[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 112 (Friday, July 26, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1390-E1392]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  A TRIBUTE TO COACH PAT HEAD SUMMITT

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR.

                              of tennessee

                    in the house of representatives

                         Friday, July 26, 1996

  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I recently had the privilege of hosting a 
luncheon in honor of the Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team, the 1996 
national champions. The team was later honored along with the Kentucky 
men's team in a special ceremony and reception at the White House.
  Coach Pat Head Summitt, who has coached the Lady Vols for more than 
20 years now, is unquestionably one of the finest coaches in this 
Nation. She has achieved her great success through much hard work, 
determination, and perseverance.
  The Knoxville News Sentinel recently ran a very fine article about 
Coach Summitt which I would like to call to the attention of my 
colleagues and other readers of the Record. I was particularly 
impressed by the great influence that this article shows that Coach 
Summitt's family had in helping her become the great leader she has 
become.

   Tennessee's Pat Summitt Credits Family for Her Zeal for Hard Work

                            (By Amy McRary)

       Minutes after winning her fourth national basketball crown, 
     Tennessee Lady Vols Coach Pat Summitt went looking for the 
     people who taught her about the game.
       Tennessee had just trounced Georgia 83-65 in the March 31 
     NCAA finals at the Charlotte Coliseum in North Carolina. When 
     Summitt got to the seats where her parents, Richard and Hazel 
     Head, sat, the 43-year-old coach got a reward she'd waited 
     for all her life. Tall, stern Richard Head wrapped his 
     daughter in a bear hug and gave her a kiss.
       ``I'm glad you finally got to see one,'' Summitt said to 
     the quiet Middle Tennessee farmer with a gruff voice and 
     sometimes gruffer manner.
       It was only the second hug and first kiss the 73-year-old 
     Head had ever given this child he raised as a hardworking 
     fourth son, the young woman he cheered for to play harder, 
     the demanding coach he'd once worried would be fired.
       Patricia Sue ``Trish'' Head's first basketball court was 
     one end of a 100-foot hayloft. Her daddy hung a goal at one 
     end and strung some lights. Her first teammate was her oldest 
     brother, Tommy, seven years older than his little sister and 
     now a state legislator. Her first opponents were 
     older brothers Kenneth and Charles.
       Trish gave as good as she got when they played two-on-two 
     after raking hay, milking cows, working tobacco. Summitt 
     praises her parents, saying they protected her from her 
     brothers. Her only sister, Linda, is six years younger than 
     Summitt.
       To hear the family tell it, Trish didn't need any 
     protecting.
       ``I reckon she was just one of the boys,'' says Charles 
     Head, a farmer and greenhouse operator. ``In that hayloft, 
     she was right in the middle of us. That's what made her 
     tough.''
       As tough and as good as she was, she had no team to play 
     for in 1966. The high school in Clarksville didn't have a 
     girls' team.
       So Richard Head moved his family of seven some six miles 
     down the road, to tiny unincorporated Henrietta in 
     neighboring Cheatham County. Then, Trish could play ball over 
     at Cheatham County High School in Ashland City. Her first 
