Pat Summitt quotes:

Attitude is a choice. Think positive thoughts daily. Believe in yourself.

Competition got me off the farm and trained me to seek out challenges and to endure setbacks; and in combination with my faith, it sustains me now in my fight with Alzheimer's disease.

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

Most people get excited about games, but I've got to be excited about practice, because that's my classroom.

A competitor continually sets new goals. He feels the need to keep raising the bar. If the fist goal is to make the team, and he achieves it, he immediately resets the goal to: I want to be a starter.

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

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

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.

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.

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,'

Attitude lies somewhere between emotion and logic. It's that curious mix of optimism and determination that enables you to maintain a positive outlook and to continue plodding in the face of the most adverse circumstances.

Know your strengths, weaknesses, and needs.

Success is a project that's always under construction.

Sometimes you learn more from losing than winning. Losing forces you to reexamine.

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.'

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.

I can remember trying to coach, trying to figure out schemes, and it just wasn't coming to me.

There is nothing wrong with having competitive instincts. They are survival instincts.

Sometimes I draw blanks.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

I have a love-hate relationship with losing. I hate how it makes me feel, which is basically sick. But I love what it brings out.

I think I can help others just by my example.

I lost my confidence.

Actually, when I saw it in USA Today, I just, Candace Parker was, we were warming up in practice and she was underneath the basket shooting and I just said, 'Hey Candace! I enjoyed what I read in the paper today about your decision [to stay].' She just started laughing and I did too. So I haven't discussed it with her.

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

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.

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.

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

Coaches who start listening to fans often wind up sitting next to them.

Combine practice with belief.

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

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

Discipline yourself, so no one else has to.

Group discipline produces a unified effort toward a common goal.

Hard work breeds self-respect.

Here's how I'm going to beat you. I'm going to outwork you. That's it. That's all there is to it.

I am about helping each and every student athlete that selects to wear the orange, you know, be successful at Tennessee individually and as a team. That type of record is certainly not anything that I have aspirations to reach.

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

I don't give out compliments easily.

I haven't ever really had a goal to break that record or catch John Wooden.

I just think they were just a team that really enjoyed the process and allowed our coaching staff to enjoy the process.

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

I mean, we're always trying to evaluate and tweak things and get better.

I never ask Candace Parker if she was thinking about leaving because I never had any reason to believe she would. I just kept the focus on the team and on Candace and the role she played for us.

I really felt like we had to have a go to player.

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.

I think helped our players in terms of being able to fight through some adversity along the way.

I think sometimes for me that sounds like almost being selfish. I am not about personal records.

I think that it was a great feeling and probably a little bit more special because of the length of time that had passed before we won, but I think more importantly, it was just a great feeling because this team had such strong leadership and they had great chemistry.

I think the most important thing I thought is, I thought about recruiting and what we need in recruiting.

I think the only thing that I really thought about, I am always every year thinking about how I can get better, how my stuff can get better, how our team can improve.

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.

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.

I want to go to practice. I want to be in the huddles. That's me.

I want to keep coaching as long as I can. I love teaching and working with student athletes and I love being at the University of Tennessee.

I was a little concerned about it when State Farm approached me because, you know, I've never done a commercial by any means, but I tried to look at it as something that would be good for our game. We've never had a women's basketball coach represented in that fashion and I love State Farm for the fact they really support the women's game.

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.

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

If I aint happy, nobody's happy.

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

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

If it doesn't bother you, it won't bother them.

If you don't want responsibility, don't sit in the big chair. To be successful, you must accept full responsibility

If you want to be in the game you better shoot 75% from the line.

I'm interested to see where a combination of faith and science will take me.

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.

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

It is what it is. But, it will be what you make it.

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

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.

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

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

Make Winning an Attitude.

My parents taught me a long time ago that you win in life with people, and that's important, because if you hang with winners, you stand a great chance of being a winner.

No one feels strong when she examines her own weakness. But in facing weakness, you learn how much there is in you, and you find real strength.

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

Our emphasis is on execution, not winning.

Put the Team Before Yourself.

Rebounding wins championships, you need to emphasize it and work with kids on it.

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

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.

She taught me that it's ok to let down your guard and allow your players to get to know you. They don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

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

Sit up straight, listen and participate.

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

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

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

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.

Teamwork is what makes common people capable of uncommon results.

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.

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

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

The ultimate goal of discipline is to teach self discipline.

The willingness to experiment with change may be the most essential ingredient to success at anything.

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.

There is an old saying: a champion is someone who is willing to be uncomfortable.

There is not that many players that really can take over games, signed Candace Parker, I really felt like at that time that a National Championship was certainly in reach.

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.

Value those colleagues who tell you the truth, not just what you want to hear.

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

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

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.

Winners are not born, they are self-made.

With attitude, you can determine your own performance.

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

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

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

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

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.

Class is more important than a game.

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