Randy Smith: Don't Forget About Pat

The average ticket price for the NCAA Women's Final Four this weekend is $2,000. Two thousand dollars just in case you didn't read it correctly the first time. Women's basketball has exploded in popularity in 2024 and you can thank Iowa's Caitlin Clark for it. You can also thank UConn's Paige Bueckers, LSU's Angel Reese and Southern Cal's JuJu Watkins for it as well. TV ratings have skyrocketed in the last two years, with the LSU-Iowa match up in the Elite Eight drawing 12.3 million viewers. That was more than the World Series drew last fall.

Credit for all this popularity can be spread out over a lot of people, but ultimately it comes down to the late Coach Pat Summitt. She brought women's basketball out of the dark ages as she coached 38 seasons at the University of Tennessee, winning 1098 games, 32 SEC Championships and eight national titles. She coached a lot as well on the international stage putting together a record of 63-4. The Sporting News once listed the fifty best coaches of all time and Coach Summitt was eleventh on that list and the only woman on it.

She took over the Tennessee program in 1974. Back then there was no NCAA Women's Basketball. That would come several years down the road. Women played under the banner /of the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AiAW) until 1982 when the NCAA adopted it as a sport.  There was a pretty big explosion for women's basketball in the early 1980s and the Lady Vols' first national title in 1987 let it be known that Tennessee was setting the standard of excellence for women's college basketball. The Lady Vols won their second national crown in 1989 and would win six more from 1991-2008. Her 1997-98 squad finished a perfect 39-0 and is considered as the best women's team of all time. Coach Summitt was named as head coach for the 25th anniversary team for women's college basketball in 2006. 

I could spend hours and hours listing all of Pat Summitt's honors and accomplishments but everyone knows about them. UConn's Geno Auriemma has won more games and more national championships but it was Pat who built the game from the ground floor.  When she was diagnosed with early onset dementia, " Alzheimer's Type "in 2011, she came forward, making it public and showing the tremendous courage and determination she had exhibited all her life. She passed away in 2016 at the much too young age of 64. Had she not been stricken by that terrible disease, she might even still be coaching and would have tallied 1417 career wins based upon her annual average of 29 wins a year and who knows how many more national titles she would have accrued. That's all pure speculation right now but the legacy Pat Summitt left in women's college basketball is a fact! 

When we start congratulating players and coaches now for the growing popularity of women's college basketball....let's not forget what Coach Pat Summitt did. After all, without her the sport might still be in the dark ages.