by Pat Summitt
“I’m doing everything I can,” he said.
Our defense flapped and waved at Stanford, about as effectually as laundry on a clothesline. I called a time-out and stamped my heels, but nothing prevented the slaughter. Final score: Stanford 82, Tennessee 65. The Lady Vols left the floor dispirited, their uniforms hanging on them limply, like sails with no wind.
Each season at Tennessee was its own torturous journey, but 1996–1997 was shaping up like just plain torture. We were on our way to setting a program record for losses—and for quarreling among ourselves. The Stanford game was a new low: it was our worst home loss in a decade, and it gave us a 7-3 record, our slowest start since 1984. Afterward Chamique Holdsclaw and I walked together disconsolately to a press conference to face the questions about what was wrong with the Lady Vols.
“I can’t wait till next year,” Chamique whispered to me.
I said, “We’ll be all right.” But inwardly I was thinking the same thing. How am I going to get through this? I wondered. We were only ten games into the season, and our schedule stretched ahead like a dark river. We were thin and injured, and had no chemistry, and if I was honest with myself, I didn’t really like where this team was headed. I liked them plenty as people, lunch companions, but as competitors they were too laid-back and low energy. Nor did I always like myself as their coach.
As I looked over our roster, I saw nothing but problems with no quick fix. Kellie Jolly had torn her anterior cruciate ligament in October playing a game of pickup, literally the day before our first fall practice. I couldn’t restore Kellie’s knee. We had some promising freshmen in Kyra Elzy, Niya Butts, and LaShonda Stephens, but they were floundering, and it wasn’t in my power to make them older overnight. We had a staunch point guard in Laurie Milligan, but she had been thrust into the starting position hurriedly because of Kellie’s injury, and I couldn’t fast-forward her progress.
As soon as we got Kellie’s diagnosis, I knew we were in trouble. “This is going to be a long year,” I told R.B. Kellie was one of Tyler’s crushes, a platinum-braided kid from Sparta, Tennessee, who had taken over from Michelle Marciniak as our floor leader, and was one of the best I’d ever seen at the position. She invariably called the right play at the right moment, and sent the ball to the right place, but more than that, Kellie had a quality that everyone on our team drew from: heart. She was our most conscientious player, the daughter of a coach and schoolteacher, who got absolutely everything out of her physical talent and brought her best every day.
“Pat never gets on you,” the other Lady Vols would say, enviously.
Kellie would reply, “What the heck is she going to say to me? I can’t do anything more than I’m doing. I’m maxed out.”
At her first team meeting as a freshman, Kellie had showed how willing she was to do what I asked. We had a plush blue leather sectional sofa that the kids loved to sink into. I marched in and said, “First things first, sit up straight and look me in the eye.” Kellie sprang up from the blue cushions and sat so ramrod straight, I thought she might salute.
I was worried that I had been leaning back on that couch and what was this woman thinking of me, because I had obviously screwed up already.
—KELLIE JOLLY
Yet Kellie was unafraid of me, and our relationship had budded early because of it. There was no strife, no tension or resistance, just a growing bond. In the spring of ’96, she came to my office and gave me a gift: a photograph. Kellie’s mother, Peggy, had captured the moment that my father hugged me in the stands the night we won the championship, and Kellie framed a copy of the photograph and brought it to me, a dear gesture that touched me like no overture from a player ever had.
Our team followed Kellie’s lead in everything, and her absence left a huge void. She underwent surgery to have a new ACL grafted into her knee, and as soon as the doctor pronounced her well enough, she began rehabbing for six hours a day. Her goal was to get back on the floor before the season was over, and every time the Lady Vols took the court for a big game without her, she agonized. Just before the Stanford tip-off, she had gone into the bathroom and dissolved in tears.
I felt powerless to help our team, and I wasn’t dealing with it well. I juggled different lineups, looking for one that might click—I would try thirteen different combinations by the season’s end. My response to problems was to work harder, push harder, to fight even harder. But there were some things grinding couldn’t cure.
