Pat summitt quotes

Bringing together disparate personalities to form a team is like a jigsaw puzzle. You have to ask yourself: what is the whole picture here? We want to make sure our players all fit together properly and complement each other, so that we don't have a big piece, a little piece, an oblong piece, and a round piece. If personalities work against each other, as a team you'll find yourselves spinning your wheels.

I learned so much from Sue about the Xs and Os of the game of basketball.

Group discipline produces a unified effort toward a common goal.

Accountability is essential to personal growth, as well as team growth. How can you improve if you're never wrong? If you don't admit a mistake and take responsibility for it, you're bound to make the same one again.

I think I can help others just by my example.

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

Know your strengths, weaknesses, and needs.

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.

If I'm not leading by example, then I'm not doing the right thing. And I want to always do the right thing.

I have a love-hate relationship with losing. I hate how it makes me feel, which is basically sick. But I love what it brings out.

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

I think helped our players in terms of being able to fight through some adversity along the way.

Teamwork doesn't come naturally. It must be taught.

Belief in yourself is what happens when you know you've done the thing things that entitle you to success.

I'd wake up in the morning and I would think, 'Where am I?' I'd have to gather myself.

You're wondering what a bale of hay has to do with success. Well, there's a trick to loading hay. You have to use your knee. What you do is, you put your right knee behind it and half kick it up in the air. That way you get some lift on it. ... My point is, there are certain ways to make a hard job easier.

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.

Hard work breeds self-respect.

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.

I never ask Candace Parker if she was thinking about leaving because I never had any reason to believe she would. I just kept the focus on the team and on Candace and the role she played for us.

I don't give out compliments easily.

It is what it is. But, it will be what you make it.

Coaches who start listening to fans often wind up sitting next to them.

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.

The person, the student, the athlete, all are considered equal.

I remember every player-every single one-who wore the Tennessee orange, a shade that our rivals hate, a bold, aggravating color that you can usually find on a roadside crew, "or in a correctional institution," as my friend Wendy Larry jokes. But to us the color is a flag of pride, because 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.

Success is a project that's always under construction.

We do not win championships with girls. We win with competitors

I love teaching I think more than anything. It's the opportunity to just teach young people and teach the game. You teach more than basketball. You teach life skills. The teaching part of it is something that I am passionate about. I look forward to every practice. A lot of people say well, I enjoy coaching, but I see myself as more as a teacher.

Attitude is a choice. Think positive thoughts daily. Believe in yourself.

The greatest strength any human being an have is to recognize his or her own weaknesses. When you identify your weaknesses, you can begin to remedy them - or at least figure out how to work around them.

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.

I've always put great emphasis on the academics and getting your degree. It's important because basketball is short term. The long term is what are you gonna do after college and after you no longer can bounce the ball.

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

Attitude is a choice. What you think you can do, whether positive or negative, confident or scared, will most likely happen.

It's harder to stay on top than it is to make the climb, Continue to seek new goals.

Value those colleagues who tell you the truth, not just what you want to hear.

I mean, we're always trying to evaluate and tweak things and get better.

A competitor continually sets new goals. He feels the need to keep raising the bar. If the fist goal is to make the team, and he achieves it, he immediately resets the goal to: I want to be a starter.

Offense sells tickets, defense wins games, rebounding wins championships.

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.

Anyone can quit, but it takes a strong, committed person not to quit when times are tough.

To me, teamwork is a lot like being part of a family. It comes with obligations, entanglements, headaches, and quarrels. But the rewards are worth the cost.

I was a little concerned about it when State Farm approached me because, you know, I've never done a commercial by any means, but I tried to look at it as something that would be good for our game. We've never had a women's basketball coach represented in that fashion and I love State Farm for the fact they really support the women's game.

I really felt like we had to have a go to player.

You can't always be the most talented person in the room. But you can be the most competitive

You have to make shots. That's the bottom line.

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

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.

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

Winners are not born, they are self-made.

The ultimate goal of discipline is to teach self discipline.

