Gator Country

Tennessee head coach Pat Summit looks on during the Gators' 66-64 loss to the Lady Vols on Thursday at the O'Connell Center. / Gator Country photo by Tim Casey

After 36 years on the job and an all-time record 1,019 coaching wins after Thursday night’s 66-64 win over the Florida Gators at the Stephen C. O’Connell Center, not much catches Pat Summit by surprise anymore. The way the Gators scratched and clawed the entire game to stay close to Summit’s fourth-ranked Tennessee Lady Vols wasn’t the least bit surprising. She expected nothing less from an Amanda Butler-coached team, but she admits she was caught totally flat-footed earlier in the week when Lane Kiffin announced he was leaving Tennessee to become the new head football coach at USC.

“I was at a booster event in Gatlinburg where I was speaking with Bruce (Pearl, Tennessee men’s basketball coach) when I heard it,” Summit said. “At first I thought it was a joke and then I realized it wasn’t and I looked at Bruce and we said it at the same time --- ‘can you believe it?’ --- and of course, we couldn’t. We had no idea, no clue at all, he was going to be leaving.”

She admits she grew to like Kiffin in his 14 months on the job in Knoxville.

“Get him away from football and he’s hard not to like,” Summit said. “He got a charm about him and he’s funny.”

Perhaps he’s funny when he’s away from football, but when it comes to leaving the University of Tennessee for Southern Cal, Summit draws the line on funny. Summit grew up in Tennessee where Bob Neyland is legend and football tradition is part of the identity of the entire state. Although she played college basketball and graduated from Middle Tennessee State, she has been in Knoxville as the head coach at UT since she was only 22 years old so cut her veins and you’ll get a steady flow of orange-colored blood.

In her time at Tennessee she has become a legend herself --- 1,019 wins, only 184 losses, and eight national championships tend to do that --- but no matter how her legend may grow before she calls it a career, she reveres the man whose name adorns Tennessee’s 107,000 seat football stadium.

“You tell me you’re leaving Tennessee and one of the great stadiums there is and tradition that Bob Neyland made into something special?” she asked. “Tennessee is one of the greatest jobs in all of college football because of that tradition and you just don’t walk away from it like that. I don’t care if it is Southern Cal, you just don’t walk away from Tennessee like that, especially after just one year when you’ve been out there making all those promises.”

Thanks to that great football tradition and a rabid fan base accustomed to filling up Neyland Stadium, Summit knows that Tennessee football will move beyond Lane Kiffin and will regain its status as one of the top tier teams in college football.

“Life will go on after Lane,” she said. “To say I’m disappointed --- well I am just like everyone else who has poured heart and soul into our university --- but I’ll get over that. I still can’t believe he did it, though. I lost a lot of respect.”

* * *

She had other concerns than Lane Kiffin following a win over the Gators secured when Angie Bjorklund somehow tightroped the baseline and threw up a reverse layup that banked in off the glass with 2.3 seconds left to give the Lady Vols the win over Florida. The Gators almost pulled out the miracle win with near perfect execution of an out of bounds play that went from Sharielle Smith on the baseline to Steffi Sorenson near midcourt and over to Lonika Thompson, whose three-pointer from the right corner rimmed out.

The Lady Vols committed a season-high 25 turnovers and while some of it was pure sloppiness, Summit said her team was forced into a bad game by Florida’s aggressiveness, something she’s come to expect from the Gators since Amanda Butler became the head coach.

“They play the way she [Butler] did,” Summit said.  When Butler was Florida’s point guard back in the 1990s, she led the Southeastern Conference in charges taken, elbows thrown, hand checks and floor burns. She was a high energy player who has evolved into a high energy coach and her teams reflect her personality.

“They will fight you with everything they’ve got and they won’t give up,” Summit said.

Summit enjoys a salary and travel budget usually reserved for the coaches and programs at the higher Division I men’s level. The Lady Vols routinely draw crowds in excess of 10,000 and occasionally sell out cavernous Thompson-Boling Arena. The Lady Vols are the winningest program in Division I women’s basketball history and no coach --- men or women --- has won more than Summit.

That she’s done it at a school where the bulk of the resources go to football makes Summit’s accomplishments even more impressive. When she sees Florida women’s basketball trying to get to that next level, she thinks the program is in good hands and has a bright future under Butler.

“First off, it’s all about getting the players,” Summit said. “We’ve had so much success that the best players want to be part of our program. If you can recruit, you can have a great program and that’s why I think Amanda will take Florida to a higher level than they’ve ever been. She’s a great recruiter. There’s no doubt, she will get the good players to come here. We’re already seeing that.”

Butler’s 2010 recruiting class includes 6-2 Deaundra Young of Titusville Astronaut, one of the best players the state of Florida has ever produced, guard Brittany Shine of Sacramento, California, who chose Florida over tradition rich Southern Cal, and do-everything Kayla Lewis, the best player in the state of Georgia, who, at 5-11, can play four positions. It’s the best recruiting class in Florida history and the type that can take the Gators to previously unreached heights.

“You take the way she gets her players to buy into going all out all the time and playing so hard and then give her the talent she needs to compete and Florida is going to be a great team for a long time to come,” Summit said. “She’s going to get the players. We’re seeing that already.

“I hate playing them. They always make us look bad. I’m really going to hate playing them when she gets a couple more recruiting classes in here.”

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