Nothing was working. We were a team of mistakes, mishaps, missed connections, and misunderstandings. My greatest misunderstanding was with senior Abby Conklin. It was a continual challenge to try to read kids, to peer into their hearts, or in their heads, and hoping to gain a little insight, I had turned to something called the Predictive Index, a personality assessment test that business managers used to put people in the right job. It was an advance over just going to a player’s guidance counselor, which was what I had done in the old days. The PI gave me an outline of a player’s emotional strengths and insecurities, and what might motivate her.
But the PI was useless with Abby. She took it three times, with three completely different results. The first time she took it, she didn’t believe the profile was really hers, so she asked to take it again, and then again. Each time she would decide who she wanted to be and make different choices. That was Abby.
She was a six-foot-three forward with a beautiful, arcing three-point shot, smooth as the lank brown ponytail she wore on the back of her head like a martial arts master. But she struggled with self-doubt as a ballplayer. She came from farm country in Charlestown, Indiana, where her father, Harlo, ran a nursery and a greenhouse, and Harlo wanted to keep her in the Midwest. He told Abby he didn’t think she could cut it with us, that she was a half step slow. “I just don’t think she’s good enough,” he told me frankly.
I said, “Harlo, why don’t you let me make that decision? I don’t tell you how to grow flowers.”
But if you hear something enough, you believe it, and Abby heard she wasn’t good enough. With Michelle Marciniak, the challenge had been to curb her self-regard and high emotion, but with Abby it was the dead opposite. She lacked confidence in certain areas, and she covered it up with a demeanor that could seem almost indifferent. I didn’t do the best job of understanding that, and I mishandled her at times. I was so unsure in my dealings with Abby that sometimes I gave her praise and criticism even in the same breath.
“CONKLIN! Get off the court! You act like a whipped puppy! I went to Indiana to get a competitor and instead I got you!”
I just stood in the shower for a long time debating, Can I pack my car up and be back in Indiana by about nine?
—ABBY CONKLIN
“Conklin! You had 18 points in that game, nobody in the country can stop you—but you gave up 17. So basically you were worth one point on the floor!”
From her perspective, Abby felt like she could never please me. When she shot the ball too much, I told her maybe she was too selfish to play basketball; maybe she should play golf. That only made her quit shooting altogether. She’d pass up an open shot and give the ball to Chamique. I snapped, “I didn’t recruit you for your passing skills.” I would rail at her, just to try to provoke any reaction. Fight back! I would think.
Every day in practice Pat put you in the most adverse, tough situations that she could, verbally, physically, and mentally; she got you spinning. And you had to control yourself and get through it or you would get buried. Pat would bury you.
—ABBY CONKLIN
Abby didn’t like being crowded and confronted by me, and her way of dealing with it was avoidance, or sarcasm. She was witty, in her dry, low-key way. One day the kids teasingly suggested I should get a tattoo and launched into a discussion of what emblem would be right for me. Abby said wickedly, “A heart.”
We almost never talked unless it was on the practice floor, where she absorbed instruction with a detached air that I wrongly interpreted as apathy. Abby would j
ust bolt out of the gym as soon as the workout was over, and the result was a wall of silence between us.
But by ’97 Abby was a senior, and as the crisis of our season deepened, I badly needed her to be emotionally engaged, because we were desperate for a leader and a more complete player. It all came to a head in the Stanford game. Our defensive game plan was for Abby to contest any Stanford entries to a particular spot on the court. “Deny the high post,” I instructed her. But Abby was worried that if she denied, Stanford would drive right past her for a layup. She lost confidence and decided, all on her own, to play containment. She dropped four feet off her player. Our plan collapsed, Stanford got wide-open shots, and we got run over.
In my mind I was trying to cause the least amount of damage. So now I’m not playing her game plan and if one person is not playing it, it all breaks down.
