by Pat Summitt
“What are you girls doing?”
“We just been beatin’ these boys in basketball,” Diane said.
I liked the sound of that.
“Well, do you know who I am?”
“You must be Pat Head,” Diane said.
“I am. Tryouts will be in two weeks.”
I was a newly minted twenty-two-year-old coach, and the young woman looking back at me was twenty-one. I was only two or three months older than her, and a season earlier had stood on a court playing against her. Yet now I was supposed to tell her what to do.
I was bluffing.
How did I begin? I just began—put one foot in front of the other. When I view the start of my professional life from the end point, I see that I was just a linear force, on a straight, determined march forward. I had no sense yet of the cycle of things and no deep or ingenious thoughts. All I had was my own impulse to emerge into the professional world, to get going.
My office was in a small attic at the top of a creaking old building called Alumni Gym. I had to climb five flights of stairs to get to it, and, honey, it was hot as the blazes up there. But it was the least of the heat that I was under. I didn’t spend much time at my desk, because I was too busy running from one place to another. I was taking four classes toward my master’s, and teaching four more to undergraduates as part of the advanced degree program, and whatever I had left after that eight-hour day I was supposed to devote to coaching, while on the side I was trying to rehab my knee and train for the Olympics. So I wasn’t thinking, I’m going to build a national powerhouse at Tennessee and be a trail-blazer for women. My aim that first season was just to survive.
I’d never coached a day in my life. I’d never organized a practice or designed a game plan, never brought a team together. The first thing I had to do was get some players. As I scanned the Tennessee roster, I saw that the average height of the squad was all of five foot five. The senior point guard was Joy Scruggs—a slight little brunette who stood exactly five foot one.
In later years I had a policy with our players: always look me in the eye. That wasn’t possible with this group. They weren’t tall enough.
I made flyers announcing open tryouts and posted them around campus. There was no such thing as recruiting back then in women’s basketball; to make up a team you just walked down dormitory hallways, saying, “You wanna play?”
When I walked into Alumni Gym for those first tryouts, I found forty or so young women, and every one was a short, sweet little white girl who hailed from the state of Tennessee and had come out of the high school system that forbade them from playing full court. They wore their own mismatching practice gear, ragged T-shirts and canvas sneakers, along with earrings and necklaces and hair clips. Then there was Suzanne Barbre, a freshman. She came to tryouts wearing Daisy Duke cutoff jean shorts—and carrying a pocketbook.
I had no basketball “philosophy.” All I had was some basic training as a student teacher, which told me, “Go in and start off tough. You can always let up.” I walked into the room intending to let them know who was in charge. I surveyed them appraisingly. “You must have had a good summer,” I said. “You’ve probably put on a few pounds. You’re going to have to work hard to get back in shape.”
For the next three hours, I drilled them at a frenetic pace: fast-break drills, defensive drills, full-court passing drills. A couple of the young ladies were so inexperienced they didn’t know to turn around as they went up the court and got hit in the back of the head with the ball.
Then came conditioning: “Hit the stairs!” I ordered. They sprinted up one set of the extremely steep Alumni bleachers and down another. “Again,” I ordered. And again.
Forty girls went up one set of bleacher stairs—and half of them quit at the top. They just never came down.
Of the twenty or so remaining players, I noticed four of them running together with their tongues hanging out. After the second suicide sprint, when they got to the end line, they just kept on going. All four of them ran out of the gym door, up the steps, and I never saw them again.
That night I called Billie Moore and wondered aloud if I’d been too demanding. It was only the first day.
“Billie, about forty people came,” I said. “But half of them left and didn’t come back.”
“That’s wonderful,” Billie said, delighted. “That’s just fine.”
“It is?” I said.
“Better to have seven or eight who really want to be there,” she said.
Actually, I ended up with eleven players. I took them down to a little cubbyhole office in the basement of Alumni and opened up a big brown box. Inside were their new uniforms, bright orange ones that had been bought with money from a doughnut sale. They were made of hot coarse polyester, and not all of them fit, but at least they made us look like a team—until we washed them, when they all bled into slightly different shades.
