Basketball Coach Quotes

John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren’t a failure until you start to blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you deny them.

They grabbed me and up I went. My shriek probably could've been heard in England. It certainly brought the basketball coach and the rest of the boys running in the belief that someone was being brutally murdered. I don't think Mrs. Green will be picking me for the squad.

As Pat Riley, the basketball coach, said, "Anytime you stop striving to get better, you're bound to get worse.

How tall are you, Constantine?” I asked, unable to hide my tears. Constantine narrowed her eyes at me. “How tall is you?” “Five-eleven,” I cried. “I’m already taller than the boys’ basketball coach.” “Well, I’m five-thirteen, so quit feeling sorry for yourself.

Good coaches tell you where the fish are, great coaches teach you how to find them.

Oh, you know. I'm queen of the rumor mill. It seems like there's been a new rumor about me every week since I got here. Comes with being the new girl, I guess. Have you heard the one where I seduced the basketball coach? That's a personal favorite.

John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren’t a failure until you start to blame.

When I went to Catholic high school in Philadelphia, we just had one coach for football and basketball. He took all of us who turned out and had us run through a forest. The ones who ran into the trees were on the football team.

In order to be a winner, you have to look for ways of getting things done and not for reasons why things can’t be done. People who live with excuses have things that can’t be done hovering around them all the time.

at the heart of character is honesty and integrity.

Sports contained the truth, I decided, the unspoken truth (how quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound), and it seemed hard to believe that I had never understood this before. They rewarded effortlessness and unself-consciousness; they confirmed that yes, there are rankings of skill and value and that everyone knows what they are (seeing those guys who were subbed with two seconds left before the end of a quarter, I’d think how girls’ coaches were never that heartless); they showed that the best things in the world to be were young and strong and fast. To play a great game of high school basketball-it was something I myself had never done, but I could tell-made you know what it was to be alive. How much in an adult life can compare to that? Granted, there are margaritas, or there’s no homework, but there are also puffy white bagels under neon lights in the conference room, there’s waiting for the plumber, making small talk with your boring neighbor.

Continually upgrade your skills in your key result areas. Remember, however good you are today, your knowledge and skills are becoming obsolete at a rapid rate. As Pat Riley, the basketball coach, said, “Anytime you stop striving to get better, you’re bound to get worse.

Now for the interesting question: If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still succeed? For example, if you were a basketball coach and you ignored your goal to win a championship and focused only on what your team does at practice each day, would you still get results? I think you would.

Don’t worry about losing. Think about winning.” – Mike Krzyzewski, 5-Time National Champion Basketball Coach

Teenage boys fall in love with girls who have blond hair and blue eyes. Basketball coaches fall in love with players who have a cerebral court sense and a great jump shot.

John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren’t a failure until you start to blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you deny them. When

You know how when you step on court your coach is like "go go go!"? And all throughout you just keep telling yourself to hit harder and harder and keep at it? You know how much you treasure those five-minute timeouts? You know how good you feel at the end of a session? You know how you're glad you're tired? No pills, no shots, just plain energy. I want to work like that. Whether I have to write ten thousand words or send five hundred emails, brainstorm for hours at a time, I want to have that energy. To keep fighting. To know it's all worth it. Oh, yeah. That's my perfect day.

When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur. When you improve conditioning a little each day, eventually you have a big improvement in conditioning. Not tomorrow, not the next day, but eventually a big gain is made. Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.” —John Wooden, one of the most successful coaches in the history of college basketball

guy raised his hand and asked if I had any advice when it came to “coaching women.” I remember leveling him with a death ray stare and then relaxing and curling up the corner of my mouth and saying, “Don’t worry about coaching ‘women.’ Just go home and coach ‘basketball.’ 

So Miss Curdy said I had to be punished. She gave me a choice of punishments. One: I could come into the gym after school every day and inflate all the basketballs — by mouth — until my head exploded. Or two: I could coach the first-grade soccer team. I chose number two. The wrong choice.

I tried to teach them [his sons] that about the importance of self-discipline, and that the culture of yes is built on a foundation of no.

We looked like a team at both ends of the court.

How does a person show respect for anything? He gives it time.

My hunger is not for success, it is for excellence. Because when you attain excellence, success just naturally follows.

Duke University’s legendary basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, or Coach K as he’s often called, famously came up with the dictum, widely practiced in sports, of “next play.” If you miss a shot in basketball, swing and miss in baseball, or throw an interception in football, you should quickly reset your mind and keep going. Focus on the task at hand rather than on what just happened.

Covering politics like sports has created a self-reinforcing incentive structure that is not dissimilar to the one the ESPN’S SportsCenter has on the fundamentals of basketball. There is a long-running concern from basketball purists that the fundamentals of the game – passing, defense, and footwork – are eroding. The theory goes that players want to be like the stars they see on SportsCenter. You don’t get on SportsCenter by doing the nitty-gritty work of winning basketball games. The more extreme the play, the more dramatic the showboating and celebrating, the more likely to be a feature in a coveted highlight segment. The reward system benefits the opposite behavior most basketball coaches would like to see in their players. This is the SportsCenter effect.

All great athletes essentially come to a fork in the road where they have to change their approach to succeed. It's a sign of intelligence and character. My college coach, Jack Hartman, made me play only defense for a full year in practice when I became academically ineligible for my junior year at Southern Illinois. Embarrassed, I thought at first about arguing with Coach Hartman over what I felt was a tremendous slight. But instead I started lifting weights and working so hard on my defense that my teammates hated to see me match up against them in practice. That was the turning point of my life, on and off the court.

