Health and End of Coaching Career
In August 2011, Summitt announced that she had been diagnosed three months earlier with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Despite the diagnosis, she did complete the 2011-2012 season, but with a reduced role, while longtime assistant Holly Warlick, an assistant under Summitt since 1985, assumed most of the responsibilities.
In an interview with GoVolsXtra.com, she stated, "There's not going to be any pity party and I'll make sure of that."
After the season, which ended with the Lady Vols losing to the eventual unbeaten national champion Baylor Lady Bears in the Elite Eight in Des Moines, on April 18, 2012, Pat Summitt officially stepped down as head coach, ending her 38-year coaching career. Warlick was named Summitt's successor. In a statement accompanying her resignation, Summitt said, "I feel like Holly’s been doing the bulk of it, She deserves to be the head coach..." Summitt was given the title Head Coach Emeritus upon her resignation. According to NCAA regulations, as head coach emeritus, she will not be allowed to sit on the team bench.
Summitt finished her coaching career with 1,098 wins in 1,306 games coached in AIAW and NCAA Division I play. No other Division I basketball head coach, men's or women's, has more than 927 career wins as of the end of the 2011-12 season.
Read more about this topic: Pat Summitt
Famous quotes containing the words health and, health and/or career:
“My long sickness
Of health and living now begins to mend,
And nothing brings me all things.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“To get time for civic work, for exercise, for neighborhood projects, reading or meditation, or just plain time to themselves, mothers need to hold out against the fairly recent but surprisingly entrenched myth that “good mothers” are constantly with their children. They will have to speak out at last about the demoralizing effect of spending day after day with small children, no matter how much they love them.”
—Wendy Coppedge Sanford. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, introduction (1978)
“A black boxer’s career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)