Next, I had to find some volunteer assistants, because I simply had more work than I could handle. In addition to my classes, and holding practices, I also had to drive the van on road trips, do the team laundry, and tape ankles, since we didn’t have trainers. For help I turned to a friend and fellow grad student, Sylvia Rhyne, a sweet bighearted Southern Baptist girl with a spacious grin. Sylvia volunteered to be an assistant coach while another fellow grad student named Judy Rose offered to be our manager. Years later Sylvia Rhyne Hatchell would win a national championship at North Carolina, while Judy Wilkins Rose became athletics director at UNC-Charlotte and a force in the NCAA.
The day of our first game arrived: December 7, 1974, against Mercer University. I got to Alumni Gym early because, in addition to doing the team laundry, it was my responsibility to see that the floor was ready. Our men’s team played in Stokely Athletics Center, a modern 12,700-seat arena with a full staff to set it up on game days. But it was up to me to get Alumni, a sagging old redbrick relic of the 1920s that also housed a swimming pool and a stage, ready for a crowd. It seated thirty-two hundred people on shaky pull-out bleachers that closely crowded the sidelines, and the floor was so dim with varnish and had so many black lines on it you could hardly tell where to shoot a free throw from. Also it was dark—you practically needed a miner’s lamp to see.
I turned on the lights and found the game clock and set it up. I swept the floor clean. Next, I had to set up the benches. As I did so, I heard a shuffling noise and turned to find that Alumni’s custodian, a gentleman named Doug Pease, was unfolding chairs. Doug could tell how harried and overworked I was and decided to help, and from that moment on he became my chief ally. He’d turn on the breakers in the morning and stay with me until we closed up the gym at night.
Once the floor was set up, I went into the locker room, which was just a lounge area with a couple of vending machines and some straight-backed Naugahyde chairs. I began to tape our players’ ankles, which I wasn’t very good at—in our first practice, I left ridges in the tape, which rubbed against their feet and blistered them. Thirty years later players still complained that they had scars from my tape job. Finally, a sophomore guard named Jackie Watson said, “Coach, I know how to tape ankles,” and I said, “Then you’re gonna have to help me out.” So Jackie became the official ankle taper.
My pregame instructions were simple, by necessity. Since so many of our new players had never played full court, I gave everyone specific responsibilities and told them to just concentrate on that. Our point guard was the young woman I’d met on the sidewalk, Diane Brady, a curly-haired senior, five foot two, with a soft-spoken, breathy voice and a wide-eyed, almost angelic face.
I looked down at Diane and said, “Your job is to take care of the ball. Do you understand me?”
Diane talked slow in her breathy little voice and she said, “I got it, Coach. I got it.”
Then she said, “Are you nervous?”
“No,” I lied. “Why—am I acting like it?”
“Well, your neck’s broke out,” she said.
I gl
anced in a mirror and saw that, in fact, my neck was mottled with vivid red splotches, which would continue to appear on every game day for the next thirty-eight years. “Let’s just go play,” I said hastily.
There were exactly fifty-three spectators in the gym, and most were parents. University president Andy Holt was there, carrying a sack of ham biscuits to snack on. Also in the crowd was Esther Hubbard, who was newly married and had driven over from her home in nearby Johnson City for moral support. Esther was around quite a lot and had gotten to know the players, so well, in fact, that as Diane Brady was dribbling up the court, she spotted Esther. Diane paused in middribble to wave and say, “Heeeeyyyy!” Which Esther thought was “cute,” but her coach was less pleased.
We lost the game. By one point, 84–83.
Afterward I called my parents. My mother answered the phone—and, bless her heart, never asked if we won or lost. Never even mentioned it, which was typical of her. She wanted to know if I liked graduate school, and how my classes were, and whether I was getting enough to eat, letting me know in her own way that she loved me no matter what the score was. But finally, after a few minutes of telling her about school, I said, “Mama, you better let me talk to Dad.”
