Legendary UT Basketball Coach Pat Summitt Dies at 64

Pat Summitt, the winningest coach in Division I college basketball history who led the University of Tennessee Lady Vols to eight NCAA championships, has died at 64. 

Summitt, who announced she had been diagnosed with early-onset dementia in 2011, had been in declining health in recent days, according to her family. The news sparked an outpouring of support on social media under the banner #PrayForPat and reportedly led friends and former players to come to her side. 

After the stunning announcement of her diagnosis in 2011, J.R. Lind wrote this for the Scene:

Everyone who's ever met the coach has a similar tale of greatness moving among us, a walking allegory who personifies strength and determination. That is precisely what makes Summitt's diagnosis of early-onset dementia — announced last week to stunned disbelief — so devastating.

Alzheimer's doesn't happen to legends. It strikes our grandparents and our parents, and it's awful beyond imagining. People forget their children's faces yet force 50-year-old memories into the present where they don't belong, like a drunk editing a movie. It's a disease that's intimate. It doesn't wither the body: it rips away memories and personalities, the things we share with the people we love.

In the grimmest of ironies, it strikes the very people who serve as the family's storytellers, the caretakers of our accumulated histories. The precious thing Alzheimer's ravages is that inner archive of home movies. Remembrances, gone. Accomplishments, gone. The light on the film projector flickers and dims. Eventually it burns out. Everything gets locked away.

Even for legends.

In her time at Tennessee — an epic 37-year saga that started with Summitt, then just 22, building a program, driving the bus and sleeping on opposing teams' gym floors — she has come to be respected as one of the sport's master tacticians, trading stratagems with Mike Krzyzewski and Bobby Knight and Phil Jackson. She's no less renowned as a taskmaster. A famous story recounts her making a hard-partying team run laps around strategically placed trashcans until every player had voided her hangover into the refuse bins.

Summitt — like Lombardi or Bryant or Rockne — is no mere coach. She's a symbol. Vince Lombardi wasn't just the overlord of the Green Bay Packers or even just a legendary professional coach. He was professional football.

And Summitt is women's basketball.

After the news this morning, the UT women's basketball program posted this on Twitter:

— Lady Vol Basketball (@LadyVol_Hoops) June 28, 2016