119 Inspiring Pat Summitt Quotes

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Best Pat Summitt Quotes
Pat Summitt Quotes on Teamwork
Pat Summitt Quotes on Leadership
Powerful Pat Summitt Quotes
Pat Summitt Quotes on Coaching Basketball
Pat Summitt Quotes on Alzheimer’s Disease
Pat Summitt Quotes on Competition & Discipline
Summary

Best Pat Summitt Quotes

Attitude lies somewhere between emotion and logic. It’s that curious mix of optimism and determination that enables you to maintain a positive outlook and to continue plodding in the face of the most adverse circumstances. Pat Summitt

The willingness to experiment with change may be essential to success at anything. Pat Summitt

It’s harder to stay on top than it is to make the climb. Continue to seek new goals. Pat Summitt

Admit to and make yourself accountable for mistakes. How can you improve if you’re never wrong? Pat Summitt

A champion is someone who is willing to be uncomfortable. Pat Summitt Quotes

What you learn after you know it all counts the most. Pat Summitt

Hard work breeds self-respect. Pat Summitt

Handle success like you handle failure. You can’t always control what happens, but you can control how you handle it. Pat Summitt

Do the things that aren’t fun first, and do them well. Pat Summitt

No one ever got anywhere by being negative. Pat Summitt

In facing weakness, you learn how much there is in you, and you find real strength. Pat Summitt

Belief in yourself is what happens when you know you’ve done the things that entitle you to success. Pat Summitt

Change equals self-improvement. Push yourself to places you haven’t been. Pat Summitt

Setting up a system that rewards you for meeting your goals and has penalties for failing to hit your target is just as important as putting your goals down on paper. Pat Summitt

Attitude is a choice. What you think you can do, positive or negative, confidence or fear will most likely happen. Think positive thoughts daily. Pat Summitt

If you don’t admit a mistake and take responsibility for it, you’re bound to make it again. Pat Summitt

In my experience, people rise to the level of their own expectations and of the competition they seek out. Pat Summitt

Pat Summitt Quotes on Teamwork

Make good eye contact. Pat Summitt

Teamwork is really a form of trust. It’s what happens when you surrender the mistaken idea that you can go it alone and realize that you won’t achieve your individual goals without the support of your colleagues. Pat Summitt

Responsibility equals accountability equals ownership. And a sense of ownership is the most powerful weapon a team or organization can have. Pat Summitt

Individual success is a myth. No one succeeds all by herself. Pat Summitt

Put the team before yourself. Pat Summitt

Communication eliminates mistakes. Pat Summitt

Not everyone is born to lead. Role players are critical to group success. Pat Summitt

We are born with certain inclinations, but sharing isn’t one of them. Pat Summitt Quotes

Group discipline produces a unified effort toward a common goal. Pat Summitt

Teamwork doesn’t come naturally. It must be taught. Pat Summitt

Teamwork allows common people to obtain uncommon results. Pat Summitt

Teamwork is what makes common people capable of uncommon results. Pat Summitt

In group success, there is individual success. Pat Summitt

People who do not respect those around them will not make good team members and probably lack self-esteem. Pat Summitt

Pat Summitt Quotes on Leadership

Very few people can organize and direct followers, which is a far more subtle and multifaceted skill. Leadership is really a form of temporary authority that others grant you, and they only follow you if they find you consistently credible. Pat Summitt

It’s all about perception—and if teammates find you the least bit inconsistent, moody, unpredictable, indecisive, or emotionally unreliable, then they balk and the whole team is destabilized. Pat Summitt

If I was renowned as a tough coach, I also wanted to be a caring one. Pat Summitt

When you understand yourself and those around you, you can better minimize weaknesses and maximize strengths. Personality profiles help. Pat Summitt

We communicate all the time, even when we don’t realize it. Be aware of body language. Pat Summitt

If you don’t want responsibility, don’t sit in the big chair. To be successful, you must accept full responsibility. Pat Summitt

