Legendary coach Pat Summitt dies

Women’s college basketball coach Pat Summitt, the winningest coach in Division I basketball history, died this morning after a five-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease. She was 64.

Summitt is credited with elevating women’s basketball from relative obscurity through her success at the University of Tennessee, where she led the Lady Volunteers to eight national championships. Six of those titles came in 12 years, during a time in the late 1980s and 1990s when her team dominated the sport.

When she retired in 2012, Summitt, had a career record of 1,098-208 in 38 seasons, plus 18 NCAA Final Four appearances.

She described her long coaching career as a “great ride.”

Summitt began coaching in 1974, and she never left Tennessee. She was known for her exacting demands and direct approach to coaching and winning. Although she drove her players hard, they loved and respected her enough to call her by her first name.

Her players’ devotion and dedication helped earn Summitt 16 Southeastern Conference regular season titles and 16 tournament titles. She was an eight-time SEC coach of the year and seven-time NCAA coach of the year.

In 1984, she coached the U.S. women’s Olympic team to a gold medal.

In 1999, Summitt joined the inaugural class of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame. The Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame inducted her a year later. And in 2013, President Barack Obama honored her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

In 2011, Summitt announced she’d been diagnosed with early onset dementia. She coached one more season before retiring.

“It’s hard to pinpoint the exact day that I first noticed something wrong,” Summitt wrote in her 2013 book Sum It Up. “Over the course of a year, from 2010 to 2011, I began to experience a troubling series of lapses. I had to ask people to remind me of the same things, over and over. I’d ask three times in the space of an hour, ‘What time is my meeting again?’—and then be late.”

Summitt’s only son, Tyler, who coaches at Louisiana Tech, said his mother battled her greatest opponent—Alzheimer’s—with the same fierce determination that brought her so much success on the court.

“Even though it’s incredibly difficult to come to terms that she is no longer with us, we can all find peace in knowing she no longer carries the heavy burden of this disease,” he said today.

In a 2013 interview with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Tyler Summitt said his mom passed on to him something far more important than their shared love for basketball.

“She prays every morning. She reads her Bible every day,” he said. “We always went to church. And if someone asked her (if she’s a Christian) she would absolutely say yes.”

The family is planning a private funeral and burial in Middle Tennessee, but a public memorial service is being planned for Thompson-Boling Arena.