Coach McConaughy grabbed the whistle swinging from a chain around his neck and blew it. “Seats, team!” Coach considered teaching tenthgrade biology a side assignment to his job as varsity basketball coach, and we all knew it. “It may not have occurred to you kids that sex is more than a fifteenminute trip to the backseat of a car. It’s science. And what is science?” “Boring,” some kid in the back of the room called out. “The only class I’m failing,” said another.

In 1960, I met a college basketball coach on the court and asked him for his best, niftiest pointer. He took the ball, walked under the basket, and shot an easy lay-up. "See that shot?" he said gruffly. "Ninety-nine percent of all basketball games are won with that shot. Don't miss it." And he walked away. I felt cheated that day, but 20 years later, I realized it was the best sales lesson I ever got. Concentrate on the fundamentals; ninety-nine percent of all sales are achieved that way.

Now, granted, Howard doesn't fit the conventional psychological profile of a rebounder - that of the no-nonsense, utilitarian "dirty work" specialist. Rather, this is a guy who sings Beyoncé at the free throw line, who quotes not Scarface but Finding Nemo, whose idea of humor is ordering 10 pizzas to be delivered to another player's hotel room, or knocking on teammates' doors and sprinting off down the hall, giggling. He goofs around during practice, during press conferences and during team shootarounds, for which Magic coach Stan Van Gundy has had to institute a no-flatulence rule because, as teammate Rashard Lewis says, "Dwight really likes to cut the cheese.

like the culture developed by Coach Steve Kerr for my beloved Golden State Warriors. Even though he helms a team, Steve believes that having good people is more important that just having good basketball players; he understands that players come and go, but the ethos on the court gets passed down from one game and one season to another. The best teams play together like a family who trust one another to have their back.

Cousy quickly learned that the pressure to win as a player as opposed to the pressure to win as a coach was vastly different. The pressure to win as a coach was filled with conflicting demands, to be honest with your players while being honest with the fans, management, and the games’ governing body. Success as a coach had a lot to do with relationships and keeping everybody happy and to do that which sometimes caused you to compromise your values.

If you talk to these extraordinary people, you find that they all understand this at one level or another. They may be unfamiliar with the concept of cognitive adaptability, but they seldom buy into the idea that they have reached the peak of their fields because they were the lucky winners of some genetic lottery. They know what is required to develop the extraordinary skills that they possess because they have experienced it firsthand. One of my favorite testimonies on this topic came from Ray Allen, a ten-time All-Star in the National Basketball Association and the greatest three-point shooter in the history of that league. Some years back, ESPN columnist Jackie MacMullan wrote an article about Allen as he was approaching his record for most three-point shots made. In talking with Allen for that story, MacMullan mentioned that another basketball commentator had said that Allen was born with a shooting touch—in other words, an innate gift for three-pointers. Allen did not agree. “I’ve argued this with a lot of people in my life,” he told MacMullan. “When people say God blessed me with a beautiful jump shot, it really pisses me off. I tell those people, ‘Don’t undermine the work I’ve put in every day.’ Not some days. Every day. Ask anyone who has been on a team with me who shoots the most. Go back to Seattle and Milwaukee, and ask them. The answer is me.” And, indeed, as MacMullan noted, if you talk to Allen’s high school basketball coach you will find that Allen’s jump shot was not noticeably better than his teammates’ jump shots back then; in fact, it was poor. But Allen took control, and over time, with hard work and dedication, he transformed his jump shot into one so graceful and natural that people assumed he was born with it. He took advantage of his gift—his real gift.   ABOUT

The best nicknames that I have ever come across: -Dai Young (ex-Wales rugby prop, current coach of Wasps) –‘Only the Good’. -Billy Twelvetrees (England rugby centre) –‘36'. - Martin Offiah (ex-rugby league legend)–‘Chariots’ - Nia Wales (ex-work colleague) –‘Chester’ - Fitz Hall (QPR defender) –‘One size’ -David Jones (lower league rugby player who had half an ear bitten off) –‘Dai 18 months’ - The New Zealand junior rugby team -the small blacks -The New Zealand basketball team -the tall blacks

By the way,” Arabella said, “you might get a call from school. I forgot to mention it before.” Mother paused. “Why?” “Well, we were playing basketball and I guess I pulled on Diego’s jersey. I don’t even remember doing it. And Valerie decided it would be a good idea to snitch on me. I mean, I saw her walk over to the coach and pull on his sleeve like she was five or something. I even asked Diego if he cared, and he said he didn’t even notice. It’s a sport! I was into it.” “Aha,” Mother said. “Get to the call-from-school part.” “I told her that snitches get stitches. And Coach said that I made a terrorist threat.” “That’s stupid,” Lina said, pushing back her dark hair. “It’s not a threat, it’s just a thing people say.” “Snitches do get stitches.” Bern shrugged. “Your school is stupid,” Grandma Frida said. “So he said I had to apologize and I refused, since she snitched on me, so I got sent to the office. I’m not in trouble, but they want to move me to third-period PE now.” Well, it could’ve been worse. At least she didn’t hurt anybody.

