BOCA RATON
The once-proud women's basketball program, the one seemingly running on fumes, suddenly was fuming.
Louisiana Tech coach Teresa Weatherspoon, who as a player led the school to a national title during the Reagan administration, had been fired in the wake of a 20-loss season. Team reaction ranged from bitter to boiling. Athletic director Tommy McClelland's meeting to inform the players had the soothing effect of peroxide.
Such was the hornet's nest of humanity into which Tyler Summitt — Weatherspoon's replacement — stepped two weeks later. He would either rouse the group or reassure it, and he needed this first impression to work.
The Techsters, in turn, needed his ID.
Ross Tyler Summitt, a newlywed with dimples carved into crimson cheeks, had been born for this moment. Thing was, he also had been born in the same decade as the kids he was about to address.
"I'm just sitting down there anxious like, 'Where's our coach?' " recalled forward Whitney Frazier, who had just wrapped up her junior season. "His cheeks were very red. … The AD introduced him, and I was like, 'Whoa, what? Okay, okay, okay.' "
From there, Summitt got down to business — the family business. He instructed one player to sit up straight, another to look him in the eyes. And darned if he didn't call them by name. Whitney. Chrisstasia. Lulu. The guy who looked too young for college algebra had done his homework.
In reality, he was just employing a mantra he had learned literally at the foot of his famous mom: They don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.
"At first I was like, 'I can't believe this,' " Frazier said. "Then when he started talking, I was like, 'Wow, I'm ready.' "
Eleven months later, the Techsters (14-13) are on a late-season surge. Chances remain for the program's first winning season since 2011-12. Though the NCAA Tournament is a long shot, the WNIT is not.
"It's been a really great year to watch him grow, to learn," McClelland said of Summitt.
"Going in, he was probably like, 'Well, this is maybe what I thought it would be like, and it's not.' But he has not surprised me in one aspect in terms of, 'Well, there you go, there's the 24-year-old coming out.' I haven't had that moment yet."
Climbing the ladder, quickly
In April, the women's Final Four returns to Tampa for the first time since 2008, when iconic Tennessee coach Pat Summitt — the winningest basketball coach in NCAA history, woman or man, with 1,098 victories — won the last of her eight national titles.
Tyler, her only child, was there. Chances are, any snapshot from the latter half of Pat's 38-year coaching career at Tennessee includes Tyler — as a toddler, tyke or teen.
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Explore all your options"We had to do two ladders (to cut the nets in Tampa), cause I used to go up in front of her and then she would go up," Tyler recently recalled in the lobby of a Boca Raton hotel, where the Techsters were preparing for a game at Florida Atlantic. "But I guess I had gotten so big (he was 17) … we had to do two ladders."
Few doubted he ultimately would navigate the rungs to a Division I coaching job of his own. All the outlandish anecdotes about Tyler being ingrained in Lady Vols hoops from birth? They're steeped far more in accuracy than hyperbole.
Techsters assistant coach Mickie DeMoss, for years Pat's first lieutenant on the Tennessee bench, was the one applying a lower back massage to her boss on a charter flight bound for Pennsylvania on Sept. 20, 1990. Pat, who had made the trip to visit coveted high school point guard Michelle Marciniak, went into labor as the plane landed.
Amid the objections of Pat's then-husband, R.B. Summitt, they made the visit anyway, then hightailed it back to Tennessee. The Lady Vols' surrogate little brother was born shortly after midnight, on Sept. 21.
Marciniak led UT to the 1996 national title.
"Growing up, I had 12 big sisters all the time, and they rotated because you lost two a year and brought in two a year," Tyler said.
"Listening to music or watching a movie or whatever, being an only child it was fun to go out and have those sisters. And my mom really did create a family atmosphere. … She cared about them, they cared about her, and it was cool."
Tyler's birthright extended only to the Lady Vols program. As an eighth-grader at Webb School of Knoxville, he was cut during middle-school basketball tryouts.
"It was exactly what I needed, because I really, at that time, thought that I would be handed everything in life because of my last name," he said.
Undeterred, he became a three-year starter for Webb's high school team and later a Vols walk-on. He drained his only shot attempt in college, a 3-pointer against Middle Tennessee that pushed UT over 85 points and assured every ticket holder free chicken strips at Hardee's the next day.
Never delusional about playing beyond college, Tyler categorized his career as de facto coaching internships. He played one of his two walk-on seasons for Bruce Pearl, another for Cuonzo Martin. Most other waking hours were spent as a student assistant with his mom's team.
