Summitt becomes first Div. I coach to win 1,000 games

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- Pat Summitt now has 1,000 victories, an unprecedented height even she finds dizzying.

"It's a hard number to even comprehend," the Tennessee coach said.

Summitt became the first Division I basketball coach -- men's or women's -- to win 1,000 career games Thursday night as her 12th-ranked Lady Vols beat Georgia 73-43. It was their second chance in four days at giving their coach her latest and one of her greatest milestones.

These baby Lady Vols (17-5, 6-2 Southeastern Conference), with seven freshmen on the roster, are nothing like the squads that brought Summitt her seventh and eighth national championships in the previous two seasons. This is an inexperienced group that had Summitt joking about whether they would even be up to the task of winning the 17 games she needed to reach 1,000 this season.

School officials also announced Summitt, 56, had signed a contract extension through 2014 earlier this week and earned a $200,000 bonus with this win.

Summitt is not only the first to 1,000 Division I victories, but she might be the only one for a long time. The only coaches with at least 900 wins are Bob Knight (902), the former men's coach at Indiana and Texas Tech currently working in TV, and retired Texas women's coach Jody Conradt (900).

Summitt said people might have noticed the challenges with this season's team. That doesn't mean she's backing down from where she wants to be at season's end.

"We may be young and we may be inexperienced, but our goal is to be in St. Louis at the Final Four. And that is something that we talk about. I think you've got a vision, you have to talk about that vision. We have a vision, and that's where we want to be."

No coach has beaten Summitt more than Landers, whose hometown is a short drive away from Knoxville and who used to scrimmage the Lady Vols when he was at a nearby community college. His Lady Bulldogs came in hot, having won four straight in a streak that included wins over Vanderbilt and Auburn after those teams had beaten Tennessee.

The Lady Vols erased any doubt that this would be the night to celebrate by grabbing the lead in the first half of a sloppy game and pushing the lead to double digits on the first bucket of the second half, a layup by Glory Johnson.

Johnson finished with a career-high 20 points to lead the Lady Vols. Alex Fuller had 13, Kelley Cain added 12 and Angie Bjorklund 11.

Georgia (15-8, 5-3) went cold for nearly seven minutes in the first half and couldn't recover. Christy Marshall led Georgia with 16, Ashley Houts had 11 and Porsha Phillips 10.

Summitt won her 40th overall against Georgia and improved to 16-4 in this series in Knoxville even in a game the banged-up Lady Vols took a few more lumps. Vicki Baugh, who tore her left ACL against Oklahoma, is out for the rest of the season. Then Shekinna Stricklen pulled a groin muscle and had to leave briefly with Alicia Manning bruising her left quadriceps muscle.