One of the Lady Vols’ newest assistant coaches dropped some incredible quotes this week about seeing Pat Summitt up close a couple of decades ago.
New Lady Vols assistant coach Bill Ferrara met with reporters on Wednesday for the first time since being hired earlier this offseason.
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And Ferrara, a Florida graduate who served as a graduate assistant for the Gators when he was in college, shared an awesome story about helping to prepare for Pat Summitt and Tennessee back in the 2000s.
Ferrera explained that preparing for Summitt’s team as a young coach revealed to him how much he still had to learn about high-level basketball.
“At the University of Florida, we brought up my time with Carolyn Peck,” said Ferrara. “As a graduate assistant, I was tasked with a scout. Like you don’t get scouts as graduate assistants.
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“I learned more about the game of basketball in that week preparing for Tennessee and preparing for one of Pat’s teams than I ever did in all of those years leading up to that. Pat’s teams played so hard. They played with passion. They made you earn every single basket, they made you box out every single time. Otherwise, they were getting an offensive rebound. And so when you’re building a scout, I was basically just trying to be like, okay, where do you try to find a weakness? There wasn’t any. There were no weaknesses. They had the best player in the country in Candace Parker.”
“But that’s my learning experience about Pat,” added Ferrara. “Obviously, there was championship success and Final Fours and all that, but that week of preparing for that game taught me so much about the game. And I was like, whoa, I know nothing about basketball.”
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Talk about a full circle moment for Ferrara.
It’s certainly cool for Lady Vols fans to hear that one of the program’s newest additions was influenced by Summitt decades ago. When Ferrara talks to players about Summitt’s legacy, he has a real life story to share. And that’s important. There are a lot of folks at Tennessee who weren’t around for Summitt’s run. The more folks that can share tales about Summitt, the better.
