Tournament Record
Summitt has 16 Southeastern Conference regular season titles with the Lady Vols, as well as 16 tournament titles. Summitt's Lady Vols have made an appearance in every NCAA Tournament, as well as every Sweet 16, except for 2009, and have appeared 18 times in the Final Four. When she made her 13th trip to the Final Four as a coach in 2002, she surpassed John Wooden as the NCAA coach with the most trips to the Final Four. Summitt is a seven-time SEC Coach of the year and a 7-time NCAA Coach of the year and has won eight national titles, including three consecutive titles from 1996 to 1998. Summitt is known for scheduling tough opponents for her team to play in the regular season, in order to prepare them for the post-season. In her years of coaching, her teams have played top ten ranked teams over 250 times.
In the 1997–98 season, her team went unbeaten, winning all 30 regular and 9 tournament games, earning Summitt's sixth championship. After the championship game, opposing Louisiana Tech head coach Leon Balmore proclaimed the Tennessee team to be the "best ever", something Old Dominion Hall of Famer Nancy Lieberman had stated in February 1998. This was the third consecutive championship for the Lady Vols, and the third for heralded players Chamique Holdsclaw and Kellie Jolly. Holdsclaw was named a consensus All-American, as was freshman Tamika Catchings.
Summitt and the 1996-1997 championship team were the subject of an HBO documentary titled A Cinderella Season: The Lady Vols Fight Back. That year, the Lady Vols posted just a 23–10 record heading into the NCAA tournament, with two losses to Louisiana Tech, setbacks against national powers Georgia, Stanford and UConn, but also shocking losses to SEC lesser lights Arkansas, Auburn, and LSU (which was 7–20 just two seasons prior and had not yet established itself as a perennial national power). However, Tennessee righted itself during the tournament, shocking previously undefeated UConn in the regional final, 91–81, before defeating Notre Dame and Old Dominion in the Final Four in Cincinnati.
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