He came to the phone, which he didn’t particularly like talking on. I never heard my father say hello.
He just picked up the receiver and said, “Awright.”
“Hi, Dad,” I said.
“How’d you do?”
“We lost.”
“How much?
“Uh, one point.”
Pause.
“Well,” he said, “you don’t take donkeys to the Kentucky Derby.”
And then he put the phone down. That was it.
Obviously, my father wasn’t going to be a great source of coaching advice. Nevertheless, there was something in what he said. It was lesson number one, the most fundamental fact of coaching: it was all about the players. There were a lot of things I could do as a coach, but I couldn’t go out there and make kids taller, or faster.
But of course they weren’t donkeys—they were incredibly willing kids who got the most out of what they had, and the season before, under a far more experienced coach in Margaret Hutson, they’d gone 25-2. Logic told me that I was at least as responsible for a one-point loss as they were. One point? That was reversible. I couldn’t make them bigger, but I could prepare them better, neutralize some weaknesses, and enhance their strengths by becoming a better coach. I hadn’t helped them much from the bench, I realized. I wish now that I’d been more knowledgeable, but I wasn’t. Before the game started, my brother Tommy asked me, “What kind of defense will Mercer play?” I replied, “I don’t know.” That’s how unprepared I was.
We had almost a month off before our next game because it was Christmas break, which left me plenty of time to think about what to do. All I had to go on was my instincts, and they told me, “Run, don’t walk.” We didn’t have a lot of basketball knowledge, I reasoned, so we’d have to go on courage. And since we didn’t have size, we’d have to go on speed. We’d have to become a running, pressing team. If we couldn’t outplay people, maybe we could outrun them.
We went back into Alumni Gym and I instituted a fast-break offense, and to practice it we used something called the Bungle Drill, which we named after a hit song that year, “Bungle in the Jungle.” It was a full-court up-tempo weave that the players actually loved. Every time I called it out, our freshman guard Suzanne Barbre would look at little Diane Brady and say, “Brady, let’s go bungle in the jungle!” Off they would go, weaving up the court, with my voice driving them.
It was December and freezing outside, and Alumni Gym was barely heated, so the kids practiced in full sweats, blowing plumes of frost out of their mouths. I’d say, “Look at Brady, she’s not even sweating,” as if I was a prosecutor and her lack of sweat was evidence against them. Then I’d make them run some more.
It worked. When we came back from Christmas break on January 10, 1975, we got our first victory, a 69–32 win over Middle Tennessee State, and from there we went on a six-game winning streak. We ended up posting more than 100 points in eight games, and the kids sprinted so hard and tirelessly that a referee actually said to them, “What do you girls do, run up and down those east Tennessee mountains?” Late in the season, a Tennessee human physiology professor conducted a heart rate experiment on them. He asked guard Jackie Watson and a couple of other players to run on a treadmill, and was amazed at how long they could go without stopping.
“What in the world does she do to you all?” he asked.
Looking back on it, that first team put up with an awful lot from their young, hardheaded coach. I was reluctant to get too friendly with them, or even to laugh, in case it might undermine my authority. I built a wall so they would know that despite our ages I was in charge. My style was intentionally barking and intimidating.
We traveled in a fifteen-passenger van, sometimes for as long as twelve or fourteen hours, and I wasn’t a lot of fun on those long, monotonous drives. I’d grip the wheel and zone out, thinking about how we could get better, to the point that I got a crease in my forehead. Periodically, to keep from falling asleep, I’d roll the window down and stick my head out into the cold air. Once, when we were driving in bad weather, I was concentrating so hard that I never noticed when the rain stopped. The wipers kept going. Screech, screech. I kept driving. After a few minutes, the windshield got so dry that the wipers began to make that sound that’s worse that squeaking. Rhent, rhent, rhent. Behind me, the players raised their eyebrows and choked back giggles, but I drove on, oblivious.