So,” Will begins, “do you play ball as well as you run?” I laugh a little. I can’t help it. He’s sweet and disarming and my nerves are racing. “Not even close.” The conversation goes no further as we move up in our lines. Catherine looks over her shoulder at me, her wide sea eyes assessing. Like she can’t quite figure me out. My smile fades and I look away. She can never figure me out. I can never let her. Never let anyone here. She faces me with her arms crossed. “You make friends fast. Since freshman year, I’ve spoken to like . . .” She paused and looks upward as though mentally counting. “Three, no—four people. And you’re number four.” I shrug. “He’s just a guy.” Catherine squares up at the free-throw line, dribbles a few times, and shoots. The ball swished cleanly through the net. She catches it and tosses it back to me. I try copying her moves, but my ball flies low, glides beneath the backboard. I head to the end of the line again. Will’s already waiting it half-court, letting others go before him. My face warms at his obvious stall. “You weren’t kidding,” he teases over the thunder of basketballs. “Did you make it?” I ask, wishing I had looked while he shot. “Yeah.” “Of course,” I mock. He lets another kid go before him. I do the same. Catherine is several ahead of me now. His gaze scans me, sweeping over my face and hair with deep intensity, like he’s memorizing my features. “Yeah, well. I can’t run like you.” I move up in line, but when I sneak a look behind me, he’s looking back, too. “Wow,” Catherine murmurs in her smoky low voice as she falls into line beside me. “I never knew it happened like that.” I snap my gaze to her. “What?” “You know. Romeo and Juliet stuff. Love at first sight and all that.” “It’s not like that,” I say quickly. “You could have fooled me.” We’re up again. Catherine takes her shot. It swishes cleanly through the hoop. When I shoot, the ball bounces hard off the backboard and flies wildly through the air, knocking the coach in the head. I slap a hand over my mouth. The coach barely catches herself from falling. Several students laugh. She glares at me and readjusts her cap. With a small wave of apology, I head back to the end of the line. Will’s there, fighting laughter. “Nice,” he says. “Glad I’m downcourt of you.” I cross my arms and resist smiling, resist letting myself feel good around him. But he makes it hard. I want to smile. I want to like him, to be around him, to know him. “Happy to amuse you.” His smile slips then, and he’s looking at me with that strange intensity again. Only I understand. I know why. He must remember . . . must recognize me on some level even though he can’t understand it. “You want to go out?” he asks suddenly. I blink. “As in a date?” “Yes. That’s what a guy usually means when he asks that question.

Maybe an example Joseph gave us would make this clearer. It had to do with a study that was done with two comparable basketball teams. Team A was coached with an emphasis on preventing mistakes on the court. Day after day, they reviewed videos that focused on their errors. Those mistakes got grooved in their brains. By contrast, Team B was coached with an emphasis on building on their successes. Day after day, they reviewed videos that focused on their most successful plays. So Team B’s successes got grooved in their brains. “To put it simply, Team A focused on what was wrong. Team B focused on what was right. I’m sure you can guess which team had the greatest improvement by the end of the season.

Baseball may be called the national pastime, but it survives on the sentimentality of middle-age men who wistfully dream of playing catch with their fathers and sons. Football, with its dull stoppages, lost its military-industrial relevance with the end of the Cold War, and has become as tired and predictable in performance as it is in political metaphor. The professional game floats on an ocean of gambling, the players' steroid-laced bodies having outgrown their muscular and skeletal carriages. Biceps rip from their moorings, ankles break on simple pivots. Achilles' tendons shrivel like slugs doused with salt. Soccer and basketball are the only mainstream sports that truly plug into the modem-pulse of a dot-com society. Soccer is perfectly suited for a country of the hamster-treadmill pace, the remote-control zap and the national attention deficit—two 45-minute halves, the clock never stops, no commercial interruptions, the final whistle blows in less than two hours. It is a fluid game of systemized chaos that, no matter how tightly scripted by coaches, cannot be regulated any more than information can be truly controlled on the Internet.

Cohen continued to struggle with his own well-being. Even though he had achieved his life’s dream of running his own firm, he was still unhappy, and he had become dependent on a psychiatrist named Ari Kiev to help him manage his moods. In addition to treating depression, Kiev’s other area of expertise was success and how to achieve it. He had worked as a psychiatrist and coach with Olympic basketball players and rowers trying to improve their performance and overcome their fear of failure. His background building athletic champions appealed to Cohen’s unrelenting need to dominate in every transaction he entered into, and he started asking Kiev to spend entire days at SAC’s offices, tending to his staff. Kiev was tall, with a bushy mustache and a portly midsection, and he would often appear silently at a trader’s side and ask him how he was feeling. Sometimes the trader would be so startled to see Kiev there he’d practically jump out of his seat. Cohen asked Kiev to give motivational speeches to his employees, to help them get over their anxieties about losing money. Basically, Kiev was there to teach them to be ruthless. Once a week, after the market closed, Cohen’s traders would gather in a conference room and Kiev would lead them through group therapy sessions focused on how to make them more comfortable with risk. Kiev had them talk about their trades and try to understand why some had gone well and others hadn’t. “Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it,” was how one skeptical staff member remembered Kiev being pitched to them. Kiev’s work with Olympians had led him to believe that the thing that blocked most people was fear. You might have two investors with the same amount of money: One was prepared to buy 250,000 shares of a stock they liked, while the other wasn’t. Why? Kiev believed that the reluctance was a form of anxiety—and that it could be overcome with proper treatment. Kiev would ask the traders to close their eyes and visualize themselves making trades and generating profits. “Surrendering to the moment” and “speaking the truth” were some of his favorite phrases. “Why weren’t you bigger in the trades that worked? What did you do right?” he’d ask. “Being preoccupied with not losing interferes with winning,” he would say. “Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win.” Many of the traders hated the group therapy sessions. Some considered Kiev a fraud. “Ari was very aggressive,” said one. “He liked money.” Patricia, Cohen’s first wife, was suspicious of Kiev’s motives and believed that he was using his sessions with Cohen to find stock tips. From Kiev’s perspective, he found the perfect client in Cohen, a patient with unlimited resources who could pay enormous fees and whose reputation as one of the best traders on Wall Street could help Kiev realize his own goal of becoming a bestselling author. Being able to say that you were the

Chapter One Vivek Ranadivé “IT WAS REALLY RANDOM. I MEAN, MY FATHER HAD NEVER PLAYED BASKETBALL BEFORE.” 1. When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and he would persuade the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense. The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans play basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would pass the ball in from the sidelines and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A regulation basketball court is ninety-four feet long. Most of the time, a team would defend only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally teams played a full-court press—that is, they contested their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they did it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, Ranadivé thought, and that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that they were so good at? Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Ranadivé lives in Menlo Park, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. His team was made up of, as Ranadivé put it, “little blond girls.” These were the daughters of nerds and computer programmers. They worked on science projects and read long and complicated books and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé had come to America as a seventeen-year-old with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press—every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.” 2. Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. Let’s say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in population and armed might

