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.
Those are the words of legendary Lady Vols basketball coach Pat Summitt. How fitting are they now as the world looks back on her many accomplishments and victories in her life cut too short by early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease. Coach Summitt passed away last week as a result of a years-long battle with the terrible form of dementia that robbed her and has robbed so many others of a long and memory-filled life. At 64 years of age, Summitt passed in the comfort of a hospice facility surrounded by her family.
Among Coach Summitt’s unfathomable number of accomplishments are the following: 1,098 career wins over 38 years, 8 NCAA championships, 32 SEC titles and multiple awards for courage and bravery since her diagnosis. She is the face of women’s college basketball and blazing a frontier of competition and excellence. Summitt has coached star WNBA players such as Candace Parker and Tamika Catchings, both of whom paid tribute to the coach last week.
Pat Summitt was a force to be reckoned with at the helm of the Lady Vols. Her number of career wins, 1,098 in total, is the winningest record by a coach in college basketball. She gave herself fully to the game and also to her players. Candace Parker put a photo of a recruiting letter she received from Summitt before joining the Lady Vols in which Summitt plead with her to join her team. Across the board, everyone that knew could attest that Pat Summitt would do anything for her team and she treated each member like family, even beyond graduation.
What I can never wrap my mind around is that Alzheimer’s attacks even the best, most beautiful and determined minds in the world. Last week, Pat Summitt was the latest victim to battle a disease that hides behind plaques in the brain. Her quote says everything to me, however. Pat Summitt is the definition of a competitor. She says that to compete is to survive, and she certainly put up quite a fight with her early-onset Alzheimer’s. What we should not overlook, however, is that Alzheimer’s wasn’t the “limit” she found at the culmination of her competition with it.
Alzheimer’s is not the end, and it should never be the way that Coach Summitt is remembered. Alzheimer’s happened to Pat Summitt, but it was not who she was. Instead, Pat Summitt was and still is the role model for coaches in the game of basketball and in sports in general. She is a loving mother, sibling, friend, wife, and educator for hundreds of young athletes. She is a pioneer in college basketball, and she is an absolute force in the history books of competition and strategy. What Pat Summitt is not is someone marred by Alzheimer’s Disease. Looking at Pat Summitt’s life and focusing mainly on her disease gives Alzheimer’s a power that it does not deserve.
Too often now we are reading about these brilliant minds succumbing to Alzheimer’s and other dementias that have robbed people like Pat Summitt from a long life filled to the last day with memories. It’s truly time—and it has always been time—to do something about Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementias. There are always ways to get involved, whether they are donating funds to research through the Alzheimer’s Association or donating your time to your local nursing facility to spend time with patients. As Pat Summitt would say, compete. Compete with yourself, and compete with Alzheimer’s so that no more of my favorite people and role models have to lose their memories for us to find a cure.
