Pat Summitt - Early Life and Family

Early Life and Family

Summitt was born Patricia Sue Head in Clarksville, Tennessee. She has three siblings: older brothers Tommy, Charles and Kenneth. She married R. B. Summitt in 1980; the two filed for divorce in 2007. They have one son, Ross Tyler Summitt (b. 1990), who played as a walk-on for the Tennessee men's basketball team, graduated from Tennessee in May 2012, and has been hired as an assistant coach for the Marquette University women's team effective with the 2012–13 season. In what ESPN.com columnist Gene Wojciechowski called "a bittersweet irony", Tyler's hiring by Marquette was announced on the same day his mother announced her retirement.

When Summitt was in high school, her family moved to nearby Henrietta, so she could play basketball in Cheatham County because Clarksville did not have a girls team. From there, Summitt went to University of Tennessee at Martin where she was a member of Chi Omega and won All-American honors, playing for UT–Martin's first women's basketball coach, Nadine Gearin. In 1970, with the passage of Title IX still two years away, there were no athletic scholarships for women. Each of Summitt's brothers had gotten an athletic scholarship, but her parents had to pay her way to college. She later co-captained the first United States women's national basketball team as a player at the inaugural women's tournament at the 1976 Summer Olympics, winning the silver medal. Eight years later in 1984, she coached the U.S. women's team to an Olympic gold medal, becoming the first U.S. Olympian to win a basketball medal and coach a medal-winning team.