Quotes from Pat Summitt

life. It gives you vision. But you can't acquire it if you're afraid of keeping score.

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.

I didn't leave her there for long. When a player makes a mistake, you always want to put them back in quickly—you don't just berate them and sit them down with no chance for redemption.

Quit? Quit? 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 gives you a larger skill set to do what you want to do in

I'm interested to see where a combination of faith and science will take me.

Every Moment is a Teaching Moment

What Michelle didn't yet know was that there is a vast difference between playing and leading. 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;

guy raised his hand and asked if I had any advice when it came to "coaching women." I remember leveling him with a death ray stare and then relaxing and curling up the corner of my mouth and saying, "Don't worry about coaching 'women.' Just go home and coach 'basketball.' 

Confidence is what happens when you've done the hard work that entitles you to succeed.

I'd bring our big players out to the perimeter and make them run the play like a guard, so they saw the play from that angle as well as their own. When one of our bigs got upset if a guard didn't make a play, I'd say, "Fine. You go play point.

I'm going to outwork you. Simple as that.

It wasn't just a job; it was my life, my home, and my family, and the players were the second-deepest love of my life.

What's bothering you? Did you read that paragraph in Sports Illustrated? The one about life expectancy for people with Alzheimer's? Yes. I read it. What did you think? Look, I think it's a guess, and a bad one. It's an average. [Crying] What upsets you the most? I want to see my son grow up.

Our team is young, but on the rise. Holly's motto for them is "Same heart, same pride, same fight," which I love. The

Our team is young, but on the rise. Holly's motto for them is "Same heart, same pride, same fight," which I love. The kids, who include my last recruiting class, tell me they want to represent everything Tennessee has ever been about: hard work, defense, rebounding, and doing all the little things right.

Yes. It is. —June 23, 2012, at night driving from Henrietta back to Knoxville with the tape recorder off, thirteen months after diagnosis

What this tells me is that facts are only the smallest components of memory.

about one's life; memories are unreliable—they smudge, and fade, like disappearing footprints in the sand. We're too busy standing in the middle of it all to remember everything perfectly

We installed something Dean called "the persistence drill," which tested their stamina: they had to make consecutive full-court layups for two straight minutes—and if they missed, start over. On the defensive end, they had to make seven straight defensive stops before they could get off the floor.