Alone at the summit: Without her two guiding forces, Kellie Harper leads Lady Vols back where they belong (2024)

For the better part of the 1980s and ’90s, that dark gray Chevy Astro van spent its summers parked outside the White County High School gym. Anyone passing by on Allen Drive who spotted the unmistakable van, usually the only vehicle in the lot, knew immediately that Kellie Harper was there.

There were perks to your dad being the high school’s assistant principal, Harper realized. One: He had keys to the gym. Two: He had summers off, which in the Jolly household meant summers in that gym.

Kenneth Jolly would open the Warriors’ locker room for his kids and let them loose. Harper and her little brother, Brent, would dive into the cardboard boxes of old uniforms. They’d hunt for their favorite jersey numbers, then run out of the tunnel and onto the court, where they’d practice layup lines before playing one-on-one. Jolly was there to watch, officiate and, occasionally, break up a fight.

As the kids grew older, the workouts became more intense. Jolly would turn on a single light and roll a few balls onto the court while Harper propped open a door and rolled over the large circular suction fan, inviting the slightly cooler air into the stuffy gymnasium. Some nights after workouts, the trio carried their water bottles and walked down to the softball field to watch adult-league games or join a pickup basketball game on the other side of the school.

Jolly was a calm, level-headed man, which made him a patient school administrator and a disciplined basketball trainer. He only worked on shots and passes that Harper could make in the normal course of a game. No trick shots allowed. Jolly often said, “You can’t expect a player to do something in a game that they haven’t done in a practice,” and so he put Harper in every situation he could imagine.

When Harper and her dad weren’t in the gym practicing basketball, they were in a gym watching basketball. They would attend their high school’s games, their junior high’s games, games in other counties. One summer, the Jolly family coordinated its summer vacation around the 15U national tournament and drove the Astro van about 800 miles from Sparta, Tenn., to South Florida to sit in muggy gyms without air conditioning and watch high school freshmen compete.

She picked her dad’s brain about how he saw the game, how he could observe all five players at once. He pointed out movements and spacing. And he was honest with her: You’re never going to be the quickest player on the floor, but if you play the angles right, that won’t matter much. You can win, and make everyone else better, with your basketball IQ.

Harper’s admiration for him shaped her dreams. Growing up to become a high school math teacher and basketball coach sounded perfect.

“I wanted to be just like my dad,” Harper said. “I thought he hung the moon.”

There was something special about high school girls basketball in Tennessee in the ’80s and ’90s. Knoxville had become the mecca of women’s college basketball, and players around Harper’s age didn’t know a world ever existed in which Pat Summitt wasn’t regularly winning national titles as the Lady Vols head coach.

By Harper’s junior year, coaches from all over the country, including Summitt, descended upon Sparta, a rural town without even a movie theater in the rolling hills outside the Smoky Mountains. The coaches came here to see Harper, an All-State player. Many left with the same conclusion: The girl who spent every summer day in the gym with her dad was, unsurprisingly, one of the most fundamentally sound players they had seen.

“No doubt he was a big reason that Kellie was what she was as a player,” said NC State coach Wes Moore, then an assistant trying to recruit Harper to play for Kay Yow and the Wolfpack.

As a young player, Harper didn’t dare imagine she’d play at Tennessee. Later, she never dreamed she’d be its coach. She wouldn’t have been either without her guiding forces. No one influenced her career more than Jolly and Summitt. But in 2019, when Tennessee hired Harper as head coach, neither was there to see her take her spot at the head of the bench.

Harper lost her dad in 2012 after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. She lost her coach in 2016 to early-onset Alzheimer’s.

Harper stood in front of her new team for the first time and talked about winning national championships. She had won three as a Lady Vol, and that needed to be the expectation again at Tennessee.

She knew what Tennessee could be because she had been a part of what it was.

The program she left as a player had advanced to 15 Elite Eights and went to another 13 in the following 16 seasons. The program she inherited hadn’t survived past the second round in three seasons, its longest streak ever without a Sweet 16.

From the onset of the job, Harper knew that — no matter what she did, whether she was wildly successful or failed — Summitt would be a main character in her Tennessee basketball coaching story. But Harper was secure as a head coach. She had already taken three teams to the NCAA Tournament, finding her footing at Missouri State after being let go at NC State. She had confidence in the decisions she made at practices and in games.

“It’s important to say, I’m not here to try to be Pat Summitt,” she said within the first two minutes of her introductory news conference. “I’m here to be Kellie, who learned from Pat Summitt.”

