Coach Steve Quotes

There are three types of people in this world. Firstly, there are people who make things happen. Then there are people who watch things happen. Lastly, there are people who ask, what happened? Which do you want to be?

Like everything in life, it is not what happens to you but how you respond to it that counts.

It is never about who is right or wrong, it is about what is best.

Too often, people get stuck in a state of over-thinking, the result is that they never reach a decision.

Compete like you cannot fail.

The first step is the most important. It is the most crucial and the most effective as it will initiate the direction you have chosen.

If obstacles are large, jump higher.

If not now, when?

Act like a champion, and then become one.

If you have positive energy you will always attract positive outcomes.

Share your aspirations only with those who will support you, not those who will respond with doubt or lack of interest.

It is action that creates motivation.

Every time a champion makes a decision they have a chance to learn something new, regardless of the outcome.

The thrust of continuous action is the firewood which fuels motivation.

Look for solutions, instead of being difficult; be more thoughtful, instead of allowing anger to burn you out. Look at things from a different perspective, embrace change, look out for opportunities and you will feel much more in control.

A mind filled with negative thoughts makes you feel miserable and inadequate and will lead to failure after failure no matter how hard you try to succeed.

If you want to continue to be the best in the world, then you have to train and compete like you are second best in the world.

If you remain static and wait for success to come to you it will certainly not happen.

You can’t coach desire, and no matter how fancy your training plan or how high your stated goals are, it comes down to getting out the door and doing the work day after day.

To think is good. To obsess is bad.

The challenge for you is to decide not what is important, but what is most important and then focus your attention on that.

Your current apathy is simply your soul telling you that it is confused.

When you think a positive thought, you become positive.

Do you want to know what one of the secrets to achieving all of your goals is? You’ve got to be committed.

If not you, who?

It is one thing to know what should be done, it is another to do it.

Nothing could be any worse than having to turn to your friends, your colleagues and your loved ones and say –‘I gave up too soon’.

These are the people who will encourage you to go after your dreams and will inspire you to succeed. Stick to them like a barnacle to a rock.

Success is virulent. Once you get the bug then it’s in you.

The people and successes in your life mirror your beliefs.

Tell me your thinking, and I’ll tell you what your life looks like.

Mix with positive-minded people as a means to tap into your unexploited potential.

Success is simply never giving in to failure - either in mind or body.

Gary, if you want to play on this football team, you answer me when I ask you who's your Daddy. Who's your Daddy, Gary? Who's your Daddy?

The Pro coach knows that being uncomfortable is the only way to grow. And because they create such powerful agreements, their clients never miss or are late for a session.

The coaching profession has a problem that is two-fold: there is a low bar for entry and a high bar for success.

See it, feel it, trust it!

The only test is what you see when you look in a mirror.

The Struggling coach has huge dreams that overwhelm them. The Pro coach has huge dreams, and takes tiny steps every day.

It is true to say that the secret of a winning formula is the ability to accept that there is a vast area of unexploited potential beyond what you currently perceive to be your maximum.

Harvard coach Bill Reid would later credit Teddy Roosevelt with saving football. But words in a rule book are one thing. Someone had to show the nation a new way to play the game. The Carlisle Indians did that.

If you are able to focus unswervingly on your goals, then all that you desire will become yours.

The sprint is like life ... blink and you miss it.

Just identify the very first physical action you need to take, and do it.

You have to create your self-belief by going to your core to find the probable reasons for the negativity in you, and then demolish them.

Coaching is a good profession for people who are genuinely devoted to making a difference in the lives of others.

I was at a Byron Katie seminar once when I heard her say something I never forgot. She said, “Do you know what I love most about the past? It’s over!

What makes a good coach? Someone who’s gone further than you, seen more than you’ve seen, failed in more interesting ways than you have, and prevailed in the face of challenges more daunting than you’ve faced.

Hey, I got an idea, let’s go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let’s go and experience the art of the cinema. Let’s begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we are going to haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let’s go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let’s catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we’ll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let’s lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it’s going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let’s go see it four times in one year. And let’s see Woodstock three times in one year and let’s see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let’s see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let’s sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler’s List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema.

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.

Successful people never forget what they love to do and are passionate about. They quickly learn to follow their own path and to make the right choices, no matter how crazy or unpopular they might appear to others. Just look at Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, who quit studying at a prestigious university to pursue his dreams.

We start something and then we stop. When Dusan coaches his clients his recommendation is this: stop stopping.

The Pro coach knows that confidence is a result of taking action.

People pay you not what they decide your coaching is worth, but what you decide your coaching is worth.

The Pro coach is committed to coaching, no matter what. Failure doesn’t stop them. They are not embarrassed by their mistakes. There’s no turning back.