Know your strengths, weaknesses, and needs. Pat Summitt

You’ll be finished when it’s done. And it’s not done till it’s done right. Pat Summitt

Silence is a form of communication. Sometimes less is more. Pat Summitt

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. Pat Summitt

See yourself as self-employed. Pat Summitt

I’m someone who will push you beyond all reasonable limits. Someone who will ask you to fulfill your potential and exceed it. Someone who will expect more from you than you may believe you are capable of. Pat Summitt

Loyalty is not unilateral. You have to give it to receive it. Pat Summitt Quotes

If I’m not leading by example, I’m not doing the right thing. And I want to always do the right thing. Pat Summitt

Being responsible sometimes means making tough, unpopular decisions.
It is what it is. But, it will be what you make it. Pat Summitt

The absolute heart of loyalty is to value those who tell you the truth, not just those who tell you what you want to hear. In fact, you should value them most. Because they have paid you the compliment of leveling with you and assuming you can handle it. Pat Summitt

Surround yourself with people who are better than you are. Seek out quality people, acknowledge their talents, and let them do their jobs. You win with people. Pat Summitt

They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Pat Summitt

My parents taught me a long time ago that you win in life with people, and that’s important because if you hang with winners, you stand a great chance of being a winner. Pat Summitt

You can’t pick and choose the days that you feel like being responsible. It’s not something that disappears when you’re tired. Pat Summitt

Be flexible. Pat Summitt

Powerful Pat Summitt Quotes

Success is all a matter of perspective. It depends on where you start from, and where you want to end up. Pat Summitt

The best way to handle responsibility is to break it down into smaller parts. Take care of one small thing at a time. Pat Summitt

Success is about having the right person, in the right place, at the right time. Pat Summitt

There is an old saying: a champion is someone who is willing to be uncomfortable. Pat Summitt

Success lulls you. It makes the most ambitious of us complacent and sloppy. In a way, you have to cultivate a kind of amnesia and forget all of your previous prosperity. Pat Summitt

Confidence is what happens when you’ve done the hard work that entitles you to succeed. Pat Summitt

Success is a project that’s always under construction. Pat Summitt

Winners are not born, they are self-made. Pat Summitt

No one feels strong when she examines her own weakness. But in facing weakness, you learn how much there is in you, and you find real strength. Pat Summitt

The greatest strength any human being can have is recognizing his or her weaknesses. When you identify your weaknesses, you can begin to remedy them – or at least figure out how to work around them. Pat Summitt Quotes

There is no such thing as self-respect without respect for others. Pat Summitt

I was like, ‘I don’t know if I could be an Olympian…’ But my dad really influenced me to stay and be in the Olympics. Pat Summitt

Sometimes I’m more stubborn than I am smart. Pat Summitt

Combine practice with belief. Pat Summitt

Pat Summitt Quotes on Coaching Basketball

I’d bring our big players out to the perimeter and make them run the play like a guard, so they saw the play from that angle and their own. When one of our bigs got upset if a guard didn’t make a play, I’d say, Fine. You go play point. Pat Summitt

Losing forces you to reexamine. Pat Summitt

I want to continue to do to help these young women be successful. Pat Summitt

Every Moment is a Teaching Moment. Pat Summitt

The offense sells tickets, the defense wins games, and the rebounding wins championships. Pat Summitt

When a team takes ownership, good things happen. Pat Summitt

When a player makes a mistake, you always want to put them back in quickly—you don’t just berate them and sit them down with no chance for redemption. Pat Summitt

Sometimes you learn more from losing than winning. Losing forces you to reexamine. Pat Summitt

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. ‘Pat should get a tattoo!’ The kids laughed. ‘What kind should she get?’ ‘A heart. She should get a heart.’ Little did they know. They are the tattoos. Pat Summitt

I remember every player—every single one—who wore the Tennessee orange. It identifies us as Lady Vols and, therefore, as women of an unmistakable type. Fighters. I remember how many of them fought for a better life for themselves. I just met them halfway. Pat Summitt

