DENVER – If you ever have a chance, listen closely to coach Tanya Haave at Metropolitan State University of Denver women's basketball practices.
 
"Sometimes she'll say, 'Pat used to say this,'" Roadrunners guard Jonalyn Wittwer (Fall Creek, Wis./Fall Creek) said. "So we get all the Pat wisdom that trickles down."
 
"Pat" is Pat Summitt, simply known as one of the greatest basketball coaches ever during her illustrious career in charge of the Tennessee women's team that she built into a dynasty.
 
And Haave? She was only an All-American for the Lady Vols, who played in three Final Fours and an Elite Eight and finished her college career as the all-time leading scorer in the history of the storied program.
 
With that background, it stands to reason that Haave, too, would become a successful coach.

She has.
 
A three-time Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference coach of the year, Haave will become – with her next victory – the winningest coach in Roadrunners women's basketball history.
 
Her first attempt is Saturday, in a 4 p.m. game at Chadron State in the RMAC opener.
 
"I knew I wanted to coach, and that was because of Pat," said Haave, who played professionally overseas for 14 years before embarking on a coaching career where she made several stops as an assistant and spent four years as the head coach of Division I San Francisco. "Pat really seemed to love what she was doing, the recruiting, all that. I was playing as long as I could play, but I always wanted to coach."
 
Now in her ninth season in charge of the MSU Denver program, Haave is 159-84 to tie Darryl Smith (1990-91 through 1997-98) in victories.
 
With typical modesty, Haave deflects credit for her work, which includes posting the only NCAA Division II tournament victories (she is 7-4) in school history, and shares it with others.
 
"I think it means I've been here a long time," Haave said of the inevitable record. "And we've had really great players, great staff and great administrative leadership to give us the resources we need to be successful. It doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's a programmatic thing from the president down."
 
Despite the higher-scoring era that came after her departure, Haave still ranks 10^thon Tennessee's scoring list with 1,771 points. But one has to sometimes work hard to find out that one of Tennessee's greatest players is also MSU Denver's humble head coach.
 
"Talking to recruits or even or players, I don't think they are diving into the history of basketball," said David Wells, Haave's long-time assistant. "There's some who have this love for basketball, and some of them are Tennessee fans, so they absolutely know.
 
"I don't hesitate to bring it up in recruiting. But she's just not going to bring it up, unless it's relative to the situation."
 
Just like when Haave didn't know she was about to become Tennessee's all-time scoring leader, she also didn't know she was closing in on MSU Denver's wins record until she tied it in last Saturday's win over Winona State.
 
"She doesn't think anything about it," Wells said. "She wouldn't say anything about it. She probably won't when she gets it."
 
Easy-going off the court, Haave said she can dial up the intensity during games like Summitt did over the course of a career in which she had 1,098 victories.
 
"My personality isn't a lot like hers – sometimes it is, on the floor," Haave said. "People know that I'm fairly laid back off the floor, but I can definitely get excitable and intense. I feel like I'm probably like her in terms of being demanding, but where I'm like her – and people didn't see it as much from her – was her compassion and empathy."
 
A Colorado high school legend, Haave seems like the perfect fit to be coaching at MSU Denver. But it almost didn't happen.
 
Her stint as San Francisco's coach had just come to an end with a 5-27 season in 2009-10. She had long known Joan McDermott, at the time the MSU Denver athletic director, who happened to be in San Francisco a couple of weeks later when the two had a meeting at a coffee shop.
 
Haave was at a crossroads, thinking that maybe she'd sit out for a season before throwing her hat back into the coaching ring. But the Roadrunners job came open.
 
"She said, 'I would really like you to apply,'" Haave said. "And fortunately, she took a long time before the interview process. Because at that point it was still so fresh, I didn't want to coach. But six weeks went by, and then I realized that I wasn't going to be able to not do anything. I just had to do something.
 
"When I finally came on campus to interview, it was perfect timing. But then I wasn't sure. My interview with the returning players went really well. But I didn't know much about Division II. I asked Joan, 'Do you really want to hire me?'"
 
Assured that she did, Haave, despite the advice of some who thought she should continue on the Division I track, came back home to MSU Denver.
 
"I grew up here and I had a chance to come back, to a place I love to be, and to continue to be a head coach, to learn from my mistakes and get better," she said. "It doesn't matter what division it is, I'm still a head coach. And it's the best decision I ever made."
 
Haave's first Roadrunners team went 30-3 and reached the Elite Eight of the Division II tournament as regional champions.
 
"We got Cassondra Bratton, lightning struck, and we were in the Elite Eight," Haave said. "The kids were great. They were open-minded. My record at USF wasn't good, no question, but I looked in their eyes, players like Jasmine Cervantes and Emily Wood, and I said, 'I know I can get you to a championship,' and they believed me. But they also believed in themselves."
 
