Tennessee’s Pat Summitt is “losing patience” with her team

This came as no surprise to me – as she creeps closer to her 1,000th career victory, Pat Summitt is “losing patience” with her young, less-experienced team.

Ranked #13 in the AP poll, the Lady Vols are scratching for a winning season. Summitt has decided to turn up the heat on her players and push them to do better.

According to this Sports Illustrated article, she’s issued challenges to her players and even made them do their own laundry (even I didn’t have to do that at a Division III level).

Here’s another example (from the same article),

“After 23 Tennessee turnovers led to 29 Auburn points in an 82-68 loss to the Tigers on Sunday, Summitt decided to make practices more demanding.

She’s turned up the volume of her criticism and ordered more intense drills. On Monday, the team had to make 23 defensive stops against the practice squad — one for each of its turnovers against the Tigers.”

Even though they’re young, they are good. I saw them compete locally against George Washington University. They were down 18 at the half and came back to win – that was quite a show.

Mechelle Voepel said on her blog last week,

“As for Tennessee … having seen them today, I believe they are a top-10 team. I’m not ranking them on “reputation.” I just think they have the talent to be there.”

They have the talent, they just need to play together, and play Summitt’s game.

They have the best coach in the country, so it will be interesting to see how this phases out over the post season.