Please don’t let anyone hang up or walk out the door if the last words you exchanged were about money.

Refuse to buy into any story your clients may bring with them. Challenge how they see the world.

Winston Churchill once said, “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

If you’ve got this sense of extreme need in your mind, your behavior and your communication is going to push the person away. That’s because neediness is creepy.

Coaching is not about “information.” It is about transformation. Change someone’s life and they will hire you.

My friend Chuck was supposed to help me coach the team. But he told Miss Curdy he had an after-school job. Do you know what his after-school job is? Going home and watching TV. - Steve Boswell

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.

And beyond these, you need to be willing to work your own process—and do the Deep Inner Work necessary—so you can see your own blind spots. You can’t take your clients any deeper than you have been able to go in your own life.

People don’t want coaching. They want what coaching can do. They want their problems solved, their habits changed, their opportunities realized. They want more income, or better relationships, or more peace on the inside, or more fun and adventure on the outside. They want less suffering and more happiness

Don’t allow the roles to become reversed in a conversation with a prospect. In other words, don’t let them become the coach and you the client. Don’t become needy and put yourself in the position of saying, “Well, you know, anything you want, call me anytime, tell me when you are available…” as you fall all over yourself to talk to them. It’s called role reversal when you do this.

Every team needs either a confrontational star player or coach. In San Antonio, Gregg Popovich was that guy and Tim Duncan was not. In Golden State, Draymond Green is the confrontational one; Steve Kerr is not. For us, Phil was not that type of person, so I provided that force. You always have to have that balance and counterbalance, and Phil and I were perfectly suited for each other in that way.

Mike Sprecklen was the coach and mentor to the famous all-conquering rowing pair Andy Holmes and Steve Redgrave. “I was stuck, I had taught them all I knew technically,” Sprecklen said on completion of a Performance Coaching course many years ago, “but this opens up the possibility of going further, for they can feel things that I can’t even see.” He had discovered a new way forward with them, working from their experience and perceptions rather than from his own. Good coaching, and good mentoring for that matter, can and should take a performer beyond the limitations of the coach or mentor’s own knowledge.

Pat Riley, the famous coach and manager who led the Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat to multiple championships, says that great teams tend to follow a trajectory. When they start—before they have won—a team is innocent. If the conditions are right, they come together, they watch out for each other and work together toward their collective goal. This stage, he calls the “Innocent Climb.” After a team starts to win and media attention begins, the simple bonds that joined the individuals together begin to fray. Players calculate their own importance. Chests swell. Frustrations emerge. Egos appear. The Innocent Climb, Pat Riley says, is almost always followed by the “Disease of Me.” It can “strike any winning team in any year and at any moment,” and does with alarming regularity. It’s Shaq and Kobe, unable to play together. It’s Jordan punching Steve Kerr, Horace Grant, and Will Perdue—his own team members. He punched people on his own team! It’s Enron employees plunging California into darkness for personal profit. It’s leaks to the media from a disgruntled executive hoping to scuttle a project he dislikes. It’s negging and every other intimidation tactic.

Hey, I got an idea, let’s go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let’s go and experience the art of the cinema. Let’s begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we're gonna have it haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let’s go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let’s catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we’ll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let’s lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it’s going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let’s go see it four times in one year. And let’s see Woodstock three times in one year and let’s see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let’s see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let’s sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler’s List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema.

Local Teen Adopted Finds Adoptive Family Within 24 Hours of 18th Birthday The final chapter of a family tragedy was written yesterday at the county courthouse when Cynthia and Tom Lemry signed formal adoption papers, gaining custody of Sarah Byrnes less than 24 hours before her 18th birthday. Local readers will remember Ms. Byrnes as the youngster whose face and hands were purposely burned on a hot wood stove by her father 15 years ago. The incident came to light this past February after Virgil Byrnes assaulted another teenager, 18-year-old Eric Calhoune, with a hunting knife. “Better late than never,” said Cynthia Lemry, a local high school teacher and swimming coach, in a statement to the press. “If someone had stepped up for this young lady a long time ago, years of heartache could have been avoided. She’s a remarkable human being, and we’re honored to have her in our family.” “I guess they’re just in the nick of time to pay my college tuition,” the new Sarah Lemry said with a smile. Also attending the ceremony were Eric Calhoune, the victim of Virgil Byrnes’s attack; Sandy Calhoune, the boy’s mother and a frequent columnist for this newspaper; Carver Milddleton, who served time on an assault charge against Virgil Byrnes in a related incident; the Reverend John Ellerby, controversial Episcopalian minister whose support of female clergy and full homosexual rights has frequently focused a spotlight on him in his 15-year stay at St. Mark’s; and his son, Steve Ellerby, who describes himself as “a controversial Episcopalian preacher’s kid.” Sarah Lemry confirmed that following the burning 15 years ago, her father refused her opportunities for reconstructive surgery, saying her condition would teach her to “be tough.” She refused comment on further torturous physical abuse allegations, for which, among other charges, Byrnes has been found guilty in superior court and sentenced to more than 20 years in the state penitentiary at Walla Walla. When asked if she would now seek the reconstructive surgery she was so long denied, Sarah Lemry again smiled and said, “I don’t know. It’d be a shame to change just when I’m getting used to it.