—ABBY CONKLIN
There was a fine line between being demanding and being negative, and after the Stanford loss, I crossed it. The next day in a team meeting, I went at Abby. I’d been up until four A.M. screaming at the game film. I started off by saying, “Let’s face it, we’re handcuffed because Abby Conklin won’t defend or rebound.” Then I pointed at her. “What was the one thing I asked you to do?” I asked Abby. She had given up the middle of the floor, and they had torn us apart in the middle, I said.
Abby retorted, “I don’t agree,” and started to haggle with me about what we should have done against Stanford.
I stared at her. A senior was questioning my judgment in front of the entire team—a team that was losing. A team that was young, injured, and uncertain and that I was struggling to hold together, and which Abby had just done her best to pull apart at the seams. Most days in practice Abby was low on feedback. Suddenly, on this day of all days, she decided to give me some, by defying me in front of her teammates.
I said tightly, “You’re more stubborn than you are smart. And you’re gonna kill this team with it.”
Abby felt terrible about it, I learned later. She had reacted defensively in the face of my criticism and blurted it out. She wanted to be part of the solution, but she didn’t know how to express it. At the time, however, all I heard was the mutiny in her words.
After practice, Abby came to the coaches’ locker room and tried to apologize, but by then my simmering had risen to a boil. I was drinking a cup of water, and it practically turned to steam when she came through the door.
Abby said, “Pat, I want to apologize …”
Before she could finish, I threw the cup at the wall. It was just a paper Gatorade cup, but I flung it so hard it showered us all like a tsunami.
Pat had water in her hand and she flung it, and I thought, “Oh my God.” I thought she was swinging to hit her. I thought her head was gonna come off. As competitive as Pat was, I never thought she would put her hands on somebody, but at that moment I thought Abby might’ve pushed her past the brink of her consciousness. The water just hit the wall and went everywhere.
—HOLLY WARLICK
“I don’t know why you don’t respect me, Abby,” I said. “But you’ve hurt me worse than any player ever has.”
“I’m sorry. I just want to apologize.”
“I don’t accept your apology. I’m not gonna accept it. Maybe I’ll accept it by the end of the year. But right now you need to get out of here.”
Abby backed out of the room, leaving me alone with Mickie and Holly, who were toweling off.
“Pat, I thought you were going to hit her,” Holly said.
“I wish I could,” I said.
For once my anger wasn’t an act. I felt betrayed by a senior I should have been able to depend on, and I had a hard time getting over it. Over the next few days I became the one who was more stubborn than smart. I took Abby out of the starting lineup for the next game against Texas Tech, and she was so anxious to get back in my good graces that she answered with a career-high 26 points off the bench. “Way to respond,” I told her. But it also only made me angrier; why didn’t she do that all the time?
My hard feelings festered through a disastrous four-game road trip. We lost to Arkansas for the first time in school history. I wasn’t speaking to Abby—or much of anybody—and she was starting to play more poorly than she ever had.
We went to UConn, never an easy trip, and in this instance it was like walking into the mouth of a dragon. They were the top-ranked team in the country, and we got destroyed, 72–57. We hit new season lows for points and shooting percentage.
Most of the time after a loss it was a very eerie feeling. Pat would walk in and wouldn’t just immediately start blasting. She doesn’t say a word, which is way worse. She just kind of looks at you. I could imitate her: She catches her breath, and then shakes her head very slowly, and looks down at you. Then she says in a very soft voice, “I’m embarrassed,” or she would call us out individually, and that wasn’t a low voice, it was more aggressive. You actually felt like you hurt her. That was pretty powerful for me, and most of my teammates, whether it was because you disgraced the uniform or the program or yourself. For me, I felt like my insides were ripped up. For players who were not so innately competitive, it made you question, “Why am I not feeling that way too?” And now she’s got you.
—KELLIE JOLLY
We had five losses and it was only January, and the road trip still wasn’t over. Our next opponent was second-ranked Old Dominion, and we flew to Norfolk, Virginia, stopping in Washington, D.C., to change planes. I sat in the airport, with Tyler asleep on my lap, drained and dispirited. Across the terminal, I spotted the North Carolina basketball team and my old friend Sylvia Rhyne Hatchell, who were also passing through on a road trip. I must have looked pitiful, because Sylvia came over and dropped a hand on my shoulder.