     year, she caught a Trailways bus home every day.
       ``Everybody thought I had lost my mind,'' Hazel Head says. 
     The family moved from a new home to an old, drafty house near 
     their community grocery. ``That old house was cold as 
     kraut.''
       Richard Head says simply: ``I just knew she wanted to play 
     ball.''
       Pat Summitt coaches basketball the way she played 
     basketball--intensely.
       ``The amount of work it takes to be successful does not 
     detour Pat,'' says former UCLA coach Billie Moore, who 
     coached Summitt on the 1976 silver medal U.S. Olympic team. 
     ``In the coaching game, she is not going to leave anything 
     for granted. She was that way when I first met her.''
       Growing up on the family's Middle Tennessee dairy farm 
     meant working--and working hard. ``Daddy said he wanted Mama 
     to have a girl, but he treated me like one of the guys,'' 
     Summitt says.
       Summitt wasn't any older than 10 or 11 when she was driving 
     a tractor. She set and harvested tobacco, raked and baled 
     hay, plowed fields and raised 4-H calves.
       When the doors were open at Mount Carmel United Methodist 
     Church near Ashland City, the Heads were there. Summitt 
     couldn't date until she was 16. Living 15 miles from town, 
     she didn't go out for pizza until her senior year in high 
     school. ``We worked, and we played basketball in the 
     hayloft,'' she says.
       Richard Head ran the farm and the store, built houses, 
     served as water commissioner and on the county court. ``Miss 
     Hazel'' worked as hard as her husband, mowing the yard and 
     cooking huge, country meals. The first to bring food to 
     families after the death of a loved one, Hazel Head is ``the 
     hardest working person I know,'' Summitt says.
       ``I've often said I wish I had more of my mom in me. I 
     think I learned a lot from my mom about being a good mother. 
     You can always count on Miss Hazel.''
       Today, the Heads are likely the hardest-working retired 
     people in Tennessee. Richard Head still works the family 
     farmlands and does some work in Springfield, over at the 
     tobacco warehouse. Hazel Head helps over at the family 
     laundry in Ashland City almost every afternoon. The friendly 
     and down-to-earth 70-year-old still fills three freezers of 
     her own and keeps friends and family supplied with vegetables 
     from the Heads' 10-acre garden. They still live in Henrietta, 
     but in a newer and warmer house Richard Head built. Except 
     for Summitt, all their now-grown and married children live 
     within a five-mile radius.
       In the Head family, good work was expected and didn't need 
     praising. Excuses weren't accepted; laziness wasn't 
     tolerated. Not that the Head kids questioned.
       ``Rebel? Are you kidding?'' laughs Summitt. ``A lot of 
     discipline came as a result of fear. We had to get our own 
     switch out of the yard. And if you got a little one, Mama 
     would get her own. I hated that.''
       Trish's 16th birthday was spent on a tractor. Friends were 
     feting her and a friend at a country club. But rain was 
     coming and bales of hay were still in the field. Richard Head 
     refused to let his daughter leave. She had work to finish.
       ``I think I wound up getting in trouble with my dad that 
     day,'' Summitt remembers. ``I was so mad I wasn't paying 
     attention (to her work). I think I got a switch that day and 
     it wasn't birthday licks.''
       ``Richard was far more the patriarch than Hazel was the 
     matriarch,'' says R.B.