Before they’re done my internal monologue is already going through the paces: Robert Loggia’s sure had some interesting parts over the years, hasn’t he? Like when he played that growly assistant football coach in Necessary Roughness. And that leads me to: Hey, you know who else made an appearance in that movie? Roger Craig. And the next thing you know, I’m at Memorial Stadium. Again. This time it’s 1981, and Roger’s dressed in red, jetting 94 yards down the Astroturf for a touchdown, with a pair of Florida State defenders helplessly flapping along in his wake. The school record for longest run from scrimmage that was, and it stood for twenty years, until Eric Crouch got 95 with that impossible run at Mizzou. And that gets me to consider: Who’d win in a footrace between Crouch and Craig, if Craig were in his prime, of course? Hmmm…

Too much focus on numbers can be counterproductive. “Very few people take into account the psychological ramifications of all this science-y data,” says Steve Magness, the running coach and coauthor of Peak Performance. “The more you measure, the more you create athletes who are fragile. I’ve seen it at the largest stage with world-class athletes. They become dependent. If the fancy HRV or omega wave tells them they aren’t ready, then they believe they are not ready.

Seek perfection in everything you do. Steve Jobs was a perfectionist who had an eye for every detail, would seek the best results and would not hesitate to do things again if the results were not up to his expectations.

Manage to keep the best people. Steve jobs feared what he named ‘the Bozo explosion’, that is a system in which the failure of the management to seek for the best and get rid of the less efficient only leads to mediocrity.

those who don’t say ‘no’ will never manage to focus on the important things, the 20% of your time that ought to generate 80% of your income

For a variety of reasons, staffers always want to take new initiatives, do new things that excite them. But if those new things fail to serve your business’ goals, their time and energy are lost at your expense because money and efforts are diverted uselessly to non-essential tasks!

he would launch a massive brainstorming sessions and gather the opinions and thoughts of all his people. The idea there was to make a list of ten priorities based on the team beliefs, but in the end, he would only keep three, thus making them even more important (while keeping a certain form of control over the decision-making process).

Steve Jobs for instance reflected on his feelings about being fired from Apple. Here is what he said: “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

What other people say about how you fail means nothing, especially if you can say why your failure has made you stronger.

Does your leadership image reflect who you are? Are you happy with the perception others have of you?

Research from Brunel University shows that chess students who trained with coaches increased on average 168 points in their national ratings versus those who didn’t. Though long hours of deliberate practice are unavoidable in the cognitively complex arena of chess, the presence of a coach for mentorship gives players a clear advantage. Chess prodigy Joshua Waitzkin (the subject of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer) for example, accelerated his career when national chess master Bruce Pandolfini discovered him playing chess in Washington Square Park in New York as a boy. Pandolfini coached young Waitzkin one on one, and the boy won a slew of chess championships, setting a world record at an implausibly young age. Business research backs this up, too. Analysis shows that entrepreneurs who have mentors end up raising seven times as much capital for their businesses, and experience 3.5 times faster growth than those without mentors. And in fact, of the companies surveyed, few managed to scale a profitable business model without a mentor’s aid. Even Steve Jobs, the famously visionary and dictatorial founder of Apple, relied on mentors, such as former football coach and Intuit CEO Bill Campbell, to keep himself sharp. SO, DATA INDICATES THAT those who train with successful people who’ve “been there” tend to achieve success faster. The winning formula, it seems, is to seek out the world’s best and convince them to coach us. Except there’s one small wrinkle. That’s not quite true. We just held up Justin Bieber as an example of great, rapid-mentorship success. But since his rapid rise, he’s gotten into an increasing amount of trouble. Fights. DUIs. Resisting arrest. Drugs. At least one story about egging someone’s house. It appears that Bieber started unraveling nearly as quickly as he rocketed to Billboard number one. OK, first of all, Bieber’s young. He’s acting like the rock star he is. But his mentor, Usher, also got to Billboard number one at age 18, and he managed to dominate pop music for a decade without DUIs or egg-vandalism incidents. Could it be that Bieber missed something in the mentorship process? History, it turns out, is full of people who’ve been lucky enough to have amazing mentors and have stumbled anyway.