“How you doing, Pat?”
“Oh, I’m doing all right,” I said.
“Well, just hang in there till next year,” she said.
In Norfolk, we checked into the hotel, and Holly, Mickie, and I went for a drink on the waterfront. We studied our schedule, counting up the teams we thought we could beat versus the potential losses. There was hardly a game we felt sure about; a silence fell over the table. “We could be the first Tennessee team that doesn’t even get into the NCAA tournament,” Mickie said.
I clenched my jaw. I’d had this same argument at home with R.B. He stared at our schedule with his cautious, analytical banker’s eye and announced, “We won’t win twenty games.”
“Oh yes we will,” I said.
“I don’t see how.”
“Let me tell you something,” I said. “We are not waiting until next year.”
I refused to give up. I spent the next day soul searching with our entire team. I met with each player individually, starting with Abby. Mickie had finally intervened and, as always, told me what I needed to hear instead of what I wanted to hear. “Pat, you have to sit down and talk to Abby or we’re going to lose her for the year,” she said. My problems with Abby were affecting the whole team’s well-being, including Mickie’s.
“Either get rid of me, or do something, because I can’t take it anymore,” Mickie said. “Y’all have got to come to some kind of truce.”
“She needs to come to me,” I said.
“You’re the adult,” Mickie said.
“I don’t know why they fight me.”
“Pat, what are we fighting over? Aren’t we all on the same side?”
Mickie was right, of course. I found Abby in the hotel, and we sat and talked. I made a rare concession: for once, I told a player that I was wrong.
“I need to be the adult in this situation, and I haven’t been,” I said.
Abby replied, “Pat, I don’t think you understand how much I do care about this team.”
Abby wanted to be a stronger personality and emotional leader for the team, she said, but she just didn’t know how. “I’ll help you,” I said. I suggested she talk to my old friend Michelle Marciniak, and I set up a phone date for the tw
o of them. Michelle had learned how to cope with my demands, and Abby could too.
“Look, when Pat yells at you, that’s actually how she shows she has confidence in you,” Michelle told her. “When she ignores you, that’s when you’re in trouble.”
The meeting with Abby was just the first of many that day. The entire team gathered in my room for a team therapy session that lasted for five hours, and it lingers in the memory of the people in the room for its gut-spilling honesty and frequency of tears. “Why did you come to Tennessee?” I asked all of them. “What did you think we were about?” Any notion I had that the team was too laid-back or they didn’t care was dispelled. Every kid in the room cried. We die laughing about it at reunions now, but at the time there was nothing amusing about it, because everyone was so distraught. The line most often quoted came from our young center LaShonda Stephens, who was crying so hard she couldn’t catch her breath.
“I thought this was s-s-supposed to be fun!” she said.
The next night we played with our whole hearts and delivered our feistiest performance of the year. We actually built a 10-point lead on Old Dominion deep into the second half. But we couldn’t hold on: the refs called six fouls on us in the space of two minutes, and ODU staged a comeback. It was our third loss in four games.
When I walked in the locker room, Abby was kicking garbage cans across the room. Holdsclaw had her head in her arms, and young Kyra Elzy was crying so hard I could hear her hitch. Kyra was just a naive freshman, but she’d had the duty all night of trying to guard Ticha Penicheiro, a dashing all-American who was the best guard in the country. We had prepped Kyra as best we could, but Penicheiro had hung 25 points on her.
I’d never seen a team so pained by a loss—and while I felt awful, I was also relieved. It was the emotional buy-in I’d been waiting for. “Listen up,” I said. “Get your heads up. If you give effort like this all the time, if you fight like this, I’m telling you, I promise you, we’ll be there in March. You hadn’t fought like this every night. I enjoyed coaching this team tonight.” I told Kyra that we would see Old Dominion again, in the NCAA tournament, and she would get another shot at Penicheiro. Next time we’d make sure she was ready.