You might expect that if you spent such an extended period in twelve different households, what you would gather is twelve different ideas about how to raise children: there would be the strict parents and the lax parents and the hyperinvolved parents and the mellow parents and on and on. What Lareau found, however, is something much different. There were only two parenting “philosophies,” and they divided almost perfectly along class lines. The wealthier parents raised their kids one way, and the poorer parents raised their kids another way. The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children’s free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. One of the well-off children Lareau followed played on a baseball team, two soccer teams, a swim team, and a basketball team in the summer, as well as playing in an orchestra and taking piano lessons. That kind of intensive scheduling was almost entirely absent from the lives of the poor children. Play for them wasn’t soccer practice twice a week. It was making up games outside with their siblings and other kids in the neighborhood. What a child did was considered by his or her parents as something separate from the adult world and not particularly consequential. One girl from a working-class family—Katie Brindle—sang in a choir after school. But she signed up for it herself and walked to choir practice on her own. Lareau writes: What Mrs. Brindle doesn’t do that is routine for middle-class mothers is view her daughter’s interest in singing as a signal to look for other ways to help her develop that interest into a formal talent. Similarly Mrs. Brindle does not discuss Katie’s interest in drama or express regret that she cannot afford to cultivate her daughter’s talent. Instead she frames Katie’s skills and interests as character traits—singing and acting are part of what makes Katie “Katie.” She sees the shows her daughter puts on as “cute” and as a way for Katie to “get attention.

Are you going to show integrity only when someone is watching you—or are you going to show it all the time?

Reputation is not, in fact, the most important thing. As famed UCLA basketball coach John Wooden once explained: “Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

Consequently the Harney High athletic department decided to focus on another sport, basketball. The first order of business was to build a gymnasium with a basketball court and some portable bleachers. The second order of business was to send a cautious delegation of coaches and teachers into the black neighborhood to recruit some good basketball players. A few old crackers in Harney huffed and swore about having to watch a bunch of skinny spooks tear up and down the court, and about how it wasn't fair to the good Christian white kids, but then it was pointed out that the good Christian white kids were mostly slow and fat and couldn't make a lay-up from a trampoline.

When you’re a coach or athlete and you win a championship, you realize that the championship was really a work-in-progress. What you went through during the pre-season, in the regular-season and then during the post-season enabled you to win a title. I treated the stages of my cancer treatment as the phases of a championship season, and it kept me on track to accomplishing my ultimate goal.

In my case, the stats that were being quoted to me were not about me personally. I’m not a stat, I’m a person. I considered myself a ‘stat breaker.

The idea of going back to basketball drills made her stomach tighten, but she stood up on her tiptoes and leaned into Jay, whispering against his cheek. "I got your note last night. Would've been better if I'd have found you in my bed instead." Jay groaned and grabbed her by the shoulders. There was the hint of accusation buried behind his breathy chuckle as he set her away from him. "You're playing with fire, Vi. You shouldn't tease me at school. Besides, I think if I hid in your room, your father—check that, your mother—would skin me alive." Violet heard the coach shouting her name, and she knew she'd be getting a demerit for slacking off. But she didn't care. She flashed him her most wolfish smile. "Next time, you should totally take that chance. It could've been fun," she promised before sauntering away.

Sam Pickett, English teacher and former basketball coach at Willow Creek High School, scrounged for sleep in his tangled bed. He was thirty-six years old and he hadn’t a clue as to who he was or what his life was about. He bore a wound he couldn’t heal. He

That’s why her friend Kaylin got raped by the assistant basketball coach and had to leave school last year. He, of course, is now the head coach. Because there wasn’t any evidence, and when it came down to Kaylin’s word versus everyone else, Kaylin lost. Good basketball coaches are hard to find.

What to do with a mistake: recognize it, admit it, learn from it, forget it.” – Dean Smith, 2-Time National Champion Basketball Coach

my old coach used to say that forty percent of success in basketball is desire and another forty percent is confidence.

Dooney and Deacon Mills shuffle down the steps above us. Some people claim the basketball players at our school have an arrogant strut, but Ben says they're all walking that slowly because they're in pain. Coach Sanders kills them with squats in the weight room.

I feel what I feel when I feel it, and then express it. --Dawn Staley, Head Women's Basketball Coach, University of South Carolina.

UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said, “Things turn out the best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.

You gain more respect as a leader when you admit you don’t have all the answers,” says Steve Kerr, the coach of the championship Golden State Warriors basketball team. “It can actually add to your credibility.

Fellas, don’t put yourself in a position where you have to cheat. That’s the worst thing you can do as a Duke basketball player. If it happens, you’re going to be punished severely by the school—and I’ll support that punishment, whatever it is. But we should never get to that point. If you just say to me, ‘I’m stuck or I’m in trouble,’ then we’ll work on it together. We’ll be there to help you. But you also have to learn to help yourself.

We’re conditioned to seek only gain, to be happy, and to try to satisfy all our desires, he (Jakusho Kwong) explains. But even though we may understand on some level that loss is a catalyst for growth, most people still believe it to be the opposite of gain and to be avoided at all costs. If I’ve learned anything in my years of practicing Zen and coaching basketball, it’s that what we resist persists.

We’re conditioned to seek only gain, to be happy, and to try to satisfy all our desires, he (Jakusho Kwong) explains. But even though we may understand on some level that loss is a catalyst for growth, most people still believe it to be the opposite of gain and to be avoided at all costs. If I’ve learned anything in my years of practicing Zen and coaching basketball, it’s that what we resist persists.

