Early Life and Family
Summitt was born Patricia Sue Head in Clarksville, Tennessee. She has three siblings: older brothers Tommy, Charles and Kenneth. She married R. B. Summitt in 1980; the two filed for divorce in 2007. They have one son, Ross Tyler Summitt (b. 1990), who played as a walk-on for the Tennessee men's basketball team, graduated from Tennessee in May 2012, and has been hired as an assistant coach for the Marquette University women's team effective with the 2012–13 season. In what ESPN.com columnist Gene Wojciechowski called "a bittersweet irony", Tyler's hiring by Marquette was announced on the same day his mother announced her retirement.
When Summitt was in high school, her family moved to nearby Henrietta, so she could play basketball in Cheatham County because Clarksville did not have a girls team. From there, Summitt went to University of Tennessee at Martin where she was a member of Chi Omega and won All-American honors, playing for UT–Martin's first women's basketball coach, Nadine Gearin. In 1970, with the passage of Title IX still two years away, there were no athletic scholarships for women. Each of Summitt's brothers had gotten an athletic scholarship, but her parents had to pay her way to college. She later co-captained the first United States women's national basketball team as a player at the inaugural women's tournament at the 1976 Summer Olympics, winning the silver medal. Eight years later in 1984, she coached the U.S. women's team to an Olympic gold medal, becoming the first U.S. Olympian to win a basketball medal and coach a medal-winning team.
Read more about this topic: Pat Summitt
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or family:
“The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt an early syllable to answer the longings of saints, the fears of mortals. We should have listened on our knees to any favorite, who, by stricter obedience, had brought his thoughts into parallelism with the celestial currents, and could hint to human ears the scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“Children need money. As they grow older they need more money. They need money for essentially the same reasons that adults need money. They need to buy stuff....They need it regardless of whether they get good grades, violate a family rule, or offend a parent.”
—Donald C. Medeiros (20th century)