I don’t give out compliments easily. Pat Summitt

I think that a lot of people would perceive my style as intimidating. And although I don’t want to intimidate kids, I am very demanding. Pat Summitt

I remember teaching a clinic to other coaches, and a guy raised his hand and asked if I had any advice when it came to coaching women. I leveled him with a death-ray stare and said, ‘Go home and coach basketball.’ Pat Summitt

I would give back every one of my trophies to still be coaching. That says it’s the teaching you really love more than the winning. That’s right. It also says that retirement is a deep wound. Pat Summitt

Coaching is my life’s great passion, and the job has always been an opportunity to work with our student-athletes and help them discover what they want. Pat Summitt

Most people get excited about games, but I’ve got to be excited about practice because that’s my classroom. Pat Summitt

I remember standing on a medal podium at the Montreal Olympics, imbued with a sense that if you won enough basketball games, there was no such thing as poor, backward, country, female, or inferior. Pat Summitt Quotes

You spend more of the game preparing to win in the final seconds. And that is what separates winners from losers. Pat Summitt

Losing strengthens you. It reveals your weaknesses, so you can fix them. Pat Summitt

If it doesn’t bother you, it won’t bother them. Pat Summitt

Our emphasis is on execution, not winning. Pat Summitt

It wasn’t just a job; it was my life, my home, and my family, and the players were the second-deepest love of my life. Pat Summitt

The truly ambitious teams find relief in honesty when they’ve lost because it’s the diagnostic tool that leads to a solution—here’s what we did wrong and let’s fix it so we don’t ever have to feel this way again. Great teams explain their failure; they don’t excuse it. When you explain a loss aloud, it’s no longer a tormenting mystery. I believed in that brand of honesty my whole career. Pat Summitt

Class is more important than a game. Pat Summitt

Pat Summitt Quotes on Alzheimer’s Disease

God doesn’t take things away to be cruel. He takes things away to make room for other things. He takes things away to lighten us. He takes things away so we can fly. Pat Summitt

My short-term factual memory can be like water; events are a brief disturbance on the surface and then it closes back up again, as if nothing ever touched it. But it’s a strange fact that my long-term memory remains strong, perhaps because it recorded events when my mind was unaffected. My emotional memory is intact too, perhaps because feelings are recorded and stored in a different place than facts. The things that happened deeper in the past, and deeper in the breast, are still there for me, under the water. Pat Summitt

The competition got me off the farm and trained me to seek out challenges and endure setbacks, and in combination with my faith, it sustains me now in my fight with Alzheimer’s disease. Pat Summitt

About one’s life; memories are unreliable—they smudge and fade like disappearing footprints in the sand. We’re too busy standing in the middle of it all to remember everything perfectly. Pat Summitt

Have you ever walked along a shoreline only to have your footprints washed away? That’s what Alzheimer’s is like. Pat Summitt

I think I can help others just by my example. Pat Summitt

The doctors believe early-onset Alzheimer’s has a strong genetic predictor and that it may have been progressing for some years before I was diagnosed. Pat Summitt

This tells me that facts are only the smallest components of memory. Pat Summitt Quotes

I’m interested to see where a combination of faith and science will take me. Pat Summitt

Pat Summitt Quotes on Competition & Discipline

You become a competitor by doing things when you are too tired or pushing yourself farther than you thought you could — like running the track after a two-hour practice. Each time you go beyond your perceived limit, you become mentally stronger. Pat Summitt

When you choose to be a competitor, you choose to be a survivor. Pat Summitt

When you choose to compete, you make the conscious decision to find out what your real limits are, not just what you think they are. Pat Summitt

Discipline is the only sure way I know to convince people to believe in themselves. Pat Summitt

Self-discipline helps you believe in yourself. Pat Summitt

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. Pat Summitt

You will run into a situation where you are not as talented as the person next to you. That’s when being a competitor can make a difference in your fortunes. Pat Summitt Quotes