Zen teacher Jakusho Kwong suggests becoming “an active participant in loss.” We’re conditioned to seek only gain, to be happy, and to try to satisfy all our desires, he explains. But even though we may understand on some level that loss is a catalyst for growth, most people still believe it to be the opposite of gain and to be avoided at all costs. If I’ve learned anything in my years of practicing Zen and coaching basketball, it’s that what we resist persists.

I am a high school biology teacher who has also taken on coaching girls’ field hockey and basketball as of late to earn more money. I know almost nothing about field hockey or basketball.

conversation that included the news that the Bruins had just lost the freshman coach. Wooden offered Cunningham the job before the end of the meal. A high school junior varsity coach in Ohio tried to land what had suddenly become an unusually attractive role, in the program coming off back-to-back national championships, on the team

When you leave it to chance, then all of a sudden you don’t have any more luck. —Basketball coach Pat Riley

Good afternoon, Coach.” “Today, we are going to learn how to put on our sneakers and socks correctly.” The greatest first-year class in college basketball history looked around and waited for the punch line. Wooden, never one to joke about something as serious as footwear details, bent down and removed his shoes and

his point, you’re likely to get wrinkles. Wrinkles cause blisters. Blisters force players to the sideline. Players on the sideline result in losses. Don’t just tug, he directed. Be snug. Alcindor asserted himself on the first day under assistant coach Gary Cunningham, running the freshman squad, with a display that instantly convinced Wooden his next

had accidentally walked into history as the first college coach of the player on a path to change amateur sports forever. On the 1965 morning that changed everything, Cunningham was getting breakfast in the Student Union when he spotted his former coach eating alone at a table. He asked to sit with Wooden and ended up in a

The college basketball coach Shaka Smart, upon moving from coaching at Texas to Marquette, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was asked if he was a cold-weather or warm-weather guy. “I’m a dress-for-the-weather guy,” he said.

As a basketball coach, I love to watch the player who rotates to provide defensive help, sets the proper angled screen to free up the three-point shooter, and blocks out the other team’s leading rebounder. Unfortunately, the majority of fans watching the game (and everybody reading the box score in the paper) miss these crucial elements in the win. Statistics just can’t properly measure the impact a player has on the game.

I firmly believe in my heart that the U.S. must lead women's soccer and create change on the field and socially.' But, referring to American coaches, he said, 'The whole men's side doesn't respect the women's game,' believing it to be on a level of teenage boys. 'There may be some jealousy,' he said, adding that the men's national team was competing against 200 other countries, most with superior soccer cultures, while the American women were competing 'against five other countries.' This was a frequently made, but entirely specious, argument against the American women. First of all, only seven countries have ever won a men's World Cup, and only 11 have ever reached the finals in 70 years of competition. The power in the men's game is just as concentrated as it is in the women's game. A lack of competition was used to diminish the achievements of the American women, but of course it was a double standard. No one complained about the weak tournament fields when UCLA began its basketball dynasty or when the San Francisco 49ers won a handful of Super Bowls after playing against execrable regular-season competition in the NFC West division.

Coach John Wooden20, one of the best basketball coaches and teachers of all time. To be effective teachers, he tells us “we have not taught students, until they have learned.” We shouldn’t judge our effectiveness by how much we teach, what we teach, and how we teach. Rather, we make a positive judgment if we’ve approached students every day knowing that our success depends on how well students learn.

We need to enter classrooms each day with one purpose in mind that comes from Coach John Wooden20, one of the best basketball coaches and teachers of all time. To be effective teachers, he tells us “we have not taught students, until they have learned.” We shouldn’t judge our effectiveness by how much we teach, what we teach, and how we teach. Rather, we make a positive judgment if we’ve approached students every day knowing that our success depends on how well students learn. I suggest that applying the Student

Hall of fame college basketball coach John Wooden said, “A leader who is through learning is through. And so is the team such a leader leads. It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.

Famed basketball coach Phil Jackson, a meditator himself, arranged to have his players—first the Chicago Bulls, and then the L.A. Lakers—learn meditation as a way to improve their focus and teamwork. Jackson finds that mindfulness assists players in paying attention to what’s happening on the court moment by moment. Such precise training in attention has paid off during tense playoffs; Jackson has led more teams to championships than any coach in NBA history. Meditation

Jimmy Valvano was a legendary college basketball coach and broadcaster. In June of 1992, he was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. In March of the following year, Jimmy gave a powerful speech at the first ever ESPY awards, presented by ESPN. His message was just as simple as it was moving: “Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up.” Eight weeks later, he passed away. In his speech, he also said this:   To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears―could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special.   And finally, this:   Cancer can take away all of my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on forever.   There is no other reason to be alive than to enjoy it. So laugh, think, cry. Work hard. Celebrate your victories. Embrace the day. And don’t ever give up.