[[Page E1391]]

     Summitt, Summitt's husband of nearly 16 years. ``Pat didn't 
     hear anything if things were OK. If something went wrong, 
     boom. Pat responds to that. Most women, I think, do not.''
       Affectionate expressions simply weren't Richard Head's way. 
     ``I never did like that stuff,'' Head says matter-of-factly.
       ``Some families hug and kiss all the time, but we just 
     never really did,'' defends Hazel Head. ``It's just the 
     difference in people. But that didn't mean you didn't love 
     them. He'd work his toenails off for either of our five 
     kids.''
       Attempting to win her father's approval helped drive 
     Summitt early in her career as she took a program only 
     slightly above intramurals and made it the best in women's 
     basketball. Her teams have won four championships in 13 trips 
     to the Final Four. For 20 consecutive years, the Lady vols 
     have won at least 20 games. For eight seasons, including the 
     last three, Summitt's teams have won 30 or more games. 
     Summitt played on the 1976 Olympic team and coached the 1984 
     women's team to a gold medal. She has repeatedly been named 
     Coach of the Year by athletic organizations.
       ``It was obvious when he (Head) was in the stands, Pat 
     played at a different level,'' Billie Moore says. ``I like to 
     kid him and say it's all a front, that he's really a softie 
     on the inside. They are a very close, supportive family and 
     having that is part of (having) your confidence.''
       The Heads and Moore tell of Richard Head yelling ``Trish, 
     Trish'' at his player-daughter through one pre-Olympic game. 
     Teammate Trish Roberts thought that man in the stands was 
     yelling at her. Summitt knew exactly who her daddy was 
     hollering at. ``The coach said afterward she'd never seen two 
     girls play so hard,'' Richard Head says.
       You'd likely zip right through Henrietta up Highway 12 from 
     Ashland City to Clarksville except for that big green-and-
     white highway sign proclaiming. ``Home of Pat Head Summitt.''
       Under the green sign is a smaller, handmade one shaped 
     something like the state of Tennessee. Fashioned and fastened 
     by the Heads' mail carrier, that sign reads ``Lady Vols #1 
     and Always #1 Here'' in bright orange letters.
       Two satellite dishes stand in the Heads' back yard, gifts 
     from Summitt so her parents won't miss a game. She phones 
     after contests.
       ``If they lose, she doesn't call right straight; she's too 
     down,'' Hazel Head says. ``But she likes to know what we 
     think.''
       Today, her assistant coaches and husband insist Summit is 
     self-motivated. ``I think she is pretty well content with her 
     folks, her family, her career, her life. I think it took a 
     while,'' says R.B. Summitt, who's executive vice president of 
     Sevier County Bank. ``I think she always worried what her dad 
     would say or think.''
       The first hug Summitt got from her daddy was last year, a 
     conciliatory hug after a bitter loss to Connecticut in the 
     NCAA championship game. The second came with a kiss after 
     this year's championship.
       ``To hug me and give me a big old kiss, that was a first,'' 
     Summitt says. And she says, her father has now told her he is 
     proud--in his own matter-of-fact, understated manner.
       The Heads spent a day at the Summitts' Blount County home 
     after this year's NCAA tournament. As Richard Head was 
     leaving, he told his daughter: `Now I don't want to hear any 
     more about how I've never hugged you or kissed you or told 
     you I was proud of you.''
       ``That was Daddy's way of telling me he was proud,'' 
     Summitt grins.
       Consider how far she has come. Pat Head began coaching the 
     year Title IX, which required equal athletic opportunities 
     for women, became law.
       She was a 22-year-old graduate assistant who also taught 
     four courses. Four of her players were 21; 50 people came to 
     see them lose their first game by one point to Mercer 
     University. Between coaching, Summitt worked on her master's 
     in physical education and rehabilitated an injured knee so 
     she could try out for the '76 Olympics.
       She was her own assistant, own trainer and sometimes team 
     driver. R.B. Summitt remembers hauling team equipment to 
     games in his Ford van after he met his future wife in 1977.
       Twenty years later, it's still a family event, but the 
     coach doesn't drive the team bus and her husband doesn't have 
     to load equipment. Richard and Hazel Head drive 3\1/2\ hours 
     to some contests. R.B. Summitt has seats near the court where 
     he can yell--loudly--at officials and opposing coaches.
       The Summitts' only son, 5-year-old Tyler, has been Summit's 
     traveling companion since he was just months old. This 
     spring, he stood on a ladder to help his mother cut the nets 
     in Charlotte.
       During this season's 18-point thrashing by Stanford, 
     Summitt walked to the end of the bench near her son. 
     ``Mama,'' he said solemnly, ``I'm doing all I can.''
       ``Son, she replied, ``I don't think that will be enough.''
       Today, Pat Summitt has coached half her life, compiling a 
     22-season record of 596-133. some 8,000 fans regularly cheer 
     the Lady Vols during home games. After working 20 years 
     without a contract, Summitt now earns an annual $135,000. 
     That's the highest base pay of any UT coach, male or female.
       But for those first couple of years, the Lady Vols won only 
