Last Tuesday, Pat Summitt, the venerable head coach of University of Tennessee Lady Vols women’s basketball team who built a hoops empire in Knoxville, passed away at the age of 64 due to complications of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Although I was never able to attend a game involving the Lady Vols in any capacity, I know it would have been an honor for this reporter to have covered Summitt and experienced a genius at work. We at A Lot of Sports Talk would like to express and send our condolences to the Summitt family.
Our latest edition of The A Lot of Sports Talk Podcast does focus exclusively on the hardwood, where Coach Summitt excelled for almost four full decades in Knoxville, and we were fortunate enough to talk with Seattle Storm head coach Jenny Boucek, someone who grew up in the Volunteer State playing basketball before her collegiate playing days at the University of Virginia. In our interview, Boucek not only discusses the influence coach Summitt had on her when she was growing up in Nashville as an emerging basketball star, but also the face-to-face interaction that she had with Coach Summitt in 1996 that, Boucek says, validated her toughness as a basketball player. A basketball coach since her playing days ended in 1998, Boucek, in her second season as head coach of the Storm, explains what she has gotten to know about current rookie sensation and college basketball legend Breanna Stewart that she might not have known while she was watching her dominate at the University of Connecticut from afar.
Speaking of the Huskies, our second featured interview is with former UConn great Jennifer Rizzotti, now the new head coach of the George Washington University women’s basketball team. Since the beginning of her prep career, Rizzotti’s extraordinary career and basketball exploits had been centered around the state of Connecticut, but she explains to us in our interview why she decided to leave her post as head coach of the University of Hartford after 17 seasons – with six NCAA Tournament appearances and an NCAA Tournament win at Hartford to boot – to take the job in our nation’s capital. Rizzotti, who won the Wade Trophy as a senior in 1996, also talked about the challenges she will face coaching in the Atlantic 10, the similarities between coaching at Hartford and coaching at GW, and importance of being an integral member of UConn’s first national championship in 1995 and setting the foundation for other great UConn teams to follow.
Please enjoy the podcast, and leave us any and all comments that you have. Click here to go to the A Lot of Sports Talk podcast page on iTunes, and from there, you can download this show as well as subscribe to our podcast page and receive new episodes on your device the second it is posted. You can also open iTunes, and in the Podcasts section, type in “A Lot of Sports Talk” in the search box to find our shows.
[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/ALOST/TheALOSTPodcast28.mp3]Interview Order: Intro (0:00 – 4:03); Jenny Boucek (4:05 – 14:22); Jennifer Rizzotti (14:31 – 37:20); Wrap-up (37:27 – 39:24)
[Cover photo (Jenny Boucek) courtesy of Dean Rutz/The Seattle Times]
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