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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

But in real life, the good boys are all hiding the fact that they’re really bad boys, and no one believes it until it’s too late. 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.

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.

Cotton Fitzsimmons was a famous NBA basketball coach who was brilliant at motivating his teams. On one occasion when his team was playing the great Boston Celtics in a game they were not expected to win, Fitzsimmons hit on an idea that he thought would help motivate his players. His pre-game speech went something like this: “Gentlemen, when you go out there tonight, instead of remembering that we are in last place, pretend we are in first place; instead of being in a losing streak, pretend we are in a winning streak; instead of this being a regular game, pretend this is a playoff game!” With that, the team went onto the basketball court and were soundly beaten by the Boston Celtics. Coach Fitzsimmons was upset about the loss. But one of the players slapped him on the back and said, “Cheer up, Coach! Pretend we won!’”1

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.

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.

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!

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.

Andrej Oljaca is a highly trainable individual who listens well to instruction. A team player who gets along well with others, former employers have commented on how low maintenance as well as punctual he is. Andrej Oljaca is passionate about fitness and loves working out. He has also coached at a youth basketball camp.

If you’re always striving to achieve success that is defined by someone else, you’ll always be frustrated. Define your own success.

off of the backboard rang throughout the gym like a bell as it flew back onto the court. “Zero, zero,” the coach said as he walked back to the top of the key. One of the other players in the gym got the ball from mid court and passed it back to the coach. “Check up,” the coach said as he passed the ball back to Matt. After that, you can imagine how it went. The basketball coach beat Matt pretty easily, scoring basket after basket with ease. It was almost like Matt wasn’t even there. Just like I had predicted, the coach beat Matt soundly, and he did it without having to say a word. Now, don’t get me wrong, a lot of players with grit talk trash, and we’ll get to that in a minute, but they usually only do it with people they perceive as real competition. There are a lot of things that go with trash talking and I can guarantee that you probably don’t know them. Don’t worry, you will after you finish this book. The coach in this story knew that Matt wasn’t real competition, so he just beat him. The other players on the sidelines did all the trash-talking for him. Most of the time, players with grit won’t talk trash to

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.

How would you diagnose a patient who walks back and forth screaming at the top of his lungs one minute, then sits in a chair weeping uncontrollably the next?" A young man in the rear raised his hand and answered, "A basketball coach?

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.

In leadership, there are no words more important than trust. In any organization, trust must be developed among every member of the team if success is going to be achieved.” Mike Krzyzewski College Basketball Head Coach

Leaders should be reliable without being predictable. They should be consistent without being anticipated.

Always respect your competition. Do disrespect your competition is to disrespect yourself.

My hunger is not for success, its for excellence, because when you attain excellence, success just naturally follows.

I never let a person's weakness get in the way of his strength.

Discipline is doing what you are supposed to do in the best possible manner at the time you are supposed to do it.

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.

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.

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.

When a coach ad libs, it is easy to focus on the immediate rather than the most important

Being a professional athlete allows you to postpone your adulthood. You grow up in Hero World. Parents change the dinner schedule for you, teachers help with grades, coaches fawn over you, cops ask for an autograph and someone else buys the drinks. Or worse. As basketball great Bill Russell put it, “most professional athletes have been on scholarship since the third grade.

Several years ago I did a TV commercial for Minute Maid where my team came in at halftime after obviously playing well, and I greeted them with a big smile and cookies and nice words. I had to go to Los Angeles two days early just to prepare for that one. I got paid well for it, but the performance should have won me an Oscar.

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'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.

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.

And for goodness' sake, come on. These men, who were feigning shock and indignation, they knew. Why else would my male friend stop me from taking a bus at midnight when I was a student, and insist I take a cab, even if that would make a massive hole in my monthly budget? What about the basketball community I grew up with, which looked the other way when the elderly club owner kissed the children in the girls' teams a little too close? Why would the young coaches make sure nobody ever had to ride with the club owner in his car alone on the way to the games? Why did the bouncer and owner at the bar and restaurant I worked at make sure the female staff left quietly through the side door on nights the male clientele was getting too rowdy?     Because they knew, that's why.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Friendships, along with love, make life worth living.” —Coach K

Wooden often said a coach only made four or five real decisions during a game. “It disgusts me to see all these cartoons of raving maniac coaches,” he said. “There is far more overcoaching than undercoaching in basketball. It’s a great game, an intricate game, but we should not make it complicated.

Their first coach was James Naismith, who invented the sport of basketball. (He is less known for being the only Kansas coach in history to have a losing record.)

if you do the following three things, you will be successful in major college basketball. If you don’t do them, it will be most difficult.” He didn’t say it would be impossible—typical of John Wooden—but he said it would be difficult. I was scrambling for my pen when he said, “Those three things are fairly simple: Number one, make certain, Dale, you always have better players than anybody you play. Now, with that locked up, make sure you always get the better players to put the team above themselves. And number three—this is very important, Dale Brown,” he said, “don’t try to be some coaching genius, or give the guys too much information, or too much stuff; always practice simplicity with constant repetition.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

From kindergarten through senior year of high school, Evan attended Crossroads, an elite, coed private school in Santa Monica known for its progressive attitudes. Tuition at Crossroads runs north of $ 22,000 a year, and seemingly rises annually. Students address teachers by their first names, and classrooms are named after important historical figures, like Albert Einstein and George Mead, rather than numbered. The school devotes as significant a chunk of time to math and history as to Human Development, a curriculum meant to teach students maturity, tolerance, and confidence. Crossroads emphasizes creativity, personal communication, well-being, mental health, and the liberal arts. The school focuses on the arts much more than athletics; some of the school’s varsity games have fewer than a dozen spectators. 2 In 2005, when Evan was a high school freshman, Vanity Fair ran an exhaustive feature about the school titled “School for Cool.” 3 The school, named for Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” unsurprisingly attracts a large contingent of Hollywood types, counting among its alumni Emily and Zooey Deschanel, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jack Black, Kate Hudson, Jonah Hill, Michael Bay, Maya Rudolph, and Spencer Pratt. And that’s just the alumni—the parents of students fill out another page or two of who’s who A-listers. Actor Denzel Washington once served as the assistant eighth grade basketball coach, screenwriter Robert Towne spoke in a film class, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma talked shop with the school’s chamber orchestra.

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.

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.

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

How did I bridge the gap from depression to elation? Well, I worked hard at improving all aspects of my game. I got stronger mentally and physically. I had good coaching, I studied the other players, and I learned from the history of the NBA. I gained confidence, ability, and intelligence. In short:I learned the game within the game.

Cohesion on the offense, intensity on the defense, is the game plan. When a coach puts multidimensional skilled players on the court who have the savvy to create the balance on the floor, move the ball, take high-percentage shots on the offense, and stifle their man on the defense, his team stands a good chance of winning the championship. That is what old school ball is all about. Old school players make timely hoops at the ends of big games. They have good body control and hands, dexterity is always the catalyst for old school players. They can go right and left when they make their moves. They know when to dish and when to swish and they prosper in the paint. They're not over-zealous in their play, falling into early foul trouble. They're omnipresent on defense, creating havoc for the opposing team. They play under control, not hell-bent, and have a rhythm and continuity in their offensive games. Basketball is a game of momentum and old school players know how and when to pick their spots to make their prolific moves that break the opposing team down.

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.

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

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.