CLEVELAND -- North Carolina coach Sylvia Hatchell was among a group of three longtime friends who traveled to rendezvous with Pat Summitt last summer at her home in Blount County.
Little did the two coaches know that they'd be meeting again to decide who goes to the Final Four in Boston next weekend.
Having just defeated one of her closest personal friends in Rutgers coach C. Vivian Stringer, Summitt now has to deal with Hatchell and her one-loss Tar Heels.
``Sylvia and I go back 32 years to when we were in grad school at Tennessee and she coached my junior varsity team,'' Summitt said. ``I value her as a dear friend in this profession. When you've been in it this long, you make a lot of people mad.''
Stringer suggested over the weekend that it was almost as though the NCAA was playing a cruel joke by putting three close friends, with teams capable of making the Final Four, in the same region. All three were also nominated for WBCA NCAA Coach of the Year, and Hatchell won it
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COMMON SYMPTOMS: Summitt says she knows North Carolina and Tennessee have played many common opponents this season, including Connecticut, Vanderbilt, Old Dominion and Duke, but when she was looking over the schedules at the common results, she decided that wasn't the best approach to preparing for this game.
``I didn't want to look at that very long because Duke pretty much annihilated us on their court and North Carolina found a way to beat Duke,'' Summitt said. ``So I thought, I'm not going to get caught up in this.
``I just quit looking. I started getting indigestion and decided it wasn't worth it.''
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FEELING BLUE: North Carolina has won only a single game in 13 meetings with Tennessee, but this year's Tar Heels have won 32 games, the second greatest number of victories in school history. Only the 1994 national championship team won more.
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TURTLE FEAR: UNC's only loss this season was an ACC contest with then-No. 6 Maryland, 98-95, in overtime. The Tar Heels defeated the Terps the second-time around, 91-80, when Maryland was ranked even higher, at No. 4.
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REMEMBER WHEN?: Tennessee's task tonight is to upset the No. 1 team in the country and the NCAA Tournament's top seed in order to advance to the Final Four. That is familiar territory for Summitt, who guided her 1997 team, which had 10 losses, past No. 1 Connecticut in the Midwest Regional title game and won the national championship held in Cincinnati that year.
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BEEN HERE TOO: The Lady Vols once found themselves in Cleveland in 2000 because it was the hometown of one of the Meeks -- Semeka Randall, who had more than 300 family members in attendance when Tennessee took on North Carolina State, winning 83-63. Summitt usually plays at least one game in the hometown or state of her starters before they graduate.
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ANOTHER NATIVE: Former Lady Vol Vonda Ward, who took up professional boxing following her career at UT, was also from the Cleveland area, and she attended UT's knockout of Rutgers on Sunday. Ward is 21-1-0 in her boxing career and credits Summitt with instilling the kind of toughness that sees her through training for the sport.
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