During his speaking engagement at the Columbus Rotary Club on Tuesday, Mississippi State women’s basketball coach Vic Schaefer stressed the importance of not just developing talent, but people.
Success in coaching, he said, is not merely a matter of enhancing a player’s natural athletic abilities, but helping to shape the whole person.
“It’s the difference between making an impression and making an impact,” he said. “We want our players to become professionals, whether that means as a basketball player or in any other field they choose for their adult lives. We want them to have an impact.”
It was fitting that Schaefer should use the word “impact” on Tuesday. Earlier in the day, Pat Summitt, the legendary former women’s basketball coach at the University of Tennessee died at age 64 after a five-year battle with Alzheimer’s Disease.
“There’s no question about the impact she had on our game and in the lives of so many players and coaches,” Schaefer said. “And I’m not just talking about women’s basketball. I’d put her right alongside John Wooden.”
While the ground-breaking gender-equality legislation known as Title IX on June 23, 1972, is rightfully considered the birth date of women’s athletics in this country, the growth of women’s sports would not likely be where it is today without the pioneering “country girl” who took over the Tennessee women’s basketball program in 1974.
Her arrival as the Vols’ coach says much about where the women’s game was at the time. It was hardly more than an afterthought, which explains why, at the age of only 22, Summitt was given the top coaching job after the head coach abruptly quit.
Summitt earned $250 monthly and washed the players’ uniforms — uniforms purchased the previous year with proceeds from a dough-nut sale.
Over the course of the next 38 years, Summitt built Tennessee in a dynasty, collecting eight national championship, 16 Southeastern Conference Championships and 1,098 wins, the most of any Division 1 basketball coach, male or female.
Her success provided women’s basketball with an aura of credibility it so desperately needed at the time.
Apart from the championships and victories, the popularity of today’s women’s game — with teams playing before sold-out crowds all over the country (including at MSU) — can be attributed in part to Summitt’s impact on the game.
It is a cruel irony that the illness that led to her death robbed her of the one thing she had more of than almost every other coach — memories. Players, coaches, victories and championships.
As the shadows of lost memory crowded in on her, it was left to those who played and coached with and against her to hold those memories as her legacy.
“As a coach, if you could have even half the impact she had, you would consider yourself very lucky,” Schaefer said.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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