Lady Vols' Bridgette Gordon embraces role as Pat Summitt historian

Bridgette Gordon made history as a Tennessee women’s basketball player, helping UT win its first two national championships and becoming one of the Lady Vols’ top all-time scorers.

Her jersey is one of six hanging from the Thompson-Boling Arena rafters.

Now, as a Lady Vols assistant coach, she’s trying to better familiarize the current players with the program’s entire legacy and draw them into it. The focal person is former coach Pat Summitt, who won 1,098 games in 38 seasons and guided the program to eight national championships.   

Gordon ranks being a historian on par with any role she will play in their competitive and personal development.

“One of the first things I saw was the disconnect,” said Gordon, who joined coach Holly Warlick’s staff last summer. “The young women coming in here, how can they be invested if they don’t know the history?

“How can you love something and be a part of something if you don’t know how it originated?”

Gordon is coordinating her objective with the former Lady Vols players and their ongoing efforts to reconnect after Summitt’s death on June 28, 2016, after a five-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease.

“I think these kids are maybe wanting to know more of that (history),” said Liza Graves, who played on Summitt’s first team. “With Bridgette, they are going to know it.”

'What can we do to help'

Along with Summitt’s death, Graves indicated that the state of the program has served to rally the alumni.

“I don’t want to say it’s an uprising,” Graves said. “But I feel like we’ve bonded together to bring the program back, to do whatever we can to help.”

The Lady Vols haven’t won any sort of SEC championship in three years. They were eliminated in the second round of the NCAA tournament the past two seasons, losing on their home court (versus Oregon State) in March for the first time in program history.

More:Lady Vols alumni work to stick together without their glue, Pat Summitt

Given the program’s history, the trend has raised the level of criticism directed at Warlick.

“The naysayers being on Holly’s case have sort of bonded us,” Graves said. “We had Pat’s back, and we have Holly’s back.”

Fellow alumnae Pam Marr’s playing career (1982-86) also coincided with a difficult period in program history. Summitt served as the U.S. Olympic team coach in 1984, thereby adding a huge responsibility to her UT coaching duties.

Marr said competing players tended to use games against Tennessee as Olympic auditions. 

“(1983-84) was a tough year," Marr said. “I knew Pat didn’t have fun, and we didn’t have fun that year.”

Furthermore, the Lady Vols had yet to win a national championship, coming close in 1984 against Southern California.

“You could smell that chocolate, but you couldn’t eat the cake,” Marr said.

More:Former Lady Vols assistant Mickie DeMoss feels difference without Pat Summitt

The memory of the expectations and inherent pressures still are vivid for Marr. They are shaping her perspective regarding the current players and the prevailing circumstances.

“They need an understanding that they have a support system that is a basketball family,” she said. “They have to understand that there is unconditional love.

“What can we do to help them in ways that aren’t in that current support system? We want to let them know that we are really there to help them.”

'We're all a family'

Gordon also has been considering what might not help. In particular, she’s been rethinking the effectiveness of alumni coming back and exhorting the current players without first having a prior relationship with them.

“You just can’t go at anybody the hard way,” she said. “You have to build up to that. You have to build that relationship.”

With that in mind, Gordon invited the current players earlier this month to join her and a group of alumni, who were in Knoxville for the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame induction.

Former Lady Vol Chamique Holdsclaw was an inductee and alumnae Patricia Roberts was honored as a former player in the Women’s Professional Basketball League.

Sophomore guard Anastasia Hayes said that Gordon debriefed the players about Roberts, a transfer who played one season at Tennessee (1976-77) and holds the program record for points scored in a season (987) and a game (51).

More:What four faces would be on a Tennessee Vols Mount Rushmore?

“There’s no reason that Patricia Roberts comes to town and our kids don’t know who she is, the first African-American to play for Pat,” Gordon said.

The gathering was informal, primarily revolving around watching an NBA Finals game. Gordon said several current players lingered for more than an hour, laughing and listening to the stories.

Hayes said the she and her teammates did a lot of listening.

“They talked to us a lot about Pat and how being a Lady Vol is very important,” Hayes said. “We’re all a family, a sisterhood.”

The current players included.