7 Quotes & Sayings By Pat Summitt

Pat Summitt, widely considered one of the greatest coaches in the history of sports, has led Tennessee to 11 national championships. She is the first woman to win 1,000 games as a college basketball coach. She led her Lady Vols to two NCAA titles during her career. She also won Olympic gold medals as a player on the U.S Read more

Women's National Team in 1972 and 1976. Pat grew up in rural Tennessee, where she played basketball for her high school team and later became the first female athlete at Tennessee to play varsity basketball by earning a spot on the freshman squad. Upon graduation from Tennessee in 1973, Summitt used her scholarship to attend graduate school at that same university and then began her coaching career as an assistant under Joanne Boykin at the University of Texas-El Paso (UTEP).

Summitt was named head coach at UTEP in 1975 and remained there until 1983, when she moved to Knoxville to take over as head coach at The University of Tennessee Women's Volleyball Team.

1
God doesn’t take things away to be cruel. He takes things away to make room for other things. He takes things away to lighten us. He takes things away so we can fly. Pat Summitt
2
My short-term factual memory can be like water; events are a brief disturbance on the surface and then it closes back up again, as if nothing ever touched it. But it’s a strange fact that my long-term memory remains strong, perhaps because it recorded events when my mind was unaffected. My emotional memory is intact too, perhaps because feelings are recorded and stored in a different place than facts. The things that happened deeper in the past, and deeper in the breast, are still there for me, under the water. I won 1, 098 games, and eight national championships, and coached in four different decades. But what I see are not the numbers. I see their faces. 'Pat should get a tattoo! ' The kids laughed. 'What kind should she get?' 'A heart. She should get a heart.' Little did they know. They are the tattoos. Pat Summitt
3
Someday, I suppose I’ll give up, and sit in the rocking chair. But I’ll probably be rocking fast, because I don’t know what I’ll do without a job. Pat Summitt
4
When you learn to keep fighting in the face of potential failure, it gives you a larger skill set to do what you want to do in life. It gives you vision. But you can't acquire it if you're afraid of keeping score. Pat Summitt
5
We keep score in life because it matters. It counts. It matters. Too many people opt out and never discover their own abilities because they fear failure. They don't understand commitment. Pat Summitt
6
When you grow up on a dairy farm, cows don't take a day off. So you work every day and my dad always said, 'No one can outwork you.' Pat Summitt