Pat Summitt's Definite Dozen

Below are the late coach Pat Summitt's “Definite Dozen” rules for achieving success in any endeavor. 

Respect Yourself and Others

There is no such thing as self-respect without respect for others. 
Individual success is a myth. No one succeeds all by themselves.
People who do not respect those around them will not make good team members and
probably lack self-esteem themselves.
When you ask yourself, “Do I deserve to succeed?”, make sure the answer is yes.

Take Full Responsibility

There are no shortcuts to success.
You can’t assume larger responsibility without taking responsibility for the small things, too.
Being responsible sometimes means making tough, unpopular decisions.
Admit to and make yourself accountable for mistakes. How can you improve if you’re
never wrong?

Develop and Demonstrate Loyalty

Loyalty is not unilateral. You have to give it to receive it.
The family business model is a successful one because it fosters loyalty and trust.
Surround yourself with people who are better than you are. Seek out quality people,
acknowledge their talents, and let them do their jobs. You win with people.

Learn to Be a Great Communicator

Communication eliminates mistakes.
Listening is crucial to good communication.
We communicate all the time, even when we don’t realize it. Be aware of body language.
Make good eye contact.
Silence is a form of communication, too. Sometimes less is more.

Discipline Yourself So No One Else Has To

Self-discipline helps you believe in yourself.
Group discipline produces a unified effort toward a common goal.
When disciplining others, be fair, be firm, be consistent.
Discipline helps you finish a job, and finishing is what separates excellent work from
average work.

Make Hard Work Your Passion

Do the things that aren’t fun first, and do them well.
Plan your work, and work your plan.
See yourself as self-employed.

Don’t Just Work Hard, Work Smart

Success is about having the right person, in the right place, at the right time.
Know your strengths, weaknesses, and needs.
When you understand yourself and those around you, you are better able to minimize
weaknesses and maximize strengths. Personality profiles help.

Put the Team Before Yourself

Teamwork doesn’t come naturally. It must be taught.
Teamwork allows common people to obtain uncommon results.
Not everyone is born to lead. Role players are critical to group success.
In group success there is individual success.

Make Winning an Attitude

Combine practice with belief.
Attitude is a choice. Maintain a positive outlook.
No one ever got anywhere by being negative.
Confidence is what happens when you’ve done the hard work that entitles you to succeed.

Be a Competitor

Competition isn’t social. It separates achievers from the average.
You can’t always be the most talented person in the room, but you can be the most competitive.
Influence your opponent: By being competitive you can affect how your adversary performs.
There is nothing wrong with having competitive instincts. They are survival instincts.

Change Is a Must

It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts the most.
Change equals self-improvement. Push yourself to places you haven’t been before.
Take risks. You can’t steal second base with your foot on first.

Handle Success Like You Handle Failure

You can’t always control what happens, but you can control how you handle it.
Sometimes you learn more from losing than winning. Losing forces you to reexamine.
It’s harder to stay on top than it is to make the climb. Continue to seek new goals.

The Spinderella Story, a snapshot of Pat Summitt from 1996

In our digital age, what does one do when you can't just click on a link and read an old story?

For those of us who wrote stories for Knoxville's upstart weekly MetroPulse between 1993 and 2014, we might possess hard copies of our favorite stories, but we can pass them along only in the form of crude pdfs or other jury-rigged mechanisms.

The passing of UT's legendary coach Pat Summitt brought this to mind.
     To this end, I present, scanned, a story from 1996.
     The photographs are by David Luttrell.
      The story was edited by Bill Dockery.
       It was easily my peak moment as a reporter when my former colleague, the great Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated, told me he would use some of this material in his definitive Summitt portrait in 1998.  (This was an extra boost since, in writing intense psychological profiles, I always emulate  Smith in both the level of reporting and in the search for insights.)
       But the main reason I look back on the story below is the privilege of experiencing a living legend and being lucky enough to see up close a tiny slice of what made her great.

My Moment With Pat

On a November morning in 1995, I had an interview with Pat Summitt.

