Leadership's Legacy: Pat Summitt, NCAA Women’s Basketball, and Claiming Your Space

Once again I offer an observation about women’s basketball.  I am a born and bred Nutmegger, longtime fan of UConn’s women’s team, and father of two high school, college, and beyond female athletes/sport captains…And, I have a story with only one source and a secondhand one at that, namely another father talking about his child, in this case about a son ‘playing with girls’, but it’s a good story.  First….

Arguably the fountainhead, Pat Summitt, began coaching Tennessee’s women’s basketball in 1974, 8 years before the NCAA even sponsored women’s basketball and just two years after the passage of Title IX.  Summit was 22 years old.  She died at 64 in 2016.

Who was she? 

“Here’s how I’m going to beat you.  I’m going to outwork you.  That’s it.  That’s all there is to it.”
 
“I won 1,098 games and eight national championships and coached in four different decades.  But what I see are not the numbers.  I see their faces.”
 
Sum It Up: A Thousand and Ninety-Eight Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective   Pat Head Summit and Sally Jenkins … Jenkins’ new book, The Right Call, is another good read by her.
 
Summitt not only coached her early Tennessee teams—she also did, seemingly, almost everything else, including literally driving the team bus.  Someone had to do it.  In addition, she actively recruited black players to a school, shall we say, not noted as a haven for black athletes.
 
Further, she had her players regularly scrimmage male players to improve their game, especially its physicality.  So would her eventual UConn arch rival, Italian born Geno Auriemma. So does Iowa’s coach Lisa Bluder.  In fact, the male scrimmage team now has its own organization in many big time women basketball programs.
 
Here’s the story, apocryphal or not, about an early male UConn scrimmage team… years and years ago.

My client’s son had just started at UConn.  He’d played basketball well in high school receiving acclaim, but he knew that he was not a Division I player.  No UConn basketball for him.  He figured his playing would come exclusively in pickup games.

Several weeks into his first college semester he saw the recruiting posters.  Did he want to ‘play with girls’, i.e., scrimmage UConn’s women’s team?

Well… he missed playing the game regularly.  Hence, he tried out (yes, there were/are tryouts) and made the men’s scrimmage team.  He played and he watched. Did he really want to commit to this?

                     The answer came soon enough.

          Basketball, like any sport, includes establishing one’s space.  If one can’t establish room to play, then one cannot play.  A pitcher needs to work across to the entire strike zone. A middle infielder must have unrestricted access to second base.  A handball player needs at least an equal physical presence in the middle of the court.  A (fill in the blank)…. Basketball includes an ongoing individual and collective struggle for control of court floor and air space, i.e., for room to operate, to play one’s game.

On this occasion, UConn’s women’s guard took the ball up the court.  Her male opponent successfully crowded her, using legal and marginally acceptable if perhaps not legal tactics.  She endured the pressure but the infringement on her space significantly diminished her usual effectiveness on that trip up the court.

She took the ball up the court again.  Her male opponent went to work again.  This time she employed a mixture of legal and marginally acceptable tactics of her own.  He left the game with a broken nose.  My client’s son immediately decided that he was all in.

Not long after this event, the son’s roommate, a good high school basketball player himself, announced his interest in joining the women’s scrimmage team.  The son pronounced, “You don’t have enough game for them.”

Friday, Iowa and UConn will square off for a place in the finals. As will Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, potentially the greatest women’s basketball player ever, and UConn’s Paige Bueckers, one of the best ever and apparently fully recovered from the injuries that prevented her from playing two years in a row.  A deep and talented Iowa team will take on another tough, injury riddled UConn team. 

The game has a good chance to be a classic…and perhaps yet another record setter as a viewed sporting event—of any kind, ever—as just was Iowa’s recent game with LSU.

A truly diverse set of athletes will drive the action—nationality, race, size, and respective skill sets.  One will even have a broken nose of her own: UConn’s powerful forward, Canadian Aaliyah Edwards will play with a face mask to protect a nose badly broken during a game about 3 weeks ago.  That’s her with the purple and gold braids, a homage to deceased Laker star Kobe Bryant, a kindred basketball spirit—who, of course, happened to be male.  That’s her working the court space on the inside as Paige Bueckers works the court space outside.

These players have the room to play their game, thanks to their skilled dedication and that of those who came before, those who led the way to this moment… and, of course, it’s all a metaphor, a great and wonderful metaphor.

I trust that Pat Summit will get to see every second…and from the best perch in the house.  She’s going to love it. All of it… except the part that Tennessee isn’t playing this time around.
 
(For a piece that I wrote a year ago upon the retirement of one of, if not, the greatest women’s basketball player, namely Sue Bird… once of UConn… )        
 
Enjoy the game.
 
Keep Paddling,