by Pat Summitt
Coaching and parenting had more than a little in common, I realized. The point of both was the same: to nurture young people to maturity. The previous spring after our painful experience watching Stanford win a championship on our home court, I’d told Daedra and the rest of our players they had to take more responsibility for themselves, and for what happened on the court. I couldn’t drive them to a championship with a whip and a chair, like a lion tamer. It was too draining. They had to meet me halfway.
“I can’t score for you, or get a rebound for you, I can only give you the information to be successful,” I said.
Teaching and pupildom were a mutual exercise, I told them. “I will help you if you work with me. But you have to buy into what I’m teaching. I’ll give you all the tools to put you in the position to win. But then you have to walk through that door. I’ll get you to that point—then you have to take those final steps.”
It wasn’t just about working hard on the court, either. Everything within our system was increasingly designed to teach players to make good independent judgments. I was beginning to change the way we practiced; to encourage players to think for themselves I created game situations that forced them to make their own decisions. I’d put two minutes on the clock and a certain score on the board, and then tell them, “Have at it.” I’d just stand there with my arms folded. After the segment, we’d talk about their responses, why they made their decisions, so they understood good ones and bad ones. The formal term for it in education is “situational learning.” I couldn’t stop a game, the way I did a practice, to correct them. I couldn’t say, “Wait a minute, you didn’t use your screen, and you didn’t set your teammate up.” All I could do was try to give them the knowledge and confidence to correct themselves, and perform when it counted in a big game situation.
Instead of giving them a playbook, I made them draw up all our schemes in their own notebooks. Rather than giving them a handout of team policies, I made them write them out. Writing things down would give them better recall and help them etch schemes in their minds, internalizing our offenses and defenses and out-of-bounds plays.
I also made our team rules fewer and simpler. I’d learned that if you have one hundred rules, then you have to police them, and kids are going to break them, and that just creates problems. Better to have a few rules, but strictly enforce them. I treated them as adults, until they gave me a reason not to, and usually they didn’t. As long as they abided by the rules, I was pretty flexible. But if they didn’t, I could be as tough as any person they’d ever met. But I also prided myself on being fair, firm, and consistent.
We acquired such a reputation for being highly disciplined in everything we did that kids from other schools called us the Cookie Factory. They said we turned out “cookie-cutter” players, teased us that our program was too regimented. But it was my observation that young people wanted discipline, even craved it, because they wanted to succeed. They wanted an environment of healthy structure, one in which they felt I cared about them and cared that they did things the right way. Deep down they understood there was a relationship between discipline and success, and they wanted me to show it to them.
Our rules and policies were just another expression of caring. There is an old saying, “Rules without relationship result in rebellion.” The thing I tried to emphasize first and foremost was that we were all family—and you take care of and protect your family. We literally lived together: we traveled together, ate together, practiced together, did community service projects together, had classes and even summer school and camps together. Add it all up, and we spent around three hundred days a year together.
Pat would say, “You win with the person next to you. This is your family and you need to protect the family. You live in a fishbowl and there is an image you must uphold; you are an extension not only of your own family, but the UT family, and everything you do has consequences for everybody.”
—NIKKI CALDWELL
A pickpocket got a load of our protectiveness on a road trip to Chicago. We checked into the Marriott on Michigan Avenue and then set out for a walk to do some shopping. Debbie Hawhee was just a youngster from Greeneville, Tennessee, and she had not spent much time in cities. As she stood at a street corner she was so busy staring around that she was oblivious to the fact that a man next to her was surreptitiously digging through her bag. All of a sudden the thief was surrounded by towering Lady Vol Amazons. Our trainer, Jenny Moshak, saw it first and shoved him away, and then Carla McGhee took over. After they ran the thief off, Carla scolded Debbie. “If you’re gonna be in the city, you got to guard your stuff,” she said.
Each policy told our kids what we really cared about: the Lady Vols had a 100 percent graduation rate; every kid who played for four years got her degree, and that didn’t happen without rules and policies. Our reputation on campus was for caring about their academics first, without compromise. “Class is not an optional situation,” I said. Lady Vols were required to sit in the first three rows of every lecture so their professors knew they were there, and no cuts or unexcused absences were permitted. If you cut a class, you didn’t play in the next game. Period.
We cared about commitment. Every season I told them the exact dollar value of their scholarships and explained that we expected them to fulfill their end of that deal. “It’s not going to be any bed of roses,” I said. “You’ll work for every dime. There is nothing free about it.” That meant committing to our conditioning regimens. “Your head, your heart, and both feet better be in this program,” I’d say. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday they had weights at 5:30 A.M. On Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday they sprinted on the track. Classes started at 8:00 A.M., and as soon as they were over, players were expected to be taped, stretched, and ready for practice, which usually lasted three hours. After practice they showered, ate, and went to mandatory study hall every evening until 8:00 P.M. (I’d learned from experience that the best way to keep players out of trouble was to make sure they were too worn out to get into much.)
