Pat Summitt - Reach for the Summit: The Definite Dozen System For Succeeding At Whatever You Do

OTHER BOOKS BY PAT SUMMITT WITH SALLY JENKINS

Raise the Roof

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1998 by Broadway Books.

REACH FOR THE SUMMIT . Copyright 1998 by Pat Summit!. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as:

Summitt, Pat Head, 1952
Reach for the summit: the definite dozen system for succeeding at whatever you do / Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins. 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-7679-9928-1
1. SuccessPsychological aspects. I. Jenkins, Sally.
II. Title.
BF637.S8S82 1998
158dc21 97-52609

v3.1

Formy familyfor my mother and my father, the two people who have influenced me most, and for my husband, who is my best friend and generously supports me in a two-career household, and for my son, who has already taught me more than Ive taught any player. Thanks to him, I am a better coach.

P AT H EAD S UMMITT

Formy actual goddaughters, Avery, Meredith, and Paige, and for my informal ones, Rachel and Bailey. Gorgeous children of a trillion toys, may you have a Pat in your lives.

S ALLY J ENKINS

We are indebted to Bob Barnett of Williams & Connolly for proposing this book, to John Sterling of Broadway Books for his belief in it, and to Esther Newberg of ICM for helping to bring us together on it. Without them, these pages would not have been written or published.

We are especially grateful to five people who lived with the project every day: R.B. and Tyler Summitt and Tennessee assistant coaches Mickie DeMoss, Holly Warlick, and Al Brown. They endured the imposition gracefully and told their side of the story with honesty, affection, and hilarity.

Katie Wynn and Debby Jennings of the Tennessee womens athletic department and Jenny Minton and Luke Dempsey of Broadway Books each provided invaluable editorial advice and laughter from the trenches.

Pat was very fortunate to play for some knowledgeable and dedicated coaches who greatly influenced her life as she competed at the junior high, high school, college, and international level, and she would like to thank them.

But special thanks are reserved for the Lady Vol basketball family, immediate and extended, past and present, including each of those student athletes and assistants who have worked so hard over the last twenty-four years, as well as university president Dr. Joe Johnson, past president Dr. Ed Boling, womens athletic director Joan Cronan, and the Lady Vol team managers. Without such dedicated players, staff, and administrators, there would be no success story to tell.

P.S. and S.J.

The Threepeat Season

Sometimes the best laid plan doesnt work, and sometimes, you dont have a plan at all, and things work out beautifully. Most of the time, you only have half a plan, and it about half works. But every once in awhile, a good plan works to utter perfection. When that happens, you dont write it off to luck or good fortune. You examine it, and ask yourself why things turned out so well.

I wrote Reach for the Summit in the summer and fall of 1997 with no idea of what the University of Tennessee womens basketball team was about to accomplish. It was a peculiar process. When I began the book, Tennessee had just experienced one of its most difficult, if rewarding seasons, struggling to a 2710 mark, and setting a record for the most losses ever by a team that still managed to claim a national championship. Then, on the heels of that team and shortly after the publication of Reach for the Summit, came the 199798 Lady Vols. A team starring four freshmen and an All-American named Chamique Holdsclaw went 390, establishing a record for the most victories by a collegiate team ever, men or women, and along the way won a third consecutive national championship, Tennessees sixth overall. Some called it the greatest womens collegiate basketball team ever.

In short, in the space of two seasons, Tennessee managed to set records for both losses and victories.

Strangely enough, after writing a how-to-succeed book, and concluding that I knew all there was to know about success, the 19971998 Lady Vols were the single most successful experience of my career.

Why?

The extraordinary but very different achievements of those back-to-back championship teams forced me to think again about Reach for the Summit, and the set of principles it outlines. The one thing those teams had in common, I realized, was the Definite Dozen. While the players have changed at Tennessee, The Definite Dozen has remained a fixture. It has evolved over several years, with many of the rules in place for more than a decade, while some of them have been refined or reworded.

Reach for the Summit opens with the 199798 squad reporting to campus, and our first team meeting. What none of us could know then was that the Lady Vols would go on to exemplify every principle contained in the Definite Dozen. Our plan was fully realized.

But in the beginning, we didnt even know if they would get along. We had a puzzling mix of new players and veterans. We had four pure freshmen, and not a single senior. How could we hope to repeat our previous success? Would they respect each other? The more talented people you put in the same room, the bigger the potential problem.