The words and numbers on a single sheet of paper in the press room at the Liacouras Center yesterday tried to sum up a staggering amount of information in eight and a half inches.
Four individuals with a combined 114 years as head coaches. A total of 3,575 games coached, of which 2,736 have been wins. Seventy-nine NCAA Tournament appearances, including 33 trips to the Elite Eight and seven national championships. Fourteen Coach of the Year awards.
So in this historic season for women's college basketball, it seemed appropriate that these legends of the game gathered in the city which has a rightful claim as the cradle of the sport.
For Ohio State's Jim Foster, Rutgers' C. Vivian Stringer, Texas Tech's Marsha Sharp and Tennessee's Pat Summitt, it is about much more than one game, even if the stakes are raised to the dizzying heights of March Madness.
Foster is the hometown hero, a Philadelphia native who spent 13 years at Saint Joseph's and electrified Hawk Hill before moving on to make Vanderbilt and then the Buckeyes into national powers.
"He's pretzels, cheesesteaks, and the mummers as well as anybody who's gone through here," St. Joe's Athletic Director Don DiJulia said Thursday of the man he hired in 1978.
And although Foster, who started coaching at age 29, left for Nashville, Tenn., in 1991, his roots are still firmly planted on City Avenue.
"I'm happy to be back in Philadelphia and I'm happy that my wife handles the tickets," he joked.
Rutgers' Stringer has seen it all.
She drove the team vans and doubled as athletic trainer as a 22-year old at Cheyney State, where she worked with current Temple men's coach John Chaney, who coached at the school from 1972-82.
"He's very special to me," Stringer said of the embattled Owls legend. "I should have taken a picture because I was standing on his name" at center court during Saturday's practice session.
After winning 251 games and taking Cheyney to the Final Four in 1982, Stringer made it to the big national stage with Iowa and then Rutgers. Until Saturday when Louisville's Rick Pitino took the Cardinals to the Final Four, she was the first and only coach -- in the men's or women's game -- to take three different teams to the Final Four, having done it with the Hawkeyes in 1993 and the Scarlet Knights in 2000.
Now Stringer is at the helm of a program she referred to as the "Jewel of the East" when she arrived there. And after beating Ohio State yesterday, 64-58, Rutgers is one win away from its second Final Four in Stringer's tenure.
Stringer has not only advanced her own programs, but women's basketball as a whole.
"I was one of the founders, along with Pat Summitt and certain others of us, who were instrumental in having the first conference, the first convention, for the coaches' association," she said. "We thought that we would be lucky if we had 150 coaches, and now there are almost 3,000."
The players get it, sort of.
"You try to tell the players, but you know how they are always saying that you walked 10 miles uphill the whole time," she said. "So I just have to smile."
Stringer also has Philadelphia roots.
"Chuck Daly, he was at the University of Pennsylvania, and coach Chaney and I had done a clinic there at Pennsylvania," she said. "I think that Philadelphia could easily boast, and probably could prove, that is the basketball cultural center of the country."
Of course, with the focus being Philadelphia, food was a big part of that culture.
"I think Jim's probably a little bit more familiar with where the best cheesesteak hoagies are," she said. "I think there was a big argument or discussion between Pat's or Geno's when Pat was here and Geno was here [for the 2001 Final Four], so I'll have to find out about that, because I only know about the hot pretzels that were in front of the University of Pennsylvania."
Sharp has lorded over the Big 12 and Texas Tech's previous conferences for 23 years. It seems like a long time, until Foster rightly notes that he, Stringer and Summit have been doing this for so long that "Marsha is sort of the rookie here" because the others started so young.
The respect that each coach has for the others, however, does not discriminate by age.
"We fight a lot of the same battles -- there's a lot of us that sit in rooms at different times of the year and talk about how to make the game better, and try to put personal agendas aside," Sharp said.
Finally, there is Summitt, the winningest coach in college basketball history, the one who has defined it more than anyone else.
"The things she's done speak for themselves," Sharp said after her Lady Raiders succumbed to the Volunteers and their legions of fans, 75-59. "She's probably the single most important person in the history of our game."
Thirty-one years on the sidelines in Knoxville have earned Summitt that praise, along with an enormous arena in which to showcase her team and a court that now bears her name.
Not to mention quite a lot of perspective.
"I think at this point it's kind of a love-hate feeling -- I love what I've seen, but I hate that there's no easy games now," Summitt said. "Thirty-one years ago, you've got to understand, people didn't charge admission, we didn't have scholarships, we couldn't go out and recruit except on campus in the dorms."
Stringer marveled at "the media, the press credentials, the kind of fan support" that descended upon North Broad Street all day yesterday.
Tomorrow night, Summitt and Stringer will meet once again, with a trip to Indianapolis on the line. And while there is plenty of competitive fire in both grand dames, underneath that, there is nothing but respect.
"If I needed someone in this profession, she is on a very short list of someone I would call," Summitt said of Stringer.
"We'll try to both beat each other [tomorrow]," Stringer said. "But we'll be great friends, as well as our teams, and that's what it should be about."