Can we pause the bickering for more important matters, please? Look. There’s a time-out on the court.” Which meant more Coach Romano camera time. The three women focused on the TV. “OMG,” Sarah said, the slang usage obviously for Nic’s benefit. On the screen, the man in question had slipped off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, and he was holding a basketball in a one-handed grip. “Look at the size of those hands.” Sage fanned her face. “Think of what he could do with them.” “At the risk of sounding crude, this is the first time in my life my boobs ever wished they were a basketball,” Nic observed. Out in the hallway, something heavy thumped to the floor. Nic recognized the voice that muttered the epithet that immediately followed. Gabe Callahan. She glanced in the wall mirror and smoothed her flyaway hair, catching Sarah’s knowing smirk as she did so. She stuck out her tongue at her best friend and sent up a little prayer that his hearing wasn’t all that sharp. “Gabe?” Sarah called out. “Everything all right?” Footsteps approached and he came into sight, pausing in the doorway. He wore a blue-and-gray plaid flannel shirt tucked into a snug pair of faded Levi’s. He had a stained and scruffy pair of lined leather work gloves tucked into a back pocket of his jeans, and his steel-toed boots showed plenty of wear. He might be stopping for dinner at the Bristlecone most nights these days, but he still hadn’t managed to find his way to the barbershop. His hair brushed his shoulders now, curling slightly on the ends. And dang it, her fingers itched to play with those thick silken strands. Until he turned a wickedly amused gaze her way and dashed her hopes about his hearing. “Sorry about the noise. That piece of lumber slipped right out of my hands. You know …” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I have to tell you that, while men are often accused of thinking with body parts other than their brains, this is the first time I’ve ever heard women admit they have parts that think for themselves, too.” He heard, all right. Nic closed her eyes and flushed with embarrassment. They not only think for themselves, they blush. Sage saved her by laughing. “You like basketball, Gabe?” “Not the same way you ladies do, apparently.

I was hoping to talk to you, Nic.” Oh? “You have to do something about that dog.” Oh. “Tiger?” “What other dog roams this town at will and always manages to get in my way? This must be the last town in America not to have leash laws on the books.” “Actually, I agree with you about that. It’s not safe for the animals, and it’s something Eternity Springs will need to address once we have more visitors to town. What did he do now?” “I had a breakfast meeting at the Mocha Moose this morning. He was sitting at the door when I left, and he followed me back here. He’s been hanging around all day. You were supposed to find a home for him. That was the deal, was it not?” “Yes, and I’m still trying.” She licked her lips, then offered a smile just shy of sheepish. “Dale Parker has agreed to consider taking him.” Gabe jerked his stare away from her mouth as he asked, “So why is he underfoot every time I turn around?” “I explained that to you before. He’s adopted you.” “He’s a dog. It’s not his choice!” “Oh, for crying out loud,” Sage said. “Give it up, Callahan. I saw you slip that dog a hunk of your sandwich earlier. Way to chase him away.” Gabe didn’t bother defending himself, but watched Nic for a long minute before asking, “And where might I find Dale Parker?” “He owns the Fill-U-Up.” “That grumpy old son of a gun? No wonder the mutt has taken to hiding out with me. Is he the best you could do?” She watched it register on his face the moment he realized the mistake. Nic decided to take pity on him, mostly because her embarrassment lingered and she needed distance. “Where’s Tiger now?” “Here, at the foot of the stairs.” “He can stay with us.” She lifted her voice and called, “Tiger? Here, boy. C’mere, boy.” Four paws’ worth of nails clicked against the wooden floor. The boxer paused in the doorway and rubbed up against Gabe’s legs. “Awww,” Sage crooned as Sarah said, “He’s so cute. Gabe is right. He’s too sweet to hang with Dale Parker.” Nic dropped her hand and wiggled her fingers. Reluctantly the boxer approached. “You willing to take him home, Sarah?” “I can’t. Daisy and Duke are all I can handle. You know that.” She referred to the three-year-old golden retrievers who refused to leave the puppy stage behind. Nic scratched the boxer behind the ears and said, “What about you, big guy? Wanna watch the basketball game with us?” When the boxer climbed up on her knees and licked her face, she smiled and looped a finger through his leather collar. “We’ve got him. Sorry for the trouble, Callahan.” Gabe nodded, then glanced at the television and fired a parting shot. “You do know that Coach Romano has a twin brother who coaches at Southern Cal, don’t you?” Seated

No, I wasn’t. But I saw the video of what happened between Tripp and that girl.” Tripp’s friend does a double-take. “That’s right. Video. What I saw and heard was clear, and it was completely unacceptable. Not just for anyone who wants to be on my team, but anybody. Any male. Any human being. You’re on my team, I expect you to get your ass in gear when you see something like that and stop it. Not sit back and watch it or laugh about it or go online and spew a bunch of shit about the girl. Be a man. Do the right thing. Stuff like this makes us all look bad and makes women fear us all. You want a female to like you, so that maybe she’ll be your girlfriend? It won’t happen if she’s afraid of you.” Coach says he considered canceling our entire basketball season, which brings gasps from the team, but he’s decided to give us one more chance. We’ll forfeit our first three home games. If he finds out about anybody doing anything else like this, he’s off the team. No more chances. No one who treats girls this way will play for him.

Pat Riley, the basketball coach said, "If you're not getting better, you're getting worse.

Coaching is about taking care of the people you call players. It’s a people business, not just a basketball game business.

The greatest coach in basketball history began his professional career coaching football players at basketball.

Durant had a 42 point game to finish a spectacular rookie season where he averaged 20.3 points, 4.4 rebounds and 2.4 assists. He was the first rookie to average more than 20 points in a game since Carmelo Anthony (21) and LeBron James (20.9). He also became the first rookie to lead his team in scoring since Emeka Okafor and Josh Childress did it in 2004-05. As Durant won these accolades, he was knocked to his knees all year long. Durant was often criticized for flopping too much, but the truth was that he was not strong enough to stay on his feet to defend his heftier opponents. There were rumors that he couldn't even bench press 185 pounds because all he ate was chicken and candies. He was called "Starvin" and "String Bean" by his buddies because of his reed-thin 185 pound frame. Durant was so thin that Sonics Coach P.J. Carlisimo played him as a 6-9 guard at that time. Durant was also labeled as "chucker" because he took 1,366 shots from the field and made just 43%. He was just taking orders from Carlisimo, who

I was very demanding, but the role of a head coach is that of a demanding teacher. Those of you who are reading this book can probably all look back on a tough teacher you had, and if you’re lucky you think of him or her with affection. Demands must be coupled with true caring for the students. A demanding teacher is quick to praise action that deserves praise, but will criticize the act, not the person. The coach’s job is to be part servant in helping the player reach his goals. Certainly, coaching was not a matter of manipulating people to do what would help us. I never did like the term handle people, which to me meant conning people. The life insurance salesman who genuinely believes someone needs life insurance is different from the one who tries to manipulate or con them into buying something they do not need. I believed a demanding teacher should treat each player as an important part of the team, which, of course, he is. The least skilled player received the same attention from me as the best player. When their careers drew to a close, I always had what I called an “exit meeting” with each young man, to discuss what his goals had been and what they were for the future. To me, the players got the wins, and I got the losses. Caring for one another and building relationships should be the most important goal, no matter what vocation you are in.