It seemed like we drove forever. The tension in the van was getting thick. Finally someone said to no one in particular but loud enough for her to hear, “Is it still raining?” We all thought we’d die for trying not to laugh. It was just enough for Pat to realize the wipers could be turned off.
—JOY SCRUGGS
One big road trip that year was to Western Carolina, in Cullowhee, North Carolina, and it was a trying one. We played horribly, and to compound matters every one of our starters got in foul trouble. We finally pulled the game out in the final seconds, 69–66, which was a relief, but I wasn’t happy. I went in the locker room and put my hands on my hips and delivered a tirade as if we’d just lost. They looked back at me in shock; I could see from their expressions what they were thinking: We’ve never been yelled at before for winning.
After the game, we loaded up the team van and set out on the four-hour return trip. Most of the kids fell asleep, while I stewed. But Diane Brady wasn’t asleep. Out of the darkness I heard her soft voice say, “I thought we could have played some zone since we were in such foul trouble.” All around Diane, players flinched—they were no doubt thinking, If Brady doesn’t shut up, we’re going to have to run tomorrow.
I started talking about what kind of D to play—which was like telling Moses how to part the sea.
—DIANE BRADY
But I was so surprised, I just said, “Why do you say that?” I let Diane explain that the way the refs were blowing the whistle, maybe a more conservative zone would have saved us some fouls. But what little philosophy I had at the time, I was stubborn about. I taught strict man-to-man defense, because it was active and aggressive. In my mind a zone was “lazy.” It meant sitting back while the other team came at you. A zone was static, stationary. I let Diane argue back, and neither of us conceded the point, and finally the discussion wound down.
I didn’t make anybody run—I actually respected Diane for having the spirit to talk basketball with me. But I was a little concerned with whether she’d follow my orders. I found out she was on my side one afternoon during a game against East Tennessee State. There was a dead ball near our bench, and she came over to inbound. She was standing near me on the sideline, so I gave her some instructions on what to do when play restarted. Brady was so intent on doing what I asked that she never made an entry pass—she just dribbled the ball inbounds. The ref
blew the whistle—turnover. I didn’t have the heart to bark at her for the mistake, because I was so relieved she listened to me. That was what an insecure young coach I was.
I was uneven, not yet sure of my methods, and often as not I sabotaged us. When we fell behind our cross-state rival Union University by five points, I decided to “motivate” them for the second half by making them run wind sprints in the basement during intermission. It was not exactly the recipe for a comeback—we lost. On another occasion, my halftime speech consisted of announcing, “I don’t know what to say. You all talk it over, and when you decide that you want to play, you can come back out on the floor.” Then I turned and left.
We finished with a 16-8 record, and I wish I could say it was all part of the master plan and I knew what Tennessee would become. But I didn’t. I was just a twenty-two-year-old kid fighting through her first job, confused and blind to the future. Someone who didn’t know what she was doing yet, except that she loved the game and wanted it to grow. At the end of that season when our women’s sports administrator Nancy Lay asked me what I “envisioned” for the future, I answered, “I want to fill the gym.”
The better results came off the court. Diane Brady graduated and went off to work for an accountant, but within a few weeks she called me and said she thought she was in the wrong line of work. She wanted to become a teacher and a coach, and could I help her get into the master’s program? I was touched: Diane had been such a loyal, diligent player, and the fact that she wanted to be a coach meant I hadn’t traumatized her too badly, and even had a little influence. When she came back to campus to enroll in grad school, she stayed in my apartment for a night. It was nice to be at ease with her and to talk like friends instead of player-coach.
That night I gave Diane two books that were important to me at the time, and which show you where my head was. One was Zig Ziglar’s Reaching the Top, the first of thousands of leadership books I’d collect over the coming years, looking for a clue as to how to do my job. Ziglar was the success guru of the 1970s, and he issued platitudes that rang true to me, like, “Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.” But perhaps most influential was this one, which spoke to the aspiring teacher in me: “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”