     16 games a season. The third season, they hit 28 wins and 
     never looked back.
       And over in Henrietta, Richard Head was trying to get his 
     daughter to quit the coaching game.
       ``I felt like she might have a bad season, and they'd get 
     rid of her. They won't now for awhile, but at one time I 
     figured they might.''
       A sometimes blind, always demanding passion drives the 
     woman who is arguably the best coach in women's basketball.
       ``I've always said, `Teams may beat us, but they better not 
     outwork us. Coaches may beat me, but they better not outwork 
     me,''' Summitt says. ``I guess you have to be a little crazy 
     to be this driven, but I enjoy working.''
       Says Mickie DeMoss, Summitt's assistant coach for 11 years: 
     ``She coaches with a lot of passion; she does everything with 
     a lot of passion.
       ``If she owned Weigel's up the road, it'd be the best 
     Weigel's in the city of Knoxville. Because she'd work from 
     sun-up to sun-down.
       ``Holly (Warwick, also an assistant coach for 11 years) and 
     I often say we do things the hard way around here,'' DeMoss 
     laughs. ``If the competition is doing it one way, we're going 
     to find a way to do it a little better.''
       Says Shelley Sexton, point guard on Summitt's first 1987 
     championship team and now women's basketball coach at Karns 
     High School, ``Nobody questions themselves harder, nobody 
     puts themselves through more, than Pat Head Summitt. She is a 
     perfectionist.''
       The slender 5-foot, 11-inch Summitt walks faster, drives 
     much, much faster. ``If Pat's not driving, putting on her 
     makeup and talking all at the same time, she's wasting her 
     time,'' DeMoss says. Warwick and DeMoss half-joke Summitt 
     only slows down when Tyler is riding.
       When she jogs, Summitt has to run two steps ahead of 
     everyone else and has to finish at least a step ahead. ``And 
     the whole time she's running--she's talking basketball,'' 
     says Warwick, a three-time All-American when she played for 
     Summitt from 1976 to 1980.
       Summitt readily admits she's not the world's most observant 
     woman. Her narrow focus tapers to tunnel vision during 
     basketball season. Her assistants swear Summitt comes to work 
     not knowing if she's walked in through rain or 20-degree 
     cold. Last spring, she jogged the same route for three weeks 
     before realizing a building she passed daily had burned.
       Current events don't get any more attention. Summitt was 
     once to go to Las Vegas to pick up an award. ``Today'' show 
     host Bryant Gumbel and Dallas Cowboys running back Emmitt 
     Smith were to attend. Summitt didn't want to go--she didn't 
     recall who those other people were.
       ``I have asked her before, if she will just read one story 
     on the front page of the paper before turning to the sports 
     section,'' DeMoss says. ``And it's not necessarily sports--
     it's basketball. It's women's basketball. It's Lady Vols 
     basketball.''
       One of the best stories about Summitt's single-minded 
     determination can be told in a true story that sounds more 
     like a tale.
       Consider the birth of sandy-haired, blue-eyed Ross Tyler 
     Summitt.
       Tyler, who can't talk defense and rebounding with the best 
     of them, was nearly born while his mother was recruiting UT 
     point guard Michelle Marciniak.
       The story goes like this:
       Summitt was about two weeks away from her due date when she 
     and DeMoss flew to Pennsylvania in September 1990 to recruit 
     Maricinak. While there, Summitt went into labor.
       But she wasn't going to have her son anywhere but in 
     Knoxville. And it didn't matter she was states away. `You 
     know, Pat can be pretty stubborn,'' DeMoss says.
       DeMoss raced her boss to the UT plane. On the way, 
     Summitt's pains increased. The pilot offered to land in 
     Virginia.
       That sounded like a great idea to DeMoss. Forget that 
     archrival Virginia had defeated Tennessee in overtime in the 
     NCAA East Regional that March.
       ``Pat told me, `Mickie, you let them land in Virginia, 
     you're going to have a mad woman on your hands.' That was all 
     I needed to know,'' DeMoss recalls.
       The plane landed at McGhee Tyson Airport in a fast two 
     hours, black exhaust fumes streaking its sides. Tyler was 
     born a few hours later at St. Mary's Medical Center. The 
     doctors said if the baby's head had been turned differently, 
     DeMoss would have had an assist in his birth. ``It was the 
     longest two hours of my life,'' DeMoss says.
       Down the sidelines she strides, pointing, yelling, 
     snarling. Her blue eyes glare ``the look'' that makes an All-
     American cower.
       In the comfort of your den, in the safety of your Thompson-
     Boling seat, you're very, very glad you're not wearing 
     Tennessee orange. Even Richard Head thinks Trish is sometimes 
     too hard on those girls.
       ``I think Daddy's gotten more relaxed since his children 
     have married . . . since he's got nine grandkids and two 
     great-grandkids,'' Summitt says.
       Watching Summitt, it's hard to imagine this woman was once 
     so reserved she dreaded taking college speech classes. The 
     nickname ``Pat'' stuck when she was too shy to tell college 
     classmates everybody called her ``Trish.''
       Gracious one-on-one, Summitt keeps in touch with and often 
     advises former players. Involved in community causes, she's