A healthy character means developing a positive outlook on life no matter what serious situation you’re facing. Well-respected basketball coach John Wooden said, “Be more concerned about your character than your reputation. Your reputation is how others perceive you; your character is who you really are.” Character means having a healthy, positive attitude in the wake of job loss or any life challenge. Clement Stone said, “There is little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference. The little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative.” Thomas Jefferson said, “Nothing can stop a person with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; but nothing on earth can help the person with the wrong mental attitude.

George Mumford, a Newton-based mindfulness teacher, one such moment took place in 1993, at the Omega Institute, a holistic learning center in Rhinebeck, New York. The center was hosting a retreat devoted to mindfulness meditation, the clear-your-head habit in which participants sit quietly and focus on their breathing. Leading the session: meditation megastar Jon Kabat-Zinn. Originally trained as a molecular biologist at MIT, Kabat-Zinn had gone on to revolutionize the meditation world in the 1970s by creating a more secularized version of the practice, one focused less on Buddhism and more on stress reduction and other health benefits. After dinner one night, Kabat-Zinn was giving a talk about his work, clicking through a slide show to give the audience something to look at. At one point he displayed a slide of Mumford. Mumford had been a star high school basketball player who’d subsequently hit hard times as a heroin addict, Kabat-Zinn explained. By the early 1980s, however, he’d embraced meditation and gotten sober. Now Mumford taught meditation to prison inmates and other unlikely students. Kabat-Zinn explained how they were able to relate to Mumford because of his tough upbringing, his openness about his addiction — and because, like many inmates, he’s African-American. Kabat-Zinn’s description of Mumford didn’t seem to affect most Omega visitors, but one participant immediately took notice: June Jackson, whose husband had just coached the Chicago Bulls to their third consecutive NBA championship. Phil Jackson had spent years studying Buddhism and Native American spirituality and was a devoted meditator. Yet his efforts to get Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and their teammates to embrace mindfulness was meeting with only limited success. “June took one look at George and said, ‘He could totally connect with Phil’s players,’ ’’ Kabat-Zinn recalls. So he provided an introduction. Soon Mumford was in Chicago, gathering some of the world’s most famous athletes in a darkened room and telling them to focus on their breathing. Mumford spent the next five years working with the Bulls, frequently sitting behind the bench, as they won three more championships. In 1999 Mumford followed Phil Jackson to the Los Angeles Lakers, where he helped turn Kobe Bryant into an outspoken adherent of meditation. Last year, as Jackson began rebuilding the moribund New York Knicks as president, Mumford signed on for a third tour of duty. He won’t speak about the specific work he’s doing in New York, but it surely involves helping a new team adjust to Jackson’s sensibilities, his controversial triangle offense, and the particular stress that comes with compiling the worst record in the NBA. Late one April afternoon just as the NBA playoffs are beginning, Mumford is sitting at a table in O’Hara’s, a Newton pub. Sober for more than 30 years, he sips Perrier. It’s Marathon Monday, and as police begin allowing traffic back onto Commonwealth Avenue, early finishers surround us, un-showered and drinking beer. No one recognizes Mumford, but that’s hardly unusual. While most NBA fans are aware that Jackson is serious about meditation — his nickname is the Zen Master — few outside his locker rooms can name the consultant he employs. And Mumford hasn’t done much to change that. He has no office and does no marketing, and his recently launched website, mindfulathlete.org, is mired deep in search-engine results. Mumford has worked with teams that have won six championships, but, one friend jokes, he remains the world’s most famous completely unknown meditation teacher. That may soon change. This month, Mumford published his first book, The Mindful Athlete, which is part memoir and part instruction guide, and he has agreed to give a series of talks and book signings

UCLA basketball coach John Wooden told players who scored to give a smile, wink, or nod to the player who gave them a good pass. “What if he’s not looking?” asked a team member. Wooden replied, “I guarantee he’ll look.” Everyone values encouragement and looks for it.

It’s what you learn after you know it all that really matters. —JOHN WOODEN, LEGENDARY BASKETBALL COACH

The great dividend is not necessarily outscoring an opponent. The guaranteed dividend is the complete peace of mind gained in knowing you did everything within your power, physically, mentally, and emotionally, to bring forth your full potential." – John Wooden, legendary UCLA basketball coach

I liken my marriage in my twenties to the ill-chosen shot by a basketball player, done without any thought from an impossible angle and motivated by a mix of pure adrenaline and ego, which his coach watches with complete despair as he involuntarily shouts “nooooo.

This Sportybella Girls Basketball Jewelry Set is a fun way to express your love of Basketball. This makes a perfect gift for Basketball Players, Basketball Teams & Basketball Coaches.

with exuberance and excitement. You should live the journey. You should live it right. You should live it together. You should live it shared. You should try to make one another better. You should get on one another if somebody’s not doing their part. You should hug one another when they are. You should be disappointed in a loss and exhilarated in a win. It’s all about the journey. It should be honest and it should be real. It’s not about winning games or what other people’s expectations of us may be. We’re not going to fall into the traps that so many people fall into. That’s not why we’re going to play. We’re going to play for innocence. I’m ready. There are no excuses. Let’s go!