I was doing a story for the Knoxville weekly Metro Pulse.

It was in her office. I sat on the famous sofa, where hundreds of Lady Vols had received advice, counselling, stern words, loving words. She sat across from me. Is there a word for the feeling of sitting across from a living legend, hoping not to embarrass one’s self? Of course, Summitt was friendly, open, and engaged. The glare, as many have said, was reserved for the basketball court. As she said many times, “Our players know that, when they step across the line onto the basketball court, the standard is perfection, and they accept that.” Off the floor, they got love and support.

Pat glanced at my No. 10 Reporter’s Notebook. My questions, scrawled on the brown cardboard inside flap, were about Michelle Marciniak, the flashy blonde point guard whose “spin move” to the basket—usually punctuated by an impertinent flourish of Marciniak’s ponytail—had been driving Pat crazy. It was decidedly not in the manner of Lady Vols basketball.

In an earlier interview, I’d asked Marciniak why she had scotch-taped an AP photo to the dashboard of her Honda of Pat grabbing her jersey and yelling in her face. “I wanted to make sure that that never happens again,” answered Marciniak.

Is Pat being too hard on you? I asked. “Oh, no,” she said. “She’s trying to make me into the point guard that I can be.” At some point, Marciniak said, “I want a championship so bad it hurts.”

So now I was asking my questions to Summitt.

The warm-up: What should a point guard do? “Have the team in the palm of her hand,” she said. “She should be the coach on the floor.”

We talked about how Pat had first watched Marciniak as a ninth-grade AAU player but even then worried about how her flashy style would fit in with the Lady Vols’ system.

What about the AP photo? “Yes,” Pat said, smiling. “I called the Marciniaks and told them it wasn’t child abuse,” (As Lady Vols fans know so well, it was in the Marciniaks’ living room in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that Pat’s water had broken, causing her to quickly catch a plane home to make sure that Tyler was born in Tennessee.)

Why did you bench Michelle in the previous year’s title game against UConn? (She had whipped a long pass to a center, open under the basket, who let the pass go through her hands. “We’ve been working on shortening our passes,” said Pat. “We want 12-foot passes, not 20-foot passes. Michelle knows [the center] can’t catch that pass.”

Pat glanced at my list of questions on the cardboard. “I see where you’re going with this,” she said, standing up and heading toward her side of her desk. I thought for a moment the interview was over. Instead the opposite happened. “That makes me think of something that just arrived today,” she said, cheerfully. She had given the team personality tests that Rodgers Cadillac gave its sales people to understand what motivates each individual. Summitt opened up the report and said that something had jumped out at her: basically, that she and her flashy point guard were exactly the same. More than anything else, they were both motivated to win, and they would do anything to achieve winning. Summitt said, in so many words, that this had given her a new perspective on how she had been relating to her point guard.

It should come as no surprise that an interview with one of the greatest coaches in history provided one of the most memorable moments for a humble reporter. But this was better than that. So much of Summitt’s coaching genius and personal willingness (and ability) to adapt to changing circumstances were laid out in the allegory of Spinderella and—it turned out, her Tough Love Godmother. That season was the story of Pat working with Marciniak, a psychology major, to get the most out of an introverted center who was shrinking more than most from Pat’s sterner coaching. It was also the story of Marciniak gathering the entire team on a sofa to explain to a freshman that she had been respectful of her elders long enough. For the team to win, she had to play like an All-American instead of a freshman. Happily, Chamique Holdsclaw did as asked, and the Lady Vols won the first of three NCAA titles in a row.

All this and more was told elegantly by, among others, the great Gary Smith in Sports Illustrated in 1998 and Sally Jenkins in the inspiring books she wrote with Pat.

If you ever had a moment with Pat Summitt, you have remembered it and retold it in the past few days. Great coaches change lives and make the people they meet, not just the players they coach, better. And I’m grateful for having had that moment, when Pat helped me do my job better.

This post first appeared in the Knoxville Mercury, Metro Pulse's excellent successor.