Pat Summitt Quotes

Know your strengths, weaknesses, and needs.

Discipline is the only sure way I know to convince people to believe in themselves

Confidence is what happens when you've done the hard work that entitles you to succeed.

Accountability is essential to personal growth, as well as team growth. How can you improve if you're never wrong? If you don't admit a mistake and take responsibility for it, you're bound to make the same one again.

Teamwork does not come naturally. Let's face it. We are born with certain inclinations, but sharing isn't one of them.

I didn't say a lot. I didn't throw anything. That's not my style. I did think about it though.

Belief in yourself is what happens when you know you've done the thing things that entitle you to success.

But the truly ambitious teams find relief in honesty when they've lost, because it's the diagnostic tool that leads to a solution - here's what we did wrong and let's fix it, so we don't ever have to feel this way again. Great teams explain their failure; they don't excuse it. Then they pay a visit to Charles Atlas and get stronger. When you explain a loss aloud, it's no longer a tormenting mystery. I believed in that brand of honesty my whole career, and I knew at least one other coach who believed in it too.

The best way to handle responsibility is to break it down into smaller parts. Take care of one small thing at a time.

I don't give out compliments easily.

You're wondering what a bale of hay has to do with success. Well, there's a trick to loading hay. You have to use your knee. What you do is, you put your right knee behind it and half kick it up in the air. That way you get some lift on it ... My point is, there are certain ways to make a hard job easier.

By doing things when you are too tired, by pushing yourself farther than you thought you could - like running the track after a two-hour practice - you become a competitor. Each time you go beyond your perceived limit, you become mentally stronger.

When you grow up on a dairy farm, cows don't take a day off. So you work every day and my dad always said, 'No one can outwork you.'

I want to continue to do is to help these young women be successful.. You don't just say goodbye at the end of their playing careers and end it there.

Class is more important than a game.

There is always someone better than you. Whatever it is that you do for a living, chances are, you will run into a situation in which you are not as talented as the person next to you. That's when being a competitor can make a difference in your fortunes.

I lost my confidence.

Very few people are able to organize and direct followers, which is a far more subtle and multifaceted skill. Leadership is really a form of temporary authority that others grant you, and they only follow you if they find you consistently credible. It's all about perception - and if teammates find you the least bit inconsistent, moody, unpredictable, indecisive, or emotionally unreliable, then they balk and the whole team is destabilized.

Hard work breeds self-respect.

It's harder to stay on top than it is to make the climb, Continue to seek new goals.

The person, the student, the athlete, all are considered equal.

Attitude is a choice. What you think you can do, whether positive or negative, confident or scared, will most likely happen.

Make Winning an Attitude.

Teamwork is really a form of trust. It's what happens when you surrender the mistaken idea that you can go it alone and realize that you won't achieve your individual goals without the support of your colleagues.

The greatest strength any human being an have is to recognize his or her own weaknesses. When you identify your weaknesses, you can begin to remedy them - or at least figure out how to work around them.

There are some concrete ways to create a winning attitude. But nothing beats practicing it. When you prepare to win, belief comes easily.

Silence is a form of communication, too. Sometimes less is more.

Individual success is a myth. No one succeeds all by herself.

In the absence of feedback, people will fill in the blanks with a negative. They will assume you don't care about them or don't like them.

Responsibility equals accountability equals ownership. And a sense of ownership is the most powerful weapon a team or organization can have.

Losing strengthens you. It reveals your weaknesses so you can fix them

Admit to and make yourself accountable for mistakes. How can you improve if you're never wrong?

Loyalty is not unilateral. You have to give it to receive it.

I learned so much from Sue about the Xs and Os of the game of basketball.

I'm going to outwork you. Simple as that.

You can't always be the most talented person in the room. But you can be the most competitive

Put the Team Before Yourself.

Life. It gives you vision. But you can't acquire it if you're afraid of keeping score.

What Michelle didn't yet know was that there is a vast difference between playing and leading. The point guard position in basketball is one of the great tutorials on leadership, and it ought to be taught in classrooms. Anyone can perfect a dribble with muscle memory;

I think you can challenge people, but you don't want to break people down. But you've got to sometimes just pull them aside and say, you know, you're OK but you could be better.

