Raise the Roof

"It wasn't a team. It was a tent revival". So says Pat Summitt, the legendary coach whose Tennessee Lady Vols entered the 1997-98 season aiming for an almost unprecedented "three-peat" of NCAA championships. Raise the Roof takes you right inside the locker room of her amazing team, whose inspired mixture of gifted freshmen and seasoned stars produced a standard of play that would change the game of women's basketball forever. The 1997-98 campaign started innocently enough. One Saturday in August, a simple pickup game turned into a amazing display of basketball brilliance - freshmen against established players, and with barely a shot missed by either side. Suddenly Pat Summitt glimpsed the future: fast, aggressive, and hugely talented, this might be the team she'd worked her whole career to coach. As 1997 turned into 1998, Pat Summitt began privately to admit to herself that this team had changed her: these kids were so lovable, funny, and eager to please that she simply had to let them into her heart. Along the way, the Lady Vols were redefining what young women were capable of, trading in old definitions of femininity for new ones - in short, they were keeping score. And by the time they entered the NCAA Final Four tournament in Kansas City, Summitt found herself believing the impossible: despite all the distractions, the 1997-98 Lady Vols could go undefeated, and, in doing so, raise the roof off the sport of women's basketball.

Pat Summitt became head coach of the women's basketball team at Tennessee in 1974; since then, she has won more national championships than any coach, man or woman, since John Wooden.  In the 1976 Olympics, as co-captain she led the U.S. women's squad to a silver medal, and in the 1984 Olympics--this time as coach--her team brought home the gold medal.  She is the author, with Sally Jenkins, of the bestselling Reach for the Summit.  A native of Tennessee, she lives in Knoxville with her husband, R.B., and their son Tyler.

Sally Jenkins is the author of Men Will Be Boys and the cowriter of Pat Summitt's first book, Reach for the Summit.  A veteran sports reporter whose work has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, she has worked for the