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

In order to grow, you must accept new responsibilities, no matter how uncertain you may feel or how unprepared you are to deal with them.

Teamwork is what makes common people capable of uncommon results.

I want to go to practice. I want to be in the huddles. That's me.

I haven't ever really had a goal to break that record or catch John Wooden.

I want to continue to do is to help these young women be successful. .. You don't just say goodbye at the end of their playing careers and end it there.

I just think they were just a team that really enjoyed the process and allowed our coaching staff to enjoy the process.

I think that it was a great feeling and probably a little bit more special because of the length of time that had passed before we won, but I think more importantly, it was just a great feeling because this team had such strong leadership and they had great chemistry.

I think the only thing that I really thought about, I am always every year thinking about how I can get better, how my stuff can get better, how our team can improve.

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

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

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.

Discipline yourself, so no one else has to.

Class is more important than a game.

I am about helping each and every student athlete that selects to wear the orange, you know, be successful at Tennessee individually and as a team. That type of record is certainly not anything that I have aspirations to reach.

There is not that many players that really can take over games, signed Candace Parker, I really felt like at that time that a National Championship was certainly in reach.

If I aint happy, nobody's happy.

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.

I didn't say a lot. I didn't throw anything. That's not my style. I did think about it though.

I want to keep coaching as long as I can. I love teaching and working with student athletes and I love being at the University of Tennessee.

She taught me that it's ok to let down your guard and allow your players to get to know you. They don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

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

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

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

Change equals self improvement. Push yourself to places you haven't been before.

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

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

Our emphasis is on execution, not winning.

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

When you choose to be a competitor you choose to be a survivor. 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.

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

The willingness to experiment with change may be the most essential ingredient to success at anything.

The absolute heart of loyalty is to value those people who tell you the truth, not just those people 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.

I think the most important thing I thought is, I thought about recruiting and what we need in recruiting.

Loyalty is not unilateral. You have to give it to receive it.

I think sometimes for me that sounds like almost being selfish. I am not about personal records.

I hate to sound this way but, 'Why me? Why me with dementia?'

If you want to be in the game you better shoot 75% from the line.

I think basketball has changed tremendously and for the better. I think that obviously the game is better. I think the skill of the players are better, the strength, the overall athleticism, the teamwork involved. I think coaching is better. We have more exposure for our game than ever. You know, our sport has grown significantly in really the last five years. It's pretty amazing.

Rebounding wins championships, you need to emphasize it and work with kids on it.

With attitude, you can determine your own performance.

Actually, when I saw it in USA Today, I just, Candace Parker was, we were warming up in practice and she was underneath the basket shooting and I just said, 'Hey Candace! I enjoyed what I read in the paper today about your decision [to stay].' She just started laughing and I did too. So I haven't discussed it with her.

Put the Team Before Yourself.

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

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

I've got a great staff and great support system, and I'm going to stick my neck out and do what I always do.

Sit up straight, listen and participate.

I think you can challenge people, but you don't want to break people down. But you've got to sometimes just pull them aside and say, you know, you're OK but you could be better.

Silence is a form of communication, too. Sometimes less is more.

Competition got me off the farm and trained me to seek out challenges and to endure setbacks; and in combination with my faith, it sustains me now in my fight with Alzheimer's disease.

There are some concrete ways to create a winning attitude. But nothing beats practicing it. When you prepare to win, belief comes easily.

Teamwork does not come naturally. Let's face it. We are born with certain inclinations, but sharing isn't one of them.

You can't have any quit in you if you want to be successful.

It's my experience that people rise to the level of their own expectations and of the competition they seek out.

Make Winning an Attitude.

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

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.

See yourself as self employed.

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

A lot of kids just want to go play basketball, but they don't know to play and they don't have the skills to play. I think just the skill development right off and then play all you can, but don't sacrifice your skill development by just playing and not working on the specifics of the game.

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

When you grow up on a dairy farm, cows don't take a day off. So you work every day and my dad always said, 'No one can outwork you,'

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.

Combine practice with belief.

If it doesn't bother you, it won't bother them.