Legendary Lady Vol basketball coach Pat Head Summitt is from Henrietta, Tennessee. She is an alumna (1974) of UT at Martin, where she played basketball and volleyball. Although the name “Pat” Summitt is recognized worldwide, she was and is “Trish” to her family and friends of longest standing. The radio broadcaster who announced some of her high school basketball games always referred to her as Pat, for some reason, and when she arrived at UT at Martin, her basketball prowess and the name Pat had preceded her. In 1973 she was first named to a United States team when she represented the United States in the World University Games in the Soviet Union. She returned to UT at Martin for her senior year and suffered an almost-career-ending knee injury four games into her final basketball season there.
She was determined to get the knee back into shape for the 1976 Olympic Games. She was offered a graduate assistantship through which she was to coach the women’s basketball team at UT. She coached the team, took classes as a master’s degree candidate, taught physical education classes, and worked on being sure that the knee was in shape. She received the MA in 1975 in physical education and made the 1976 Olympic Team, which won a silver medal.
She has coached teams in the Pan American Games, World Championships, and Olympics, among other international competitions. In 1997 she was named by Working Mother magazine as one of the 25 Most Influential Working Mothers; she has authored three books; has served as chair of the Knoxville United Way; has been an active spokeswoman for the United Way, Race for the Cure, and Juvenile Diabetes; and has served as Tennessee chair of the American Heart Association.
She is the first coach in NCAA women’s basketball to have coached three consecutive national championship teams. In 1990 she received the John Bunn Award from the Basketball Hall of Fame, the first female to receive the award. She was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2000. She was inducted into the Women’s Sports Foundation Hall of Fame in 1990 and was a charter inductee into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999. She has been named “Coach of the Year” multiple times by multiple organizations. In April 2000 she was named the Naismith Coach of the Century.
On March 22, 2005, she broke the NCAA career record of 879 victories held by Dean Smith of North Carolina, when the Lady Vols defeated Purdue in the second round of the NCAA tournament in Knoxville. And on February 5, 2009, she notched her one-thousandth victory and was designated, following the game, as the first recipient of a star on Knoxville’s River Walk by Mayor Bill Haslam. Also in 2009 she received the Jim and Natalie Haslam Presidential Medal. The UT Athletics Department hosted an event, “Pat Summitt’s Night of 1,000 Stories,” at the Tennessee Theatre on May 3 that year.
In 2006 she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, for which she began taking strong medicines. In August 2011 she announced that she had been diagnosed with dementia—Alzheimer’s type—but would coach the 2011–12 season and hoped to coach at least three more years. Colleagues reported that they had noticed that she was sometimes not “on point” but had attributed it to the medicines for rheumatoid arthritis she was taking. After coaching one season, she became coach emeritus, and Holly Warlick was appointed head coach. Controversy arose about whether she had made the decision to transition to coach emeritus or whether Athletics Director Dave Hart had made the decision. Summitt formed the Pat Summitt Foundation within the East Tennessee Foundation, which supports Alzheimer’s research and in January 2015 announced that the foundation and her son, Tyler, were creating the Pat Summitt Alzheimer’s Clinic at UT Medical Center.
Summitt has received thousands of honors and awards. In 2012, Summitt received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. UT recognized her achievements in January 2013 by raising a banner bearing her name in Thompson-Boling Arena, above “The Summitt” basketball court. The institution also permanently recognized her contributions by installation of the Pat Summitt Plaza at the corner of Lake Loudoun Boulevard and Philip Fulmer Way in 2013.
In July 2013 ESPN aired a documentary about Summitt entitled Pat XO.
Summitt passed away on June 28, 2016 at the age of 64.