Summitt, who was divorced in April, had had since Thanksgiving to sift through her correspondence.
She hears from former players regularly. Some are looking for a box-out drill to use in practice. Others seek career advice or want to know how to motivate an underachieving player. Trish Roberts, who played in the Montreal Olympics alongside Summitt before playing for her at Tennessee, said, “I could pick up the phone and talk to Pat anytime, and she’ll take the time out.”
A half-hour before the Lady Volunteers were scheduled to take the floor against Stanford in the 2008 N.C.A.A. title game in Tampa, Fla., Roberts sent Summitt a text message wishing her luck. Less than five minutes later, she received a reply.
“People say: ‘You played for Pat. Oh, my God, she looks so mean on TV,’ ” said Roberts, who guided the programs at Maine, Michigan and Stony Brook and also coached in the American Basketball League. “I always have to defend her.”
Even Lady Volunteers who did not always get along with Summitt during their playing days tend to come around. Michelle Marciniak, a guard who was an integral part of Tennessee’s 1996 national championship, said: “I have a great deal of respect for Pat. I didn’t always like her when I was playing for her.”
After stints in the A.B.L. and the W.N.B.A., Marciniak turned to coaching. When she was a South Carolina assistant two years ago, she wrote a letter to Summitt.
“The gist of it was, Thank you for all you’ve done for me,” Marciniak said. “I may not have appreciated it then, but I’m very grateful now.”
Summitt was pregnant with her son Tyler when she was recruiting Marciniak in 1990. During her official visit to Marciniak’s home in Pennsylvania, Summitt went into labor. She stayed long enough to deliver her pitch before returning to Tennessee to give birth.
Tyler, who turned 18 in September, is a senior at the Webb School of Knoxville. He takes notes on the Lady Volunteers’ games and leaves them for his mother. After a 1-point loss to Virginia in November, his observations filled two pages.
“Point guards passed to corners too much, and ball got stuck down there,” he wrote, adding: “A lot of time, posts were late on help side. When they did help, there was no one there for the weakside rebound. That gave them at least five rebounds.”
And so sprouts another branch in Summitt’s coaching tree.
“He’s already told me he wants my job,” she said. She laughed. “I told him the list is long.”
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