[[Page E1392]]

     chairing the 1996 local United Way campaign with men's 
     basketball coach Kevin O'Neill.
       So maybe, just maybe, those flashes of sideline temper 
     aren't as bad as they seem. Or maybe the end justifies the 
     means. Summitt makes no excuses.
       ``I'm not really concerned about what people say about the 
     way I coach or my style,'' Summitt says. ``Because unless you 
     are really on the inside, I don't think you can totally 
     understand and appreciate communication.
       ``My volume can be on 10, but my message can be very 
     positive. My volume may be a two and it can be one of 
     constructive criticism. I can't spend my career trying to 
     please everybody. When I concern myself with people, it's the 
     people right here.''
       Through the years, 13 players have transferred out. ``I'm 
     sure my personality, my expectations for us, had something to 
     do with it,'' she says.
       Those around her say Summitt today yells more selectively, 
     having adapted to changes in players and differences in 
     teams' chemistries. She's still tough.
       ``Now she still gets in their faces and she expects a lot 
     out of them, but I think she has really made an effort to 
     compliment them when they do well, tell them how proud she is 
     of them,'' DeMoss says. ``There's never been a question that 
     she cares about her players.''
       Says former Lady Vol center and current University of 
     Richmond assistant coach Sheila Frost: ``Pat will drive you 
     to the brink, but she won't break you. I was just a little 
     farm girl when I got to Tennessee. She took me under her wing 
     and she kicked me in the rear too.''
       The idea of playing for a demanding basketball icon with a 
     temper can be intimidating not just to 18-year-olds. DeMoss 
     works to ``humanize'' Summitt to recruits and parents. ``I 
     tell them up front, `Yes, she's tough, she's demanding. . . . 
     She expects nothing but your best. And if you come here, 
     basketball needs to be important to you because it's very 
     important to Pat.' ''
       Call it maturity. Call it security. Don't call it mellow.
       ``Pat hates it when people use that word,'' DeMoss says.
       Summitt agrees she's more apt to ask for input from DeMoss, 
     Warwick and assistant Al Brown and from her players. ``I'm 
     more flexible today than I was at 27, more tolerant. Starting 
     out I guess I was kind of a dictator type. I thought I had 
     all the answers.''
       There's no question who's in charge, but Summitt is more 
     comfortable letting players make some decisions. ``I've heard 
     her ask the players during a time-out, `You want to play zone 
     or man-to-man?' '' DeMoss says. ``I think she knows now you 
     can laugh and have fund and still win. Used to, she didn't 
     think the two ever could go together.''
       She gets help laughing from practical jokers DeMoss and 
     Warwick. Once, Summitt was ragging the players about her 
     playing days. The coach swore she always rebounded and never 
     tossed fancy passes. DeMoss and Warwick showed the team a 
     grainy, black-and-white video of Summitt's playing days.
       ``She threw hook passes; she didn't rebound. The whole team 
     had to wait for her to get down the court,'' Warwick laughs. 
     ``But she took it very well.''
       Summitt can slip in a joke herself. Tennessee was to play 
     Louisiana Tech in April in the 1988 Final Four semifinal. 
     Summitt called Warwick and DeMoss with the worst of news--UT 
     star Bridgette Gordon had severe food poisoning.
       ``She really had us going. And then she said, `April Fool.' 
     Ninety percent of the time she is so serious, she can really 
     get you,'' DeMoss says.
       Mellow or mature, Summitt remains one very poor loser.
       ``She's more like her daddy. I want them to win, but he 
     really is disappointed if they don't,'' Hazel Head says. ``I 
     try to tell her, `When you go out there, you know one's going 
     to lose, and one can't do it all. You can't always be on 
     top.' ''
       Says R.B. Summitt, ``If we should have lost, Pat's not a 
     good loser and it's not any fun. But if we should not have 
     lost, if the team didn't give effort, if we sort of gave the 
     game away with mistakes, then it's worse.''
       ``I get really sick inside,'' Summitt says, putting one 
     hand to her chest. ``I just have a terrible feeling. I cannot 
     get it off my mind. I replay every play. I always feel 
     there's something I could have said or done to make the 
     difference.''
       She is hard on herself and on her players. Game mistakes 
     are replayed in hard practices. ``I'm sure the players get 
     sick of hearing it. But that's OK. Then they'll remember how 
     they felt when they lost,'' she says.
       If you really want to feel the Summitt wrath, be lazy or 
     dishonest.
       Team policy is sacred. Going to class and being on time are 
     not mere suggestions. You don't go to class, you don't step 
     on the court. All players who remained at Tennessee four 
     years have graduated, a fact that coaches are as proud of as 
     those national championships.
       Players who break team rules get suspended. Most recently, 
     Lady Vols center Tiffani Johnson was not allowed to make last 
     Monday's team trip to the White House because of an 
     undisclosed rules violation.
       Word is that Summitt knows everything. ``She just looks at 
     you and says, `I know what you've been doing and you just 
     confess,'' Warwick says.
       Summitt suspended point guard Tiffany Woosley for three 
     games her senior year after Woosley made comments reportedly 
     criticizing some teammates. ``It doesn't matter who you are, 
     if you do one thing wrong, you get punished. It's Pat's way 
     or no way,'' says Woosley, now coach at Fayetteville's 
     Lincoln County High School. ``That's the way it should be. 
     She's tough. But I learned from it, the good and the bad.''
       Says Sexton: ``There's a price to be paid to be a part of 
     that program. You have got to be above reproach. It's a 
     responsibility, a commitment on and off the floor.
       Recruits ask DeMoss ``Can I play for Pat? Can I handle 
     Pat?'' I tell them, ``Two things will keep you out of the 
     doghouse. Work hard and be honest,'' DeMoss says.
       Says Summitt, ``I think I have very little patience with 
     people that are not motivated to work hard. It's hard for me 
     to understand.''

                          ____________________