It's Summitt blue. That's the official name. In honor of Pat. If you look on the teams that Pat coached. There was blue trim in the uniform.
It was actually started at Tennessee in the late 60s, by the predecessor of Summit and her future Athletic Director, Joan Cronan:
The Columbia blue came about because Cronan couldn’t find what she needed when rummaging through the basement of Alumni Gym, where the women’s basketball team played before moving to Stokely Athletics Center in the mid-1970s.
“In 1968, I was basketball coach, and I think we were the Volettes or something exciting like that,” Cronan said wryly. “I had very little budget, and I had to order uniforms. Many people weren’t playing women’s basketball at that time. I could find white uniforms with Tennessee orange letters. But I couldn’t find anybody that was making women’s orange uniforms.
“So, I had a choice. I could get men’s uniforms or come up with a third color. Without a marketing study, without an OK from anybody, I sat in the basement of Alumni Gym and said, ‘What color do you think looks good with orange and white?’ And I said Carolina blue. So, if you go back to the 1968 to 72 teams, we wore blue uniforms with orange letters and white trim. So, that was how we got the Carolina blue.”{/QUOTE]
In August of 1976, Pat Summitt, Gloria Ray and Terry Crawford gathered around a table at the now-defunct Old College Inn on Cumberland Avenue near the University of Tennessee campus to sketch a new logo for the women’s teams. Summitt, then known as Pat Head, had been the Tennessee women’s...
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Over time, due to the great trail-blazing career as WBB Head Coach that Pat Summitt would have, the iconic blue for the women's team would be named Summitt Blue in honor to her, with Cronan's blessing, if not insistence.
There is some discrepancy between the blue being Carolina Blue as Cronan described it, or being Columbia Blue, which is the blue used by Columbia University. Both colors of blue are identical in shade, although Columbia Blue is a slightly paler shade: most people think of Carolina Blue as being a "pastel" shade of blue, but Columbia Blue would be a pastel shade of Carolina Blue. but nowadays both UNC and Columbia use varying shades of their official blues, to where often they wear the same exact blues.....
A neat tie-in involving Cronan: she was the head coach at Tennessee in the late-early 60s-70s, mostly to following her husband to Knoxville when he got an assistant coaching job at Tennessee. Then she left and became the head coach at the University of Charleston, SC when she again followed her husband to South Carolina. At the Univ. of Charleston, she not only was the HC of WBB but also helped with other women's sports there as women's sports at most universities were still club programs. Eventually, Cronan's experience and leadership in many women programs led to her becoming the Athletic Director of women's sports at College of Charleston, a university position that was very rare for collegiate sports at the time.
While the WBB HC at CoC, Cronan hired a young woman to be her assistant coach, and upon being elevated to AD there, she promoted that woman to succeed her as HC. The woman was Nancy Wilson, and Wilson went on to become College of Charleston's winningest Head Basketball Coach, and led the Cougars to Division II AIAW championship games. In time, Cronan would leave College of Charleston to return to Knoxville, and take the same job as AD of women's sports at the University of Tennessee, where she served from 1983 to 2012 and still serves in an Emeritus capacity.
Wilson would eventually leave the Cougars program as well, becoming the Head Coach of the University of South Carolina. As the HC of the Gamecocks - at a time when the Gamecocks was a member of the Metro Conference - she led them to multiple conference titles and NCAAT appearances. Once the university joined the SEC however, they struggled to get a foothold in the then- toughest WBB conference in the nation. But Wilson would go on to become the Gamecock's all-time winningest Head Coach there, just like she did at the CoC - until that is, Dawn Staley passed her back in 2017 or 2018.....
