Pat Summitt

Patricia Susan Summitt (Head; June 14, 1952 – June 28, 2016) was an American women's college basketball head coach who accrued 1,098 career wins, the most in college basketball history at the time of her retirement.

Summitt was born Patricia Sue Head on June 14, 1952, in Clarksville, Tennessee, the daughter of Richard and Hazel Albright Head.

In her early years, she was known as Trish.

She had four siblings: older brothers Tommy, Charles, and Kenneth, and a younger sister, Linda.

When Summitt was in high school, her family moved to nearby Henrietta so she could play basketball in Cheatham County, because Clarksville did not have a girls team.

From there, Summitt went to the University of Tennessee at Martin, where she won All-American honors playing for UT–Martin's first women's basketball coach, Nadine Gearin.

In 1970, with the passage of Title IX still two years away, there were no athletic scholarships for women.

Each of Summitt's brothers had received athletic scholarships, but her parents paid her way to college.

Tennessee closed the 1970s by winning the first-ever SEC tournament, and returning to the AIAW Final Four, where they finished runner-up to Old Dominion, 68–53.

She served as the head coach of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team from 1974 to 2012.

Just before the 1974–75 season, with women's college basketball still in its infancy and not yet an NCAA-sanctioned sport, 22-year-old Summitt became a graduate assistant at the University of Tennessee, and was named head coach of the Lady Vols after the previous coach suddenly quit.

Summitt earned $250 monthly and washed the players' uniforms – uniforms purchased the previous year with proceeds from a doughnut sale.

She coached her first game for Tennessee on December 7, 1974, against Mercer University in Macon, Georgia; the Lady Vols lost 84–83.

Her first win came almost a month later when the Lady Vols defeated Middle Tennessee State, 69–32 on January 10, 1975.

The Lady Vols won the Tennessee College Women's Sports Federation (TCWSF) Eastern District Championship for the third straight year.

However, the team finished 4th overall in the TCWSF (they had been second the previous two years), and were not invited to the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) tournament.

Summitt won a silver medal at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal as a member of the United States women's national basketball team.

She later co-captained the United States women's national basketball team as a player at the inaugural women's tournament in the 1976 Summer Olympics, winning the silver medal.

In her second season, Summitt coached the Lady Vols to a 16–11 record while earning her 1976 master's degree in physical education and training as the co-captain of the 1976 U.S. Women's Olympic basketball team that won a silver medal in Montreal.

Starting with the 1976–77 season, Summitt directed two 20-win teams, winning back-to-back AIAW Region II championships.

The Lady Vols defeated 3-time AIAW champion Delta State by 20 points in 1978, and earned Tennessee its first number one ranking.

1978 saw the Lady Vols participate in their first AIAW Final Four, where they finished third.

During Summitt's first year as head coach, four of her players were only a year younger than she was and all were from Tennessee high schools, which until 1980 employed a six-person game where offensive and defensive players never crossed mid-court.

During the 1980–81 season, the Lady Vols went 25–6, and avenged their championship game loss to Old Dominion by defeating them three times.

The team made it to the AIAW Final Four for the third straight year; finished runner-up for the second consecutive year, losing to Louisiana Tech, 79–59.

The 1981–82 season featured the first ever NCAA women's basketball tournament.

She returned to the Olympics in 1984 as a head coach, guiding the U.S. women's basketball team to a gold medal.

Summitt won eight NCAA Division I basketball championships.

In 38 years as coach of the Tennessee Lady Volunteers, she never missed the NCAA Tournament nor did she ever have a losing season.

Summitt retired from coaching at age 59 following a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's disease.

Eight years later in 1984, she coached the U.S. women's team to an Olympic gold medal, becoming the first U.S. Olympian to win a basketball medal and coach a medal-winning team.

Summitt was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999 as a member of its inaugural class.

She was named the Naismith Basketball Coach of the Century in 2000.

In 2009, the Sporting News placed her at number 11 on its list of the 50 Greatest Coaches of All Time in all sports; she was the only woman on the list.

Summitt recalled that era of women's basketball during a February 2009 interview with Time.

"I had to drive the van when I first started coaching," Summitt said.

"One time, for a road game, we actually slept in the other team's gym the night before. We had mats, we had our little sleeping bags. When I was a player at the University of Tennessee at Martin, we played at Tennessee Tech for three straight games, and we didn't wash our uniforms. We only had one set. We played because we loved the game. We didn't think anything about it."

Summitt also recorded her 100th win during this season, a 79–66 victory over NC State.

In 2012, Summitt was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama and received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the 2012 ESPY Awards.

In 2013, she was inducted into the FIBA Hall of Fame.