Pat Summitt
Pat Summitt
Patricia Sue "Pat" Summittwas an American college basketball head coach whose 1,098 career wins are the most in NCAA basketball history. She served as the head coach of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team from 1974 to 2012, before retiring at age 59 because of a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. She won eight NCAA championships, a number surpassed only by the 10 titles won by UCLA men's coach John Wooden and the 11 titles won by UConn...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth14 June 1952
CityClarksville, TN
CountryUnited States of America
Our philosophy has always been you better pack your defense and your board work on the road. Because those ugly nights and those poor shooting nights you just have to grind games out. Today, we just had to grind it out.
Our team responded coming out of halftime. I never even imagined coaching 900 games and it is just wonderful.
I thought it was a game where we developed a lot of character from beginning to end. We were very nervous offensively, but it didn't affect how we played on the defensive end, fortunately.
I thought we played very well together and got the ball inside. We played an efficient game overall, if you just look statistically.
We were more committed and more aggressive defensively. We opened the game running a switching man, and that allowed us to keep constant pressure on the basketball. We just kept pressure on them.
We have a mutual respect for this game and working with young people, not just on the basketball court but to see these young women become confident and successful in career opportunities beyond basketball.
We have to win that basketball game to have a chance to win the league, and that's still our goal.
I just want her to play the game under control. And for her, it's much different from any player I've ever coached in that she can be flat-footed and go up and dunk. So it's not like things have to be perfect in her basketball world for her to dunk. If she goes up inside and dunks it, more power to her.
They are very familiar with our program and our philosophy, ... but when you have been in the game as long as I have and been on television as much as we have, I think everyone knows pretty much every move we make.
We weren't good in any aspect of our game tonight.
This team should not have lost back-to-back games. Kentucky was better tonight. This team has to understand that they just can't go out there and play. They have to execute a game plan and be mindful of one possession at a time on offense and defense.
You don't win a basketball game in the first half, but you certainly can lose one.
They know as a team they have to get better. We've been talking about this now for four games going into the Duke game as a staff and just basically trying to send out a warning signal to this team.
It was very apparent that Duke wanted this game and they went after it in a much more aggressive, determined way than we did. Quite a difference in how their defense affected what we did offensively and what we did to them. They pretty much ran what they wanted to run. They handled traps. Defensively, they disrupted us and we did not disrupt them.