A Mountainous Accomplishment

After winning a second-round game in the NCAA tournament, the best coach in college basketball immediately switched focus from the past into the future. There was, after all, still a tournament to play, another national championship to chase.

There was no time last week to bask in the glory of another milestone passed. Not right then.

In a couple of weeks, possibly after that goal is accomplished again, Pat Summitt will be able to celebrate her status as the winningest coach, male or female, in college hoops history after having passed Dean Smith with her 880th victory.

What? You thought I was talking about Mike Krzyzewski?

If calling Summitt the best college basketball coach sounds a little PC, remember that Larry Brown is in the NBA, and John Wooden and Dean Smith are basking in their hard-earned glory as the sport's elder statesmen.

Bobby Knight's train long ago zoomed right by the reality station without even slowing down. Only a man either gripped by rank hypocrisy or completely out of touch throws chairs and punches cops, yet still believes himself to a moral authority.

That pretty much leaves Summitt and the aforementioned Coach K, and the Tennessee women's coach is something that Krzyzewski can never be.

Summitt is the giant upon whose shoulders every other successful women's college basketball coach — and probably every other coach in college women's sports — stands. All of the coaches of the elite men's teams walked into something that had already, to one degree or another, been established.

When she took over as Tennessee's basketball coach in 1974, Summitt was 22-years-old and still an active member of the U.S. national team that would win a silver medal at the 1976 Olympics. More importantly, Title IX had been passed by Congress only one year earlier.

And, in a way, the rise of Summitt's program mirrors the rise of women's athletics because of Title IX. Because of that law, U.S. women were the most dominant force in all of sports during the 1990s.

On the international level during the previous decade, the best female athletes represented the United States, and the margin wasn't close.

American women dominated individual sports like gymnastics, track and field, and swimming, and won team world titles and Olympic gold in soccer and softball. The U.S. won the inaugural Women's Rugby World Cup in 1990, while fielding a team comprised mostly of players who weren't good enough to play college basketball.

And in basketball, where Summitt led the way and still continues to dominate on the collegiate level.

Title IX might have provided the tools that enabled Summitt to excel, but she used those tools to build what might be the greatest athletic program in college sports, men's or women's.

The federal law that mandated equal educational and athletic opportunities at any institution that accepts funding from the government jump-started women's sports. Dozens of universities that had no women's sports at all were forced to institute programs literally from scratch.

That's almost how it happened at Tennessee, which headed into the 1974 season with no scholarships or nickname and a 22-year-old coach who had to wash the team's uniforms and drive its van.

Today, 880 victories and counting later, Summitt is in charge of a program that serves as the yardstick by which all other women's collegiate sports programs — not just women's collegiate basketball — are measured.

When measured by national championships — of which Summitt has six, along with 15 trips to the Final Four — few of the men's programs can keep up either. It could be argued that she fattened her numbers early on against a lot of schools that were much slower in developing, but that minimizes her status as a pioneer.

In 1974, when a 22-year-old could get a women's basketball head coaching job at a major university, the competition might have been weak. But in the 30 seasons since, there have been other great coaches, like Geno Auriemma at UConn and Rene Portland at Penn State, and Title IX has made the talent pool wider and deeper.

At this point, Summitt's success can be attributed to her ability to outwork, outrecruit and out-coach her opposition.

She's only 52, so her victory total is likely to grow to spectacular levels. Summitt's victory percentage, .840, might be even more impressive than her 880 victories.

If she maintains her 29-win-per-season pace until she's 60, which is nowhere near ancient for the college coaching game, she would shatter the 1,100-victory barrier before she walks away.

There's even been semi-serious talk about the possibility that she might coach the men's team. That's a disservice to Summitt, who spent so much time battling for parity in terms of scholarships and coaches' compensation on behalf of women's programs.

Summitt's team's home court is about to be named for her, another honor that had previously been reserved exclusively for men.

Asking whether Summitt could coach the men's team is just another way of calling women's sports a minor league; that she would somehow need the validation of being "promoted" to the men's team and matching her accomplishments there before she can be seen as being equal to her counterparts in men's programs.

And that question has already been asked and answered. Calling her equal to any men's coach would be an underestimation.