Patricia Sue Summitt (nee Head; June 14, 1952 - June 28, 2016) was an American women's college basketball head coach who accrued 1,098 career wins, the most in college basketball history upon her retirement. She served as the head coach of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team from 1974 to 2012, before retiring at age 59 because of a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. She won eight NCAA championships (a NCAA women's record when she retired) and the third most all time. Summitt won a silver medal at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal as a member of the United States women's national basketball team.

Summitt was born Patricia Sue Head on June 14, 1952 in Clarksville, Tennessee, the daughter of Richard and Hazel Albright Head. In her early years, she was known as Trish.  She had four siblings: older brothers Tommy, Charles, and Kenneth, and a younger sister, Linda. She married Ross Barnes Summitt II in 1980 from whom she filed for divorce in 2007. They have one son, Ross Tyler Summitt, born in 1990.  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 Sorority 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 United States women's national basketball team as a player at the inaugural women's tournament in 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.  Tyler Summitt, who played as a walk-on for the Tennessee men's basketball team, graduated from Tennessee in May 2012, was hired as an assistant coach by 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.

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