Quit? Quit? We keep score in life because it matters. It counts. Too many people opt out and never discover their own abilities because they fear failure. They don’t understand commitment. When you learn to keep fighting in the face of potential failure, it gives you a larger skill set to do what you want to do. Pat Summitt

There is nothing wrong with having competitive instincts. They are survival instincts. Pat Summitt

We keep score in life because it matters. It counts. It matters. Too many people opt out and never discover their own abilities because they fear failure. They don’t understand commitment. Pat Summitt

There is always someone better than you. Whatever it is that you do for a living, chances are, you will run into a situation in which you are not as talented as the person next to you. That’s when being a competitor can make a difference in your fortunes. Pat Summitt

Discipline helps you finish a job, and finishing is what separates excellent work from average work. Pat Summitt

Discipline yourself so no one else has to. Pat Summitt

You can’t always be the most talented person in the room. But you can be the most competitive. Pat Summitt

Nine-tenths of discipline is having the patience to do things right. Pat Summitt

Push yourself to places you haven’t been to before. Pat Summitt

Learning to keep fighting in the face of potential failure gives you a larger skill set to do what you want to do in life. It gives you vision. But you can’t acquire it if you’re afraid of keeping score. Pat Summitt

Winning is fun… Sure. But winning is not the point. Wanting to win is the point. Not giving up is the point. Never letting up is the point. Never being satisfied with what you’ve done is the point. Pat Summitt

Cows don’t take a day off when you grow up on a dairy farm. So you work every day and my dad always said, ‘No one can outwork you.’ Pat Summitt

Competition isn’t social. It separates achievers from the average. Pat Summitt

Summary

Pat (Head) Summitt (June 14, 1952 – June 28, 2106) was a groundbreaking women’s basketball coach. She spent her entire career from 1974 to 2012 as the Head Coach for the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). She was an All-American college basketball player at the University of Tennessee at Martin prior to entering coaching. Coach Summitt was forced to take an early retirement after being diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

She is among the most accomplished coaches for any sport and for either gender. Among her achievements are:

Presidential Medal of Freedom
Arthur Ashe Courage Award
Her teams won 1098 games. At the time of her retirement that was the most for any college basketball coach of either gender and of any sport.
8 National Championships
18 Final Fours
16 Southeastern Conference tournament championships
16 Southeastern Conference regular sesaon champions
Naismith Coach of the Year in 198, 1989, 1994, 1998, and 2004
Women’s Basketball Coaches Association Coach of the Year in 1983, 1995, and 1998
38 winning seasons, 38 NCAA tournament births in 38 years of coaching
FIBA Basketball Hall of Fame inductee as a player
Naismith United States Basketball Hall of Fame
Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame

She coached the 1984 Unites States Women’s Olympic Basketball team to a Gold Medal. In 1976, she was co-captain on the women’s basketball team that won a Silver Olympic Medal (while she was the Head Women’s Coach at Tennessee!). Pat was the first person in Olympic basketball history to win a medal as both a player and a coach.

Summitt, along with many others, was responsible for improving the conditions of not only women’s college basketball, but women’s athletics at every level. She was a tireless advocate for equal opportunities for women’s sports.

It is hard to believe some of the difficulties she encountered as both an athlete and a coach. Here are just a few.

To be able to play basketball in high school, her family moved because the high school she was to attend did not have a girls’ team.
Playing college basketball in an era where there were no scholarships for women athletes.
She was named the Head Coach at Tennessee in 1974 at the age of 22. Her salary was $250 per month.
Among her duties were washing the team’s uniforms and driving the van to away games.
Being forced to sleep in the opponent’s gym for a road game.
Recruiting players who had player 6 player basketball in high school. The rules for 6 player basketball requires that 3 players from each team play on offense and 3 play on defense. The players do not cross the halfcourt line.

Funded by the Pat Summitt Foundation, the Pat Summitt Alzheimers’s was opened at the University of Tennessee Medical Center. The National Collegiate Athletic Association honored her by instituting the Pat Summitt Award. The award is given annually to individuals who are positive influences in college athletics.

Source: Wikipedia

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