URBANA — A little more than 90 miles separated Matt Bollant and Pat Summitt last decade.
The two programs in Tennessee, however, where they both coached were worlds apart when it came to women’s basketball.
But Bollant, then leading Bryan College, an NAIA program in Dayton, Tenn., didn’t feel like an inferior coach in his early encounters with Summitt, the legendary Tennessee coach who died on Tuesday morning after the 64-year-old battled early-onset dementia, Alzheimer’s type, for the last several years.
Bollant, the current Illinois coach, never forgot how the winningest basketball coach in Division I history with 1,098 career victories interacted with him, a relative unknown in the coaching profession at the time.