The comparisons came anyway, of course. The more the Lady Vols win, the more the program resembles the teams that played for Summitt — especially with its ferocious defense and rebounding — and the more Tennessee fans look for similarities.

There are a few. Harper’s first lesson every season centers on defense, and she begins with positioning. Just like Summitt. Harper is adamant: If there’s a specific place a player is assigned on the floor, this is not improv. Be in that spot.

Also like Summit, Harper is meticulously detailed in her explanations and expectations. “We know what she wants because she tells us why we need to do it, how we need to do it and what we’re going to get out of it,” junior Jordan Horston says. And of course, there are Harper’s icy blue eyes. Harper’s occasional glare from the sideline is familiar in Knoxville, too. She was on the receiving end of Summitt’s unblinking eye contact more than once, and now she has her own stare-downs that telegraph exactly how upset she is without saying a word. “Personally, if I get a turnover, I’m not looking over at her,” senior Rae Burrell says.

But usually, Harper’s sideline demeanor more closely resembles her dad’s than Summitt’s. She is calm and composed, rarely does she yell (though when she does, it’s usually directed at an official).

The seventh-ranked Lady Vols are 19-3 and moved into the AP top five this season for the first time since 2015. With clashes against No. 10 UConn, No. 1 South Carolina and No. 15 LSU still to come in February, coaches who knew Summitt will find themselves up against a Tennessee team that looks reminiscent of the Summitt days.

The Lady Vols appear closer to a national title than they’ve been in more than a decade — a dry spell once unfathomable on Rocky Top. It’s a thought that crosses Harper’s mind every time she walks into Thompson-Boling Arena.

“I want to put another one up there,” says Harper, 44, referencing the eight national championship banners hanging from the rafters. “Not for me. I want to do it for our players. I want to do it for the players who have completely bought into what we’re asking them to do and the players who haven’t had a chance to win a national championship. I would love for them to experience what I got to experience.”

And for her to experience what Summitt experienced.

Two days before Harper’s national signing day in 1995, she suffered an ACL injury in a high school scrimmage. The game was technically over, but the players decided to play a fifth quarter. Dribbling down the court, Harper suddenly felt excruciating pain in her right knee for 30 seconds. The ACL never snapped, but it pulled off the bone. She didn’t hear a pop, so she just walked to the bench and sat down. The next day, an orthopedic surgeon diagnosed her.

Jolly’s first call was to Summitt, explaining what had happened and telling her they realized a point guard with an ACL tear wasn’t who Tennessee had recruited. If Summitt needed to fill Harper’s spot with another recruit, they understood. No grudges.

“He basically gave her every opportunity to get out of signing me — that was classic my dad,” Harper said. “But, classic Pat, she said, ‘No, I’ve made a commitment to her. And we want her to sign with Tennessee.’”

When she arrived on campus, less than a year after her injury, she impressed coaches with how quickly she acclimated. Their evaluation of her as a fundamentally sound recruit held at the college level.

“(Her dad) was a good teacher,” said Georgia Tech chief of staff Mickie DeMoss, who spent 20 years on Summitt’s staff and recruited Harper as a Lady Vol. “And so, when she came into our program, she was ready for college. And I think a lot of that had to do with her dad. She didn’t have a lot of growing pains as some freshmen.”

But what maybe came as a surprise in her rapid transition was how quickly she bonded with Summitt.

Harper had an innate understanding of what Summitt wanted. In some ways, Harper realized, her dad and Summitt looked at the game similarly. During Tennessee’s recruitment of Harper, Jolly passed along a baseline out-of-bounds play he thought would work well for the Lady Vols’ personnel. Summitt liked it and implemented it. The play worked so well that Summitt ran it all four years Harper was at Tennessee, and Harper still runs it with the Lady Vols.

That familiarity meant that when Summitt communicated something to Harper, it was as though she had already heard it before and internalized it. An understanding between the two developed quickly.

“I don’t ever remember Pat just unloading on Kellie,” DeMoss said. “Pat was just tougher on (point guards) than any other position on the floor, but she didn’t have to be that way with Kellie. It was more like, just tell me what you want, Coach, and I’ll get it done. There was a trust. I think maybe trust is the biggest word there. Pat trusted Kellie, and Kellie trusted her.”

Harper had a feeling for when her teammates didn’t quite understand what Summitt was saying. When Summitt’s intensity skyrocketed, Harper was the team’s translator.

