Story via email from mein Vater:

The news hit home Tuesday. Pat Summitt has been diagnosed with dementia — the Alzheimer’s type.

If you don’t know who Pat Summitt is, let me tell you. She is the head coach of the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team. She is a former USA Olympic coach, one of the best coaches (men or women) in the world and, on top of all of that, a fierce competitor and a genuine person of the upmost integrity.

Now why should I care so much, and why would I write about her today in the Sun newspaper?

Two reasons. First, I know all about Alzheimer’s. My youngest sister is sitting in a nursing home in West Virginia today, feeble, glassy-eyed and lonely. She rarely recognizes any of us anymore.

Second, Pat Summitt and I have crossed paths more than once. And, each time she was kind, respectful and gracious to me.

In my former life, I coached women’s AAU basketball. I am proud to say I formed the first high school AAU program for girls in Huntington, W.Va. I always loved basketball and hated to see girls getting shortchanged in facilities, newspaper coverage and all other aspects of competition.

After getting our tails beat off the first season, we persevered and won state championships in 1985 and 1986.

All that, however, was just a rehearsal for the 1987 state tournament with a team of mostly seniors who I felt could make a real run at a national title. We had always made it a priority to practice against the best players we could find — that included boys teams and former Marshall University women’s team members.

So, I called Tennessee. The Tennessee AAU team had just won the national championships the year before and it had a player from Oak Ridge named Jennifer Azzi who would go on to be an All-American at Stanford, an all-WNBA player in the pros and a member of the USA Olympic team that won a gold medal.

Not only did I get a game, I got two games, and Coach Summitt invited us to play on her home court at the University of Tennessee campus.

The first day we played against a team of 15- and 16-year-olds, presumably a warm-up to the big game the next day. Well, we were beaten, soundly. To say we were discouraged is an understatement. But Summitt and her assistant coaches, who sat a couple of rows up in the enormous basketball arena, gave us some words of encouragement as we left the court.

The next day, we decided to just have fun — all coaches say that don’t they? We left our uniform shorts in the bag and each player donned a pair of what we called “jams” — bright-colored, usually flowered, surfer shorts. They didn’t match our jerseys, but we figured we had little to lose against Azzi and her nationally ranked teammates.

Well, long story short, you probably have figured out by now that we won the game. It was probably one of the biggest victories ever for a girls team from West Virginia and it left the Tennessee AAU coach a little baffled.

But, Summitt sat through the whole game. She nodded when we did something well. She shook her head when Tennessee did something bad.

Afterward, she shook my hand. Every year after that, whenever I ran into her scouting at the national AAU tournament or anywhere else, she always spoke or stopped to exchange comments. She was never too special or too busy for an AAU coach from West Virginia — even after my best player signed with Stanford, along with Azzi.

I don’t think any disease wants to go into overtime with Pat Summitt. I wish her well.

John Hackworth is managing editor of the Charlotte Sun. He can be reached at hackworth@sun-herald.com