You spend more of the game preparing to win in the final seconds. And that is what separates winners from losers.

Success lulls you. It makes the most ambitious of us complacent and sloppy. In a way, you have to cultivate a kind of amnesia and forget all of your previous prosperity.

I remember every player - every single one - who wore the Tennessee orange, a shade that our rivals hate, a bold, aggravating color that you can usually find on a roadside crew, "or in a correctional institution," as my friend Wendy Larry jokes. But to us the color is a flag of pride, because it identifies us as Lady Vols and therefore as women of an unmistakable type. Fighters. I remember how many of them fought for a better life for themselves. I just met them halfway.

To me, teamwork is a lot like being part of a family. It comes with obligations, entanglements, headaches, and quarrels. But the rewards are worth the cost.

We do not win championships with girls. We win with competitors

Nine-tenths of discipline is having the patience to do things right.

Winners are not born, they are self-made.

Bringing together disparate personalities to form a team is like a jigsaw puzzle. You have to ask yourself: what is the whole picture here? We want to make sure our players all fit together properly and complement each other, so that we don't have a big piece, a little piece, an oblong piece, and a round piece. If personalities work against each other, as a team you'll find yourselves spinning your wheels.

I've got a great staff and great support system, and I'm going to stick my neck out and do what I always do.

If I'm not leading by example, then I'm not doing the right thing. And I want to always do the right thing.

See yourself as self employed.

Setting up a system that rewards you for meeting your goals and has penalties for failing to hit your target is just as important as putting your goals down on paper.

Combine practice with belief.

Kay very calmly and sweetly said, "You know, Pat, how much better do you think Lea Henry and Cindy Noble are going to get at this point?" She was saying ease up - it's enough. I had reached the point of diminishing returns. "I think they are both trying really hard to please you, but how much more can they possibly do?" she said. "I just wonder if you've really thought about that.

I'd wake up in the morning and I would think, 'Where am I?' I'd have to gather myself.

Anyone can quit, but it takes a strong, committed person not to quit when times are tough.

Offense sells tickets, defense wins games, rebounding wins championships.

Success is all a matter of perspective. It depends on where you start from, and where you want to end up.

When you choose to be a competitor you choose to be a survivor. When you choose to compete, you make the conscious decision to find out what your real limits are, not just what you think they are.

Sit up straight, listen and participate.

God doesn't take things away to be cruel. He takes things away to make room for other things. He takes things away to lighten us. He takes things away so we can fly.

In order to grow, you must accept new responsibilities, no matter how uncertain you may feel or how unprepared you are to deal with them.

We communicate all the time, even when we don't realize it. Be aware of body language

I don't want to sit around the house. I want to be out there. I want to go to practice. I want to be in the huddles. That's me.

Discipline yourself, so no one else has to.

You can't have any quit in you if you want to be successful.

Change equals self improvement. Push yourself to places you haven't been before.

Teamwork doesn't come naturally. It must be taught.

Teamwork is what makes common people capable of uncommon results.

It's my experience that people rise to the level of their own expectations and of the competition they seek out.

I hate to sound this way but, 'Why me? Why me with dementia?'

If I was renowned as as tough coach, I also wanted to be a caring one

You have to make shots. That's the bottom line.

You can't pick and choose the days that you feel like being responsible. It's not something that disappears when you're tired.

I won 1,098 games, and eight national championships, and coached in four different decades. But what I see are not the numbers. I see their faces.

Someday, I suppose I'll give up, and sit in the rocking chair. But I'll probably be rocking fast, because I don't know what I'll do without a job.

- December 13, 2011, Piscataway, New Jersey, on the road with the Lady Vols, seven months after diagnosis

Discipline helps you finish a job, and finishing is what separates excellent work from average work.

With attitude, you can determine your own performance.

The absolute heart of loyalty is to value those people who tell you the truth, not just those people who tell you what you want to hear. In fact, you should value them most. Because they have paid you the compliment of leveling with you and assuming you can handle it.