The penalties for breaking any of our team policies were clear-cut; there were no mysteries about how I’d react. They were matter-of-fact and designed to show players how interconnected they all were to each other’s success. Let’s say somebody didn’t get her study hall hours in. I made the whole team get up and run at six the next morning, and from then on they would police each other. Nobody wanted to chance it again. I usually had to penalize them only one time as freshmen.
We cared about their reputations and appearance. We didn’t have a dress code, but we didn’t allow hats or tattoos, or jeans when we traveled, because the players were representatives of a university. We cared about being respectful. No one was allowed to get a technical foul except the head coach. We didn’t use foul language—I didn’t even swear much in private, because I wasn’t allowed to growing up, and I just never thought it was real tasteful. (Though occasionally the team would drive me to say, “What the hell do y’all think you’re doing?”) We made eye contact when we were spoken to, and we were polite whether we were dealing with a high-dollar donor, or a waitress, or a housekeeper. When we stayed in hotels, I insisted they keep their rooms in decent shape.
Pat used to say when we left the hotel, Go back in and cut the lights off. You don’t leave a place with the lights on and the TV on. We always had to go back and double-check. It was a little thing about respecting others.
—REGINA CLARK
All this added up to a tremendous sense of pride within our program. We all cared equally about the Lady Vols logo, because we felt that over the years it had begun to acquire more than just the imprint of excellence from championships. It had begun to suggest a kind of character. Discipline on and off the court, adherence to deadlines, no tolerance for excuses—all these things were lessons in self-presentation, and the grounds for self-respect.
Daedra took our rules to heart as much as any player. Here’s how accountable she was: she turned in a recruit for a morals viol
ation. The young lady in question was a high school player visiting Tennessee, and Daedra was her hostess in the dorm. She woke up in the night and found that the young woman wasn’t in her bed and assumed she’d gone to the restroom. But in the morning when Daedra asked, “Where’d you go last night?,” the recruit replied that she had been with a football player she had met earlier in the day.
“All night?” Daedra said, shocked.
“Yeah, and it was fun, too,” the recruit said.
Daedra decided she had to tell me. Only, she couldn’t bring herself to use the word sex to her head coach; it made her too self-conscious. I think the more halting, dodging term she used was “chickabowwow,” which years later still made Mickie, Holly, and me gasp with laughter. We sent the recruit on her way, after a sharp lecture.
Involvement in the private lives of players was a delicate issue that didn’t exactly fall under my job description, but it required constant consideration. It was a complicated subject: I didn’t want to be too invasive, yet I also felt responsible for them and knew their families were relying on me to protect them. Also, private lives could intrude on our team; on more than one occasion we’d had situations of jealousy. I tried to approach it like a parent: give them the information with which to make good decisions. We had campus experts talk to them about safe sex, but I added my own opinion on certain matters, learned from experience, such as the entitlement of football players.
Social lives, I told Daedra, better be conducted in an adult, discreet, responsible way. I didn’t want to interfere with their lives, and I wouldn’t show up unannounced on their doorsteps, any more than I wanted them interfering in mine or showing up at my doorstep unannounced. But I did say, “Don’t let me find out about your business. If it reaches me, then that means you haven’t kept it private. If I find out about your business, then I will be in your business.”
It was Daedra who helped me deal with the team when I learned some players had been sneaking their boyfriends into their rooms after game-night curfew. Early on the morning of a road trip, I saw the boyfriend of one of our players drop her off at the team bus. She was a great player for us, whom I was personally fond of, one of those who had sat on my hospital bed the morning Tyler was born. But breaking curfew was a team violation. When we got to the airport, I told the team, “Circle up.” We started every practice with a circle and that was a time to lay issues out in the open. “Circle up” meant we had something to discuss.
They gathered around and I said, “Raise your hand if you’ve had any males in your dorm room or apartment after curfew.” Daedra raised hers, but nobody else did. Now here was a second discipline issue: I knew they were lying. So I said, “We will finish this on the plane. And you better not lie to me. You think about this; I want to know the truth.”
I boarded the plane, and Daedra took over. “Y’all better tell the truth, because you know that she knows.”
Debbie Hawhee said, “It’s none of her business.”
Daedra said, “Yes, it is her business, because apparently people are putting our business on the street.”
Lisa Harrison said, “I know for a fact that people have their boyfriends over.”
Daedra rounded on her. “You don’t throw people under the bus. Don’t you ever do your sisters like that again. Now listen to me. We got to circle up, and everybody’s got to tell Pat their business.”
That’s how Daedra ran our team. On another occasion I had to talk to her because I’d gotten calls that some of our team were out at a bar called Ivys. They were only drinking Coca-Cola, Daedra swore, and I accepted that. But I told her it didn’t matter; what mattered was the perception that they were sitting around in Knoxville bars. “Listen, I get calls all the time,” I said. “Everybody knows y’all. And you don’t know who I know. So you better do the right thing.”
Daedra called the team together. “Don’t even get caught with a cup in your hand,” she said.
Oh, heck, she had informants. Everybody knew us. I’d say, “How’d my mama know that?” I called her Mama because she acted like my mama, and they shared the same birthday.
