re: Pat summit passed away.

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You look back at the life of Pat Summitt and you see the modern history of women’s basketball right before your eyes. Her father, Richard Head, was a tough and silent old dairy and tobacco farmer, county water commissioner and general store owner in Clarksville, TN, and he believed with the Methodists’ fury that a girl could do everything as well as a boy. This played out in various ways. He often whipped Pat (then known as Trish), and whipped her harder if she cried. She would sometimes tell the story of being a 12-year-old, and having her father drop her off in a field of hay. He handed her a rake, and said without any further instruction: “Do it.” She would remember that days would go by where her father did not say a single word to her. Pat Summitt would say that she and her father did not hug until she was 43 years old. But, he also built a basketball hoop on top of the hayloft, and he moved the family to nearby Henrietta because the high school in Clarksville did not have a girls basketball team. It was before Title IX, before women could earn athletic scholarships, before the NCAA took women’s basketball under its banner. Patricia Sue “Trish” Head was a fantastic high school basketball player, one of the nation’s best. The family pulled together enough money to send her to college at Tennessee-Martin.

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