When former Tennessee Lady Vols basketball coach Pat Summitt died in 2016, she was widely recognized as one of the top college basketball coaches of all time, with 1,098 wins under her belt. Now, she is being honored with a series of stained glass windows being handmade by The Glass Factory in Owensboro.
Scott Poynter, owner of The Glass Factory, said he was contacted by Mount Carmel United Methodist Church in Summitt’s hometown of Clarksville, Tennessee, regarding a commission for seven stained glass windows to honor the late coaching legend with funds donated by her family to the church.
“They found us on the internet, basically,” Poynter said from his studio. “They had looked at previous churches we had done in the past, and we had a meeting.”
The project, which has been underway for about four months, is expected to be completed sometime in May.
With iconic Kokomo Glass in vibrant shades of blues, green, orange and red, each of the seven panels is being built in sections, with an oval shaped “medallion” in the center featuring a variety of images, such as the original church as it appeared in the 1830s.
“I will draw those up, and they go from me to a gentlemen down in Huntsville, Alabama, who is basically a religious stained glass master,” Poynter said. “He will take what I have drawn, apply it to glass, and it is almost kind of a silk screen at first, detailed in black, and then your colors are painted onto the glass.”
While the design of the windows being completed in Summitt’s memory is considered traditional, Poynter said the color choices are a little more modern.
“They elected to use really vibrant colors, which I think is amazing,” he said. “The design is a traditional design, you have got your paisley, the scroll work.”
Poynter said he uses stained glass from Kokomo Opalescent Glass in Kokomo, Indiana, which was also used by stained glass master Louis Comfort Tiffany and renown architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
After confirming the design with the church, Poynter said he begins by cutting all of the class for each of the seven windows, so everything is cut and ready to go, before fitting the pieces to a lead frame and soldering everything in place.
While churches might be the first thing many associate stained glass windows with, Poynter said churches do not make up the majority of his commissions.
“I get about one commission for a church about every two years,” he said. “A lot of residential, some commercial. At this point, we do a lot of custom front entries. That is our big business.”
Poynter, who has been working with stained glass since he was 14, after his late father opened the store in 1978, said that while technology has changed the industry some, he still does things the old-fashioned way.
“There are so many different things that people can do as far as technology,” he said. “Now they can water jet cut the glass, but it is still not handmade.”
Poynter gestures to a small grouping of hand tools laid out on one of the high-top work stations. They include a pair of lead nippers to cut the lead, grozing pliers, a soldering iron and small rubber mallet.
“The technology has changed, but with what I do, what has changed there is the lack of the original stained glass artist,” he said. “Every time I get something like this, I am over the moon, because it is my love, and it is a lost art.”