—DAEDRA CHARLES
Just like in a family, I didn’t want our players running to me with every little squabble. Conflict resolution was a big part of what we taught in our huddles: if there was an issue, I wanted them to “circle up” and talk to each other about it face-to-face. I taught them how to run their own meetings without coaches, how to have a discussion and confront their issues in a constructive way, rather than backbiting. “Y’all need to figure this out for yourselves,” I’d say.
Realistically, not every player was going to feel like a sister. They had their dislikes, rivalries, jealousies, and squabbles over playing time. Some players were very close, and others just didn’t seem to speak the same language, and there was no rhyme or reason to it: Debbie Hawhee and Regina Clark were the closest of friends, even though Debbie was a Tennessean and Regina was from Saginaw, Michigan, whereas Debbie and Daedra didn’t see eye to eye at all; Debbie resented Daedra’s take-charge manner. But they had to learn to say, “Don’t talk to me in that tone.” I encouraged them to work it out among themselves, and by the time Daedra was a senior, Debbie could say to her, “I don’t really like you that much, but I respect you.” Daedra said, “Well, thank you.”
I constantly tried to find new ways to get the family message across. I began to write our players notes, because I knew that getting mail from home was important to kids at college. It occurred to me that when I had recruited them, I sent them warm notes and encouraging letters all the time—written words from me had attracted them to Tennessee in the first place. But once they got to campus they no longer heard from me in that way. I didn’t want them to suddenly stop getting mail from me, I decided. So I began to jot down thoughts and encouragements and stick them in their lockers. It was a personal touch that I wanted them to have. I could say the same thing twenty-five times, but when it was written down, just reading it once in permanent ink could make all the difference.
Certain letters were uplifting, and when I got sad, I would go read those letters and it would help me. They were handwritten. Not typed, and they were personal.
—DAEDRA CHARLES
I fed them. I had them over to the house as often as NCAA rules would allow, and I home-cooked for them. I’d ask them what their favorite foods were, and whatever they asked for, they got. Which meant there were some nights when pigs’ knuckles and collard greens were on the table. Also fried okra, steaks, fried shrimp, red velvet cake. I got my own mother to come visit and help me cook for them.
I loved to take our players traveling. As the program grew, we began to make summer trips overseas for tournaments—one summer we went to Brazil, and we spent a Christmas break playing a tournament in London—and for many of them, it was their first trip out of the country. They’d never had passports, or certain shots, or sat in restaurants with rows of silverware. Teaching manners was part of parenting, and before we left, I had an etiquette expert come to our locker room and give them a lesson in tableware, how to tell a dessert fork from the main course utensils. I also gave them a lesson in foreign currency exchanges. When we went out to dinner, I urged them to try new dishes. Regina Clark, from Saginaw, had never tasted lobster before. “Try it,” I urged her. “Try something new. Don’t always order the same thing.”
Some of our players had never been much of anywhere, just as I hadn’t at their age, and travel was disconcerting to them, and they needed reassuring. Marlene Jeter, a redshirt freshman on the 1991 squad, had never stayed in a hotel with turn-down service. When we went to the Final Four in New Orleans at the end of that season, Marlene, who was from Union, South Carolina, came to my room to report that she’d been “robbed” in her Fairmont Hotel room. I said, “What’s missing?” She said, “Nothing, but someone’s been in my room.” The bedcover was turned down, and there were chocolates on her pillow.
Maybe because of Tyler, I began to hear
the sound of my own voice when I talked to our players. A common complaint from them was: “Pat is never satisfied with me; she makes me feel like I can’t do anything right.” Over the years I’d tried to change that. I complimented them, but for some reason they didn’t register it, whereas they tended to hang on to the critical things I said. Even more important, when they didn’t hear my voice at all, they assumed I must be unhappy with them. Which taught me a fundamental lesson: in the absence of feedback, people will fill in the blanks with a negative. They will assume you don’t care about them or don’t like them.
I told them “great job” more than they gave me credit for. But I wasn’t going to be their cheerleader, either, and say rah-rah every time they sprinted down the floor, because they were supposed to sprint. Let’s say Jody Adams made six passes, set four screens, or made five cuts. I couldn’t possibly compliment her for doing all those things. It would just clog the gym with chatter. With too much praise you lose your effectiveness—just as too much criticism loses effectiveness. Eventually they tune you out.
With R.B.’s help, I devised an exercise in communication. Sitting at the dinner table one night R.B. said: “Look, let’s come up with a system in which they have to verbalize both negatives and positives, because they tend only to hear negatives. Is there a way that you can bring some emphasis to the positives so that they are more aware of it?”
I decided to make our players say “two points” out loud whenever I gave them a compliment, whereas if I gave them a criticism, they had to say “rebound,” meaning shake it off, take the lesson, and then move on. It sounds like a silly thing, but it was surprising how much better it made everybody feel, and we all started injecting it into our everyday conversation. A player would drop by the office and I’d say, “That’s a cute outfit,” and she’d say, “Two points.”