“She could get that point across to us and communicate it to us in such a way that we all understood what we were supposed to be doing and where we were supposed to be,” said Kentucky associate head coach Niya Butts, a former Tennessee teammate of Harper. “For me, that was very calming, very reassuring.”

As a sophom*ore, she tore the ACL she had injured in high school. The time she spent on the bench changed her perspective. Watching Summitt that season, the college game became more appealing. From the bench, without the need to track a game because her number might get called, she instead watched how Summitt interacted differently with various players, the nuances of how she communicated with Harper’s teammates. In one SEC game during the 1996-97 season, Summitt turned to her assistant coaches and pleaded, “Help me help them.”

“Here is the greatest coach ever,” Harper said, “and she’s asking for help.”

Harper told Summitt she wanted to be a college coach. Summitt didn’t dissuade her, but bluntly explained: It’s going to be really hard. Be certain it’s something you really want. Harper thought about it and later told Summitt, I’m sure. Summitt gave her two more pieces of advice: Do things the right way, and be honest.

Through it all, Harper took mental notes of everything: Utilize your assistant coaches; be meticulous in practice planning; understand each player’s motivations; be kind and grateful to every person who touches your program.

After winning national titles during her first three seasons — Summitt’s fourth, fifth and sixth championships — Harper was poised to go for a four-peat. But during her senior season, the Lady Vols ran into Duke and lost by six in the Elite Eight. Harper fouled out in that game, and as she sat in the paint, having fallen after committing the final foul, she wasn’t sure if she had enough strength to even walk to the bench.

Tennessee had its postseason routine: media, showers, food. Somehow, Harper found herself seemingly alone in the cavernous locker room in Greensboro, N.C. But when she walked out to join her team, she spotted her coach in the back corner of the locker room, arched forward with her head in hands, crying.

It was the only time Harper had ever seen Summitt cry.

“I remember in that moment having this overwhelming feeling that she was crying for Chamique (Holdsclaw) and me. It was our senior year. We didn’t get a shot at it,” Harper said.

“She wasn’t crying because she had lost the game, she was crying because her players had lost and didn’t get to see another championship.”

As a Tennessee sophom*ore, Harper learned her father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a neurological disorder that affects a person’s movement. He was the dad still fit enough to play pick-up games in his 40s and farmed tobacco and then vegetables into his 60s.

“Growing up, the one person that was not going to get sick was my dad,” Harper said.

Now, he had an incurable disease.

Along with the diagnosis came the usual marker — a slight trembling. For Jolly, this was in his hands. Even as doctors did their best to find the right balance of medications to keep the worst symptoms at bay, Jolly experienced reactions. One medicine combination caused hallucinations. Another lowered his blood pressure, so he had to avoid standing too quickly, otherwise he might pass out. More than once, he fell in the middle of the night and his wife Peggy drove him to the emergency room. As the disease progressed, parts of his body would lock up or freeze. He’d be laying down, unable to move his foot or arm until someone gave him more medicine.

A few years later, he was diagnosed with acute leukemia, requiring chemotherapy at the VA Hospital two hours from their house multiple times a week.

In 2004, Harper was a 26-year-old assistant under Moore at Chattanooga when she received an offer to become the head coach at Western Carolina, which would make her the youngest Division I head coach in the country. As she contemplated the offer, Moore advised her to consider whether she thought she could win at Western Carolina. The answer was yes.

But the other part of her consideration was more difficult. Coaching at Western Carolina meant being away from her dad as his health declined. It meant a three-and-a-half-hour drive home instead of a one-hour trip. It meant being the person running the team. At Chattanooga, she could stop home a few times a month to eat dinner with her parents on a random night. At Western Carolina, that couldn’t happen.

“The hardest part for me was being so far away from home and then watching my mom be this caretaker,” Harper said. “I had a responsibility to my job and couldn’t be there with her and for him. And my parents are such tough people in general, they wouldn’t have wanted us to feel like we had to be there for them. … They wanted us to be able to do what we needed to do.”

As Harper stepped into this new phase of her coaching life, she couldn’t ignore how life was changing at home. She couldn’t be at the doctor’s visits, she couldn’t offer to drive him to the hospital, she couldn’t be the one to mow the lawn when Jolly no longer could. The sicker he became, the harder it was for him to talk on the phone. Harper always imagined that when she finally became a head coach her dad would be there, drawing up plays and breaking down opponents in the postgame. But that wasn’t the reality.

