Pat Summitt Quotes & Sayings

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. — Pat Summitt

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. — Pat Summitt

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

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

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. — Pat Summitt

Sit up straight, listen and participate. — Pat Summitt

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

With attitude, you can determine your own performance. — Pat Summitt

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

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

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

I can remember trying to coach, trying to figure out schemes, and it just wasn't coming to me. — Pat Summitt

Teamwork is what makes common people capable of uncommon results. — Pat Summitt

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

Put the Team Before Yourself. — Pat Summitt

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

I don't want to sit around the house. I want to be out there. I want to go to practice. I want to be in the huddles. That's me. — Pat Summitt

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. — Pat Summitt

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. — Pat Summitt

Every Moment is a Teaching Moment — Pat Summitt

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

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

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

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

I lost my confidence. — Pat Summitt

Very few people are able to organize and direct followers, which is a far more subtle and multifaceted skill. Leadership is really a form of temporary authority that others grant you, and they only follow you if they find you consistently credible. It's all about perception - and if teammates find you the least bit inconsistent, moody, unpredictable, indecisive, or emotionally unreliable, then they balk and the whole team is destabilized. — Pat Summitt

Combine practice with belief. — Pat Summitt

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

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. — Pat Summitt

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

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

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

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. — Pat Summitt

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

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. — Pat Summitt

I think I can help others just by my example. — Pat Summitt

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. — Pat Summitt

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.' — Pat Summitt

I didn't leave her there for long. When a player makes a mistake, you always want to put them back in quickly - you don't just berate them and sit them down with no chance for redemption. — Pat Summitt

The ultimate goal of discipline is to teach self discipline. — Pat Summitt

The person, the student, the athlete, all are considered equal. — Pat Summitt

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

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

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

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. — Pat Summitt

Winners are not born, they are self-made. — Pat Summitt

Quit? Quit? We keep score in life because it matters. It counts. Too many people opt out and never discover their own abilities, because they fear failure. They don't understand commitment. When you learn to keep fighting in the face of potential failure, it gives you a larger skill set to do what you want to do in — Pat Summitt

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

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

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

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

- December 13, 2011, Piscataway, New Jersey, on the road with the Lady Vols, seven months after diagnosis — Pat Summitt

Know your strengths, weaknesses, and needs. — Pat Summitt

But the truly ambitious teams find relief in honesty when they've lost, because it's the diagnostic tool that leads to a solution - here's what we did wrong and let's fix it, so we don't ever have to feel this way again. Great teams explain their failure; they don't excuse it. Then they pay a visit to Charles Atlas and get stronger. When you explain a loss aloud, it's no longer a tormenting mystery. I believed in that brand of honesty my whole career, and I knew at least one other coach who believed in it too. — Pat Summitt

Offense sells tickets, defense wins games, rebounding wins championships. — Pat Summitt

My short-term factual memory can be like water; events are a brief disturbance on the surface and then it closes back up again, as if nothing ever touched it. But it's a strange fact that my long-term memory remains strong, perhaps because it recorded events when my mind was unaffected. My emotional memory is intact too, perhaps because feelings are recorded and stored in a different place than facts. The things that happened deeper in the past, and deeper in the breast, are still there for me, under the water.
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.
'Pat should get a tattoo!' The kids laughed. 'What kind should she get?'
'A heart. She should get a heart.'
Little did they know. They are the tattoos. — Pat Summitt

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. — Pat Summitt

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. — Pat Summitt

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. — Pat Summitt

Hard work breeds self-respect. — Pat Summitt

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. — Pat Summitt

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

Life. It gives you vision. But you can't acquire it if you're afraid of keeping score. — Pat Summitt

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

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

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

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

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. — Pat Summitt

Make Winning an Attitude. — Pat Summitt

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. — Pat Summitt

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

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

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. — Pat Summitt

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. — Pat Summitt

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

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. — Pat Summitt

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. — Pat Summitt

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

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

We do not win championships with girls. We win with competitors — Pat Summitt

Someday, I suppose I'll give up, and sit in the rocking chair. But I'll probably be rocking fast, because I don't know what I'll do without a job. — Pat Summitt

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

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

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. — Pat Summitt

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. — Pat Summitt

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

I don't give out compliments easily. — Pat Summitt

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. — Pat Summitt

Success is a project that's always under construction. — Pat Summitt

Kay very calmly and sweetly said, "You know, Pat, how much better do you think Lea Henry and Cindy Noble are going to get at this point?" She was saying ease up - it's enough. I had reached the point of diminishing returns. "I think they are both trying really hard to please you, but how much more can they possibly do?" she said. "I just wonder if you've really thought about that. — Pat Summitt

See yourself as self employed. — Pat Summitt

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

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

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

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. — Pat Summitt

What Michelle didn't yet know was that there is a vast difference between playing and leading. The point guard position in basketball is one of the great tutorials on leadership, and it ought to be taught in classrooms. Anyone can perfect a dribble with muscle memory; — Pat Summitt

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. — Pat Summitt

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

Loyalty is not unilateral. You have to give it to receive it. — Pat Summitt

Discipline yourself, so no one else has to. — Pat Summitt