"I don't remember a time where I didn't want to be a head coach," he said. "Growing up, kids are like, 'I wanna be a fireman, I wanna be a policeman.' I'm like, 'I wanna coach.' That's just always what it was."
By 17 he was coaching a 13-year-old boys AAU team. Three years later he was leading the Tennessee Fury 17-and-under girls to an AAU state title. Upon graduating from UT's chancellor's honors program, he began making cold calls in search of a job.
On April 18, 2012, Marquette coach Terri Mitchell, who had no noticeable connection to his mother or Tennessee, hired him as an assistant. That day, Pat stepped down as Lady Vols coach after being diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease months before.
"At Marquette we had players who were older than me," he said.
"I grew up around the Lady Vols. … So even though with the AAU team I was a little bit older (than the players), I was around my mom's players, so I was always younger. As time grew on, high school and college, I was more knowledgeable, so they were like, 'Hey, Ty, what am I supposed to do here?' … (The age issue) never bothered me, and I don't think it bothers them."
Gambling on greatness
Last March, McClelland was dining with a well-connected college basketball acquaintance while in Birmingham, Ala., on a men's basketball road trip. Mentioning he might soon have a women's coaching vacancy, he asked the friend for suggestions for a successor. The friend reeled off four or five well-established names, followed by Tyler Summitt's.
McClelland's initial surprise at the suggestion of Summitt had nothing to do with age. If anything, there was a chronological kinship.
At 33, McClelland is the youngest AD among Division I football-playing schools. To turn away Summitt for his age would have been the height of hypocrisy. Yet hiring him would seem to some Tech fans the height of blasphemy.
Louisiana Tech remains the second-winningest Division I program in women's basketball. No. 1? Tennessee. During their heyday, the Techsters knew no greater nemesis than Tyler's mom, who won her first national title in 1987 at the expense of Louisiana Tech in the final.
"It would be like if Bear Bryant had a son that was coaching football and Auburn wanted to hire him," McClelland said.
Nonetheless, on the drive home from Birmingham, McClelland asked wife Jessica to cue up Tyler's name on her iPad. Shortly thereafter, McClelland was holding a clandestine interview with Summitt in a hotel room in Tallahassee, where the Louisiana Tech men were playing Florida State in the NIT.
"Once I met with him, I knew that was the guy," McClelland said. "Then I had to convince the president that I wasn't crazy."
With the blessing of president Les Guice, Tyler and wife AnDe, at whom he once threw pencils in sixth-grade math class, were introduced as the first family of Techsters basketball on April 2. On Dec. 7, 40 years to the day after Pat coached her first game for the Lady Vols, Tyler made his home coaching debut.
In accordance with his game-day customs, he called Billie Moore, Pat's coach on the 1976 U.S. Olympic team; prayed with AnDe, who runs the Techsters' bible study; sucked on a few lemon drops, then watched Frazier score 21 points in a 75-61 triumph against Loyola of New Orleans.
Pat was among the 2,107 in attendance.
"He gets mad when I tell him good luck," AnDe said. "To him, it's all about preparation."
In that regard, perhaps more than any other, he is truly his mother's son. An obsessive note taker, Tyler has clogged a hard drive with a smorgasbord of diagrams, quotations, charts and tutorials. "I think if I printed it, it would be over 10,000 pages," he said.
On the practice floor, he shows far less animation than his mom but no less tenacity. Among his frequently used phrases: We're not leaving till you get it right. Frazier recalls the team spending 29 minutes on a routine layup drill it struggled to perfect.
To this point, he has truly blown up only once, at halftime of a game against Alabama-Birmingham (Tech rallied from an 18-point second-half deficit to win), but even then he never cursed. He even has dismissed a player.
"I think Pat was more of an emotional yeller, and he's more matter-of-fact," said DeMoss, the first point guard in Techsters history. "He's like, 'This is what we're going to do, this is how we're going to do it. If we're not going to do it, you're going to run or you're not going to play.' Where Pat would just get on 'em hard. So there's a little difference in the delivery."
Speaking of deliveries, McClelland has none prepared for those detractors convinced Tyler's last name earned him a Division I gig. In time, he's certain Summitt will prove him right. Had McClelland not made the hire when he did, he believes someone else would have given Summitt a head-coaching job.
He's that sure R.B. and Pat's son can compile his own glistening resume, can return the Techsters to a coveted stratosphere.
To a summit all his own.
"We didn't just need a good coach, we needed a great coach," McClelland said. "I truly believe that Tyler is now and will be one of the great ones."
Contact Joey Knight at jknight@tampabay.com. Follow @TBTimes_Bulls.