During her third season at NC State, the Wolfpack played a holiday tournament in Hawaii. It was the first Christmas she ever missed with her family. But in late January, she was inducted into White County High School’s athletic hall of fame, joining her father, who had been inducted eight years earlier.

She flew in from NC State on a Thursday and spent all day Friday with her parents. When her dad was feeling well enough that day, they’d sit in the living room and talk until he became too tired and went to rest in his bed. He didn’t feel well enough to attend the induction ceremony, so Harper’s mom attended. On Saturday morning, she kissed them both goodbye and caught a flight back to North Carolina. On Sunday, as she was preparing for NC State’s game against North Carolina, her mom called to say her dad died that morning at age 72 after a blood clot blocked an artery in his lung.

“I am convinced, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, that God got me home to see my dad before he passed, and he let my dad hang on until I got there. Because I don’t know how I would have been able to handle that had I not seen him,” Harper said. “As hard as it was to lose my dad, there was a great peace in knowing that I got to go home.”

At Jolly’s wake, the line of visitors for the family wrapped around the block and stayed that way for hours. Jolly’s former Tennessee Tech teammates regaled the Jolly kids with stories about their dad, how he used to be that one teammate who pushed the pace in sprints when teammates had collectively decided to coast. There were his high school students who shared that they would’ve never graduated without Jolly’s help. There were church members who had sought counsel from Jolly.

Summitt was there, too, by herself. She waited in line like everyone else.

“As much as I admired Pat and knew how great of a person she was, I still couldn’t believe she came,” Harper said. “I had been gone from Tennessee for a long time. I just knew how busy she was. And for her to come, it just reminded you who she was and the kind of person she was and also how much respect she had for my dad.”

Harper was two decades removed from her college basketball career and her three national titles when she pulled into the driveway of her former coach’s house. It was a warm summer day in 2014 and her 6-month-old son, Jackson, was in the backseat. He wore a tiny Tennessee onesie and little blue boat shoes.

Harper hadn’t seen Summitt in person since her last season coaching at Tennessee.

Summitt was less than a decade removed from her last national title and three years into her diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s. She surprised many when she decided to continue coaching after her 2011 diagnosis before stepping down in 2012 after 38 seasons. But she still swam every other day and fit in rounds on the golf course.

At this point in Summitt’s illness, everything was scheduled, and her caregiver kept everything moving on time. Harper had a 45-minute window, roughly a third of the time they spent together in a typical practice years ago.

One of Summitt’s Labradors laid at her feet as the two talked in Summitt’s living room. Harper did most of the talking, telling Summitt about her life, her coaching, her son. Her meticulous, detail-oriented coach no longer recalled many of their shared memories.

“Just being there, sitting and talking to her, and having my son there, it just meant the world that I had that opportunity,” Harper said.

Two years earlier, when she had kissed her dad goodbye, she didn’t imagine it would be the last time she saw him. When she hugged Summitt, she assumed it would be. She held it together as she walked to the car, buckled Jackson into his car seat and sat in the driver’s seat. Then, she cried.

Former teammates and assistant coaches had warned her the visit wouldn’t be easy, it wouldn’t be simple to witness a hero’s decline.

Harper knew that all too well. But she still went.

Less than two years later, at 64, Summitt died.

A few weeks ago, Harper was in her UT office when she overheard a conversation between her two kids, Jackson and Kiley. Jackson, now 8, had seen one of the many photos of Summitt around the team facilities and said to Kiley, “You know, I got to meet Pat once. When I was a baby, I met her. And that’s really cool.”

In the way younger siblings idolize older siblings, Kiley wholeheartedly agreed. Even at 3, she knew, yes, that was really cool.

From across the room, Harper smiled. Her kids never got to know the two coaches who shaped her life. They’re never going to shoot hoops with their grandpa in Sparta or watch Summitt design a play in Knoxville.

But they get to see Tennessee now, on a path back to its former prestige. They play and run on “The Summitt,” underneath the banners where their mom hopes to hang more. And when they’re older, they’ll see all the ways their mom has sustained the legacies of Summitt and Jolly, understanding that to know Harper is to know parts of them.

And that — in Jackson’s words, and Harper’s agreement — is really cool.

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos of Harper as player / Courtesy of Tennessee; photo of Harper and Jolly: Courtesy of Peggy Jolly; photo of Harper as coach / Bryan Lynn / Getty.)