7 basketball books for March Madness and beyond

Here are excerpts from seven books by some of the biggest names – coaches and players – in college basketball.

3. “Sum It Up: 1,098 Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective”

By Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins

Crown Archetype

416 pages

(Pat Summitt, the head coach emeritus at the University of Tennessee, led the Lady Vols to eight NCAA championships while compiling the most wins of any coach in NCAA basketball history.) 

“For twenty years, Tennessee had set the standard of excellence in the women’s game – but now someone had met it. We had to learn from Connecticut the way other teams had learned from Tennessee.  This wasn’t a team we could outhustle, or outmuscle. We would have to outwit and outexecute them.

“After losing to UConn twice in 1995, I knew that it wasn’t just our players who had to get better; the coaches had to get better too. I wanted to get a grip on UConn’s offense, called the Triple Post. They had beaten us twice with it and I was determined to study it, whether we ever used it or not. If you understand how to run something, then you also understand how to defend it.”

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