Read the following excerpt from a bigger passage. A History of Fearlessness by Jere Longman When Pat Summitt became head coach of the Tennessee Lady Vols in 1974, she drove the team van and began to shift gears on the long uphill climb for women’s sports. Summitt overcame athletic inequality with a stoicism and determination that came from growing up on a farm in Tennessee, chopping tobacco and baling hay as part of her sunup to sundown chores while her father admonished, “Cows don’t take a day off.” Basketball games were played at night in a hayloft with her three older brothers. “They would just run over me,” Summitt said in a 2008 interview. “But that was O. K.” She would not be run over for long. At 22, Summitt became head coach at Tennessee, barely older than her players. Thirty-seven seasons later, she has won eight national titles and more games (1,071) than any major-college basketball coach, man or woman, while avoiding scandal and graduating the vast majority of her players. Her stature made it all the more shocking Tuesday when Summitt announced that she had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease at age 59. Fellow coaches were stunned by the diagnosis of dementia but hardly surprised that Summitt approached it the way she confronted everything else—head-on, open, resolute, determined to keep coaching. “It might not be curable, but I’m sure she has a plan to deal with this,” said Tara VanDerveer, the Hall of Fame coach at Stanford. “All those things she has taught in sports—discipline—could be exactly what she needs. I give her a lot of credit for being so open in sharing this and being so courageous in continuing to coach. A lot of people would say, ‘That’s it,’ and do crossword puzzles. But she’s bringing visibility to something that a lot of people have a hard time talking about and dealing with.” In an athletic context, this is precisely what Summitt has done for nearly four decades, bringing widespread attention to something that made many people uncomfortable—the ascendance of women’s sports. Her father, Richard Head, was a stern man, but he moved the family to a neighboring county so that Tricia, as he called her, could play basketball in high school. She played on the 1976 Olympic team and won a silver medal. And when Summitt lost her inaugural game coaching at Tennessee, her father gave her this enduring advice: “Don’t take donkeys to the Kentucky Derby.” By this, he meant, the best teams have the best players. She became a fierce recruiter and motivator, supple enough with Xs and Os to change from a plodding, half-court style to a full-court style built on aggressive defense and rebounding. And she became an ambassador as much as coach, allowing television cameras into the locker room, willing to play almost any team on almost any court. According to the author, Pat Summitt learned important lessons about how to face difficult circumstances from her time spent — A) playing on the 1976 Olympic team B) dealing with her Alzheimer’s diagnosis C) working on her family’s farm D) losing games as a new coach