You can judge a coach’s legacy by her record or banners, or you can listen to those she impacted. She won eight NCAA titles, her players had a 100 percent graduation rate, and she built one of college basketball’s great powers over 38 seasons at Tennessee.
Pat Summitt, the winningest coach in college basketball history, died Tuesday after a five-year battle with early onset dementia, Alzheimer’s type. She was 64. The impact she left behind was massive.
Metro State coach Tanya Haave, a former Tennessee basketball player, was inspired by Summitt to pursue a coaching career.
“(Her legacy is) getting women’s basketball to where it is today,” Haave said. “But the lasting legacies for her is going to be the relationships that she had with all her players and that program. She IS Tennessee Lady Vol basketball. The Lady Vols are Pat Summit…It’s almost too overwhelming to answer at this point because she just meant so much.”
It’s no secret playing for Summitt was intense. It was, in part, Summitt’s famous icy stare that pushed Haave, who starred at Evergreen High School before becoming a three-year starter for Tennessee, to three Final Four appearances and a “player of the game” nod in the national championship game in 1984.
But what Haave says many don’t know, is that Summitt was hard on her players because she cared so deeply. She was that hard on her players, but harder on herself. And in turn, her players felt a duty to not let her down. Haave said it was not just a “I don’t want to get yelled at.”
“There was something deeper that you just didn’t want to let her down,” Haave said. “It’s her personality, the presence, what she demanded of herself. You didn’t want to let her down because she was going to demand that of herself. She definitely had that quality about her that transcended to everybody — everybody that worked for her, played for her, that was her life.”
And it wasn’t just her players. Summitt was a consultant for former Broncos star Peyton Manning, who was a quarterback for Tennessee at the time, when decided whether to turn pro or stay in college.
“I’ve always been honored to call Pat Summitt my friend,” Manning said in a statement Tuesday. “She was always very supportive of my career and I enjoyed seeing her back at a Tennessee football game or when she would come to Indianapolis to see Tamika Catchings play. We would always get together and I made it a point when I came to Knoxville to visit with her.”
Those who coached against Summitt were touched by her as well. Former University of Colorado women’s basketball coach Ceal Barry coached against Summit three times. She lost all three.
Barry puts Summitt on the shortlist of the major women’s basketball icons, along with Billie Moore and Jody Conradt.
“They were women that I can look up to and say this is not just how their teams played, this how they dressed, this is how they behaved on the sideline, this is how they interacted with officials, this is how they conducted themselves at the Women’s Final Four,” Barry said. “They were just first-class people. And pat was the leader amongst those.”
