Quote of the Day

It's easy to tell people how things are done; real teachers show people how things are done.

-- Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins, Sum It Up, p. 340

Quote of the Day

If there is a single ingredient in leadership, it's emotional maturity.

-- Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins, Sum It Up, p. 240

Quote of the Day

Leadership is really a form of temporary authority that others grant you, and they only follow you if they find you consistently credible.  It's all about perception -- and if teammates find you the least bit inconsistent, moody, unpredictable, indecisive, or emotionally unreliable, then they balk and the whole team is destabilized.

-- Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins, Sum It Up, p. 240

Quote of the Day

The point guard position in basketball is one of the great tutorials on leadership, and it ought to be taught in classrooms.  Anyone can perfect a dribble with muscle memory; very few people are able to organize and direct followers, which is a far more subtle and multifaceted skill.  

-- Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins, Sum It Up, p. 240

Quote of the Day

Winning helps define loss, and the loss helps define winning.  You can't have one without the other, and if you did, you wouldn't know how to feel about it.

-- Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins, Sum It Up, p. 185

Quote of the Day

I'd learned the single most important principle of teaching: they don't care how much you know, unless they know how much you care.

-- Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins, Sum It Up, p. 168

Quote of the Day

There is an old saying: a champion is someone who is willing to be uncomfortable.

-- Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins, Sum It Up, p. 168

Quote of the Day

Commitment is all about risk: the payoff is either heartbreak or exhilaration.  But it's also about tedium, the willingness to persevere through problems without quitting and, more important, without demoralization.  It's a kind of faith.

-- Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins, Sum It Up, p. 153

Quote of the Day

But the acrimony of the campaign reaffirmed something I knew instinctively: sports for women still smacked of revolution to a lot of men, especially in the South.  There was a deep resistance to Title IX.  I saw and felt it every day.  When I took the junior national team to Mexico City for the Pan Am Games, the men stayed in a comfortable hotel, while we were assigned to a dilapidated old dormitory from the 1968 Olympic Games that was so filthy our players wouldn't get under the bedsheets, and the showers had standing water in them.

-- Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins, Sum It Up, p. 131

Quote of the Day

To summon the competitiveness to work every single day for a goal that was months and even years ahead was the most invaluable lesson I'd ever learn.

-- Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins, Sum It Up, p. 114

Quote of the Day

When you set a goal of such distant possibility and reach it, you gain an insight into what it takes that lasts the rest of your life.

-- Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins, Sum It Up, p. 114

Quote of the Day

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.

-- Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins, Sum It Up, p. 89

Quote of the Day

Did I have grievances as a young woman?  You bet.  But protesting or sign carrying wasn't me -- and wasn't going to get it done.  Billie Jean [King], now there was an influential force.  Was there anything more equalizing than her sheer toughness, her combination of smarts and muscle?  I wanted to influence, and to change.  But there was only one way I could see that changed things: winning.  You changed things for women by winning.

-- Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins, Sum It Up, p. 79

Quote of the Day

We keep score in life because it matters.  It counts.  Too many people opt out and never discover their own abilities, because they fear failure.  They don't understand commitment.  When you learn to keep fighting in the face of potential failure, it give 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 with Sally Jenkins, Sum It Up, p. 19