Sports Illustrated announced its annual Sportsman of the Year award on Monday, but there’s a twist this year. Two twists, actually. First, there are two winners. And second, one of them is a woman.
SI Sportsman, Sportswoman Of The Year Goes To Mike Krzyzewski, Pat Summitt
Mike Krzyzewski and Pat Summitt have been named the winners of Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman and Sportswoman of the Year in 2011. They’ll be officially honored later this week, and you can see the forthcoming Sports Illustrated cover here.
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Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and Tennessee’s Pat Summitt share the honors in 2011, after each coach became the winningest coach in the history of their sport. But the award’s not just a reflection on the year they had. To some degree, it reflects a lifetime of success. As Sports Illustrated explains of Summitt:
Of course there’s an element of the lifetime achievement award in SI’s choice. How could there not be? Summitt has put her stamp on women’s basketball for 38 seasons, from the days when the sport was sometimes referred to as “women’s extramurals,” and her Lady Vols were asked, during a 1979 game at LSU when their prelim to the men went into overtime, to move to an auxiliary gym so the guys could tip off on time.
And then there’s Coach K:
...with four more seasons he will complete 40 years as a collegiate head coach. He won his fourth and unlikeliest national title in 2010, and -- oh, by the way -- sandwiched around it two almost criminally underappreciated international gold medals, at the 2008 Olympics and 2010 World Championships, as head coach of a U.S. national team program that had been in steady decline. No other coach has ever won the Olympics, the NCAAs and the Worlds -- and Coach K did so in a span of 26 months.
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