The first thing I would show players at our initial day of training was how to take a little extra time putting on their shoes and socks properly. The most important part of your equipment is your shoes and socks. You play on a hard floor. So you must have shoes that fit right. And you must not permit your socks to have wrinkles around the little toe—where you generally get blisters—or around the heels. I showed my players how I wanted them to do it. Hold up the sock, work it around the little toe area and the heel area so that there are no wrinkles. Smooth it out good. Then hold the sock up while you put the shoe on. And the shoe must be spread apart—not just pulled on the top laces. You tighten it up snugly by each eyelet. Then you tie it. And then you double-tie it so it won’t come undone—because I don’t want shoes coming untied during practice, or during the game. I don’t want that to happen. That’s just a little detail that coaches must take advantage of, because it’s the little details that make the big things come about. The sentiments above are John Wooden’s, the most successful coach in the history of college basketball.

As I told my players a hundred times, it doesn't matter where you come from, but where you're going; it doesn't matter where you start, but where you finish. And where we finished was at the NCAA championship game, the very first in women's basketball history.

Life might be unfair; you might be blindsided by bad luck or misfortune. Nobody knows better than a basketball coach that you might not reap the rewards of your hard work, and that you don't always get what you deserve. But with the support of other people, you get through it. We need one another, and if we stick together, we can get through anything.

I'm so glad that I didn't quit,' I told them. 'If I had, I would never have known what it was to coach you. I've never seen better evidence of the resilience of the human spirit. I've never coached a team that has accomplished so much in one year - ever. It seemed that there was no way for you to reach the levels you aspired to. But from you I've understood even more what it means to persevere in the face of adversity. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.' Championship or no championship, this had been the most rewarding year I'd ever had coaching basketball. The last few months had been a fairy tale. We were the team that had been written off by the world as nothings. There wasn't a single person in America who would have bet ten cents that we'd be the team to go to Cleveland. No one in the world would have thought that we'd be the ones looking up and seeing 'AND THEN THERE WERE TWO' on that JumboTron—and that included me. But nobody knows better than me—a coal miner's daughter from Edenborn, Pennsylvania, a patch with no stop light—that it's not where you start but where you finish that counts. We might have started the season with a forty-point loss on our own floor, but we ended it by playing at the highest level, as one of the two best teams in the nation.

I'd like you to come to Ohio, Tom. Would you consider being our basketball and maybe our track and field coach? Really?! Sounds great, but I've never lived in the Midwest. Snow and all... Tommie... It might be time for a change, my friend.

If we didn't have our first game tomorrow, I would go over to one of the classrooms in the charter school, get some construction paper, some scissors, markers, and we could make come Christmas decorations together. And then I could stick them up your asses.

Sean dribbled to the basket, leaping into the air and leaning into defenders, grimacing when no foul came. This would inspire Hurley to tell him at halftime, 'Why isn't there a call? Because no referee in the world is going to blow the whistle and bail out a fucking idiot who's up in the air for some unknown reason.

Research has also shown that basketball players who miss the first free throw shoot a higher percentage on the second free throw if they receive a high-five for support and encouragement. This phenomenon highlights the power of social touch in creating an environment of connection, security, and playfulness rather than one focused solely on survival.

We co-operators did our own office cleaning. There was no getting out of it. We had a roster. Everyone had to muck in about twice a month. Some argued that our time could be more profitably allocated and that an inexpensive contractor should do the cleaning work. Maybe so, but I always felt that the other benefits made the scheme worthwhile. There is nothing like an egalitarian donation of time and labor to enhance team spirit. I played basketball in high school. I did not get many minutes on the court, but the experience was very rewarding. My coach once said to me, “Lakesha Williams, you are a real team player,” and I have not forgotten how proud that made me.

In one Globetrotter’s skit, it involved Globetrotter’s Captain Meadowlark Lemon collapsing on the ground, and Wilt threw him up in the air several feet high and caught him like a baby. Lemon weighed 210 lbs. Lemon, and other people including Arnold Schwarzenegger, said that Wilt was the strongest athlete that ever lived. On March 9, 2000, his number 13 was retired by the Globetrotters. Wilt’s NBA Career Accomplishments On October 24, 1959 Wilt finally made his NBA debut. Wilt played for the then, “Philadelphia Warriors.” Wilt immediately became the league’s top earner making $30,000 topping Bob Cousy who was making $25,000. The $30,000 is equivalent to $263,000 in today’s currency as per the year 2019. In Wilt’s 1959-1960 season, which was his rookie year, his team made the playoffs. The Warriors beat the Syracuse Nationals then had to go on to play the Eastern Conference Champions, the Boston Celtics. Coach Red Auerbach strategized his forward Tom Heinsohn to commit fouls on Wilt. When the Warriors shot free throws, Heinsohn grabbed and pushed Wilt to stop him from getting back on defense, so quickly. Wilt was a prolific shot blocker, and this allowed Celtics to score quickly without Wilt protecting the basket. The Warriors lost the series 4 games to two after Tom Heinsohn got a last second tip in to seal the win of the series for the Celtics. As a rookie Wilt shocked Warriors' fans by saying he was thinking of retiring from basketball. He was tired of being double- and triple-teamed, and of teams fouling him very hard. Wilt was afraid that he would lose his temper one day which he did in the playoff series versus Boston. Wilt punched Heinsohn and injured his hand. Wilt played for The Philadelphia Warriors, who then relocated to San Francisco, The Philadelphia 76ers, and The Los Angeles Lakers. He won one title with the 76ers then one with the Lakers. First NBA game Wilt scored 43 points and snatched 28 rebounds. Grabbed his rookie career high of 43 rebounds in a win over the New York Knicks.