Nick Harris

“Have Candace bring the ball up,” she said urgently. It was totally counterintuitive: Candace was our go-to player, on whom we counted when we needed a score. If Candace brought the ball up the court, that meant she’d have to pass it off. It meant someone else would take the last shot of the game. It meant that if we lost, everyone in the country would want to know why we hadn’t gone to the best player in the game. I nodded. It was a high-stakes decision. But I loved being the trigger puller. Loved it. I went into the huddle—and made the last critical call I would ever make in an NCAA Final Four. I looked at Lex, who would be our inbounder. “Get the ball in to Candace,” I said. I turned to Candace. “They will converge on you. Find the open player.” They all nodded and took their places. What happened next is a credit to the culture of a program in which players are taught to commit, to play all out, to attend to every detail no matter how seemingly unimportant, to never go through the motions, no matter how routine seeming, to finish with as much energy as they started with.”
― Pat Summitt, Sum It Up: A Thousand and Ninety-Eight Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective

“life. It gives you vision. But you can’t acquire it if you’re afraid of keeping score.”
― Pat Summitt, Sum It Up: A Thousand and Ninety-Eight Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective

“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;”
― Pat Summitt, Sum It Up: A Thousand and Ninety-Eight Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective

“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.”
― Pat Summitt, Sum It Up: A Thousand and Ninety-Eight Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective