Skip to footer

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 Ross Atkin Staff writer

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.”

3 of 7
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.