Her next team was 27-4, and she made it three NCAA tournament trips in a row with a 21-10 season in 2012-13. Though the next three Roadrunners teams hovered around .500 while winning 13 games each season, an upward trend followed and the 2016-17 season saw the team finish 18-12.
 
Previously, Haave's stops as an assistant included four years at Colorado under Hall of Fame coach Ceal Barry – a close friend and another major influence. While coaching at Colorado, Haave remembers taking a couple days off to go watch Summitt's Tennessee team practice, nearly two decades after she had played for the Lady Vols.
 
Gone, or almost gone anyway, was the fiery Summitt of her youth who had become a head coach in her early 20s and was only about 10 years older than Haave.
 
"I watched practice and I was like, 'Who is this woman?'" Haave said, laughing. "She had completely adapted how she was coaching to the time. And that was another great thing about her, she was going to do what she needed to do to be successful. She was always learning."
 
Is it much of a surprise then, that as the Roadrunners re-emerged as a regional power last year while going 23-9 and reaching the second round of the national tournament, it was a more mellow Haave running the show?
 
"She's a totally different woman compared to my freshman year," said a laughing Emily Hartegan (Wylie, Texas/Wylie East), a fifth-year senior and the team's leading scorer. "She's more understanding. It (the intensity) is still there, just maybe in a different way."
 
Haave said last year's senior class, which included Georgia Ohrdorf (Wollongong, Australia/St. Mary Star of the Sea College) and J'Nae Squires-Horton (Colorado Springs, CO/Sand Creek H.S.) as well as class of 2014 recruit Hartegan, helped her make the transition.
 
"I've changed my approach the last three years," she said. "Sometimes I would coach like Pat, I'd be pretty hard on them and call them out. But I could tell with the class that just graduated that the same things were happening and they weren't progressing – some of them weren't staying. The common denominator was me. So I took a good hard look at myself.
 
"I still get on them, but it's more just firmly explaining my expectation, or teaching through talking about, 'How can we get better?' The only time I'm upset is if it's a bad attitude or a bad work ethic."
 
Said Wells: "She's evolved, definitely. You have to adapt. It's our job to be able to communicate to the players, and if that communication is breaking down, at some point you have to be able to take a look in the mirror. A great coach will do that.
 
"Maybe you'd say she's softened. Maybe there's an evolution to a coach in general. But you either make that change or you keep banging your head against the wall."
 
The game has changed over the years, so other than seeing a lot of man-to-man defense, the on-court MSU Denver product isn't working off Summitt's Tennessee playbook. But the background influence is there.
 
"What sticks with me the most are some of her core values: her work ethic, commitment, attitude, all those things," Haave said. "Pat would always say, 'Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.'"

The Roadrunners are looking for an opportunity to continue to turn things around after a slow start to the season.
 
Though the competition has been stout – including a road game at top-10 Lubbock Christian and a home game with top-10 West Texas A&M – MSU Denver started the season 0-4. The fourth loss was a humbling 21-point setback to Minnesota State-Moorhead last Friday.
 
The Roadrunners then had to scratch and claw for a three-point home win over Winona State the next day.

"Up until Friday, it didn't feel like we were 0-3," Haave said. "But that loss brought us back to reality. We needed to get over the top. The players felt the pressure. We had to win for confidence reasons going into conference. To win when we're figuring out roles and positions, that was huge. Even if it wasn't particularly pretty, I'll take that. We're not playing great right now, but we're going to figure it out."
 
Chadron State hasn't been great thus far, either, but MSU Denver is taking nothing for granted.
 
"It's easy to look at their record and dismiss them, but they're 1-5 and we're 1-4," Haave said. "We're on the road and we're going to have to play our game. They are at home and they're going to look at our record and know it's a game they can win. It's going to be tough, any game on the road is. We need to approach it the right way."
 
Haave still goes to Tennessee relatively frequently: to a football game every couple of years, to see Barry inducted into the women's basketball hall of fame earlier this summer, and a couple of visits to Summitt before she passed away in 2016.
 
Haave's professional career included seven years in France as well as stops in Italy, Spain, Sweden and Australia.
 
"I was fluent in French and it became a second home to me," Haave said. "But every place had nice qualities to them. It was fun to finish in Melbourne, a city that has something for everyone, kind of a little bit bigger Denver."
 
She coached in the Denver area as an assistant at Regis and Denver, in addition to Colorado, before taking the San Francisco job. She came home again in 2010. There are no regrets.
 
"I'm still coaching," she said. "It's a lot higher level (of play) than anybody gives it credit for being. The kids are great and I love what I'm doing. I don't know what else you can get out of a job."