Steve knew just how and when to find them. We headed out early the next morning, before there was wind. The temperature was exactly right at eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit. Steve got a faraway look in his eye, as though he was concentrating or communicating. Then he headed off. Ten minutes later, we were on the trail of a fierce snake. “Would you like to tail one?” Steve asked. “Are you kidding?” I said. “I don’t know how to catch a fierce snake.” Steve had already “tailed” one of the snakes. Gently grabbing the end of its tail, he could hold it at arm’s length and examine it. During this procedure, snakes would often defecate, and we could get some clue about what they’d been eating. Steve would tail a snake, put it in a bag, release it, and keep what remained. “You grab the next one,” Steve said. He spotted a four- or five-foot-long fierce snake. It glistened in the sun like glass, brilliantly shiny and sleek. “It’s warming up now,” Steve said as we approached. “You’re going to have to be quick.” Yes, Terri, I said to myself, please be quick so as not to get struck by the most venomous snake on earth. If you get bitten out here, you’re in a load of trouble. We crept up behind the fierce snake. I got close enough to grab it, but the snake suddenly and violently swung its head around, directly at me, poised and ready to strike. I backed off abruptly. Time and again I approached the snake just as I’d seen Steve do it: Walk up behind the snake as it started to slither away, and grab it by the tail. I knew what to do, but I couldn’t do it. Every time I reached down, the snake would swing around and I would jump a mile. We wandered farther and farther on the trail of the snake. I could see our truck way in the distance. I sweated profusely. I kept thinking the same thought. If I get bitten by this snake, I’m dead. Then I would try to push that thought away. Stop thinking, just grab the snake. Steve wouldn’t ask you to do something that you couldn’t do. But the whole process was becoming ridiculous. “What am I doing wrong?” I wailed. “You are too bloody scared,” Steve said. “Oh,” I said. Then I reached down and picked up the snake. It was magic. Once I had the nice, soft, supple body in my hands, it was as though the snake and I had a connection. Its skin was warm to my touch from sitting in the sun. I suddenly understood exactly how to hold on so it wouldn’t get away, and yet not squeeze it so tightly that it would get angry. The snake naturally kept trying to move off. I let the front part of its body stay on the ground and held the tail up. I felt such triumph--not that I had dominated the snake, but that it had let me pick it up. Steve held out the catch bag, and I carefully dropped the snake in. He tied a knot in the bag. We looked at each other and grinned. Then we both whooped and hollered and jumped in the air. He hugged and kissed me. “I’m proud of you, Terri,” he said. Once again I marveled at Steve’s instincts. He knew that this particular snake would be okay for me to pick up. He never hesitated, he never yelled at me or coached me--until I asked for help. Then he simply told me what to do.

I called Steve. He came up from the Gold Coast as quickly as he could, after losing his car keys, not remembering where he parked, and forgetting which way home was in his excitement. When he arrived at the hospital, I saw that he had brought the whole camera crew with him. John was just as flustered as anyone but suggested we film the event. “It’s okay with me,” Steve said. I was in no mood to argue. I didn’t care if a spaceship landed on the hospital. Each contraction took every bit of my attention. When they finally wheeled me into the delivery room at about eight o’clock that night, I was so tired I didn’t know how I could go on. Steve proved to be a great coach. He encouraged me as though it were a footy game. “You can do it, babe,” he yelled. “Come on, push!

Discipline

Wilt’s message was a simple one that’s been repeated by coaches for generations: trust your training, trust your fitness. These simple phrases are meant to relay a much more profound lesson: that true confidence is founded in doing the work.

It appears to lie, paradoxically, with the coach’s ability to produce an environment, which emphasizes trust and inclusion, humility, and service.

Steve Molaro: We also went to a few Baptist churches, and it was shockingly informative. Chuck likes to do this type of research before launching a new show because he says it may open your eyes to a completely different version of the pilot you haven’t thought of yet. We also talked to Texas high school principals and teachers and football coaches, we went to restaurants, a megachurch… we packed a lot in.

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.

MIDDLE CLASS vs. WORLD CLASS 1. The Middle Class competes — the World Class creates. 2. The Middle Class avoids risk — the World Class manages risk. 3. The Middle Class lives in delusion — the World Class lives in objective reality. 4. The Middle Class loves to be comfortable — the World Class is comfortable being uncomfortable. 5. The Middle Class has a lottery mentality — the World Class has an abundance mentality. 6. The Middle Class hungers for security — the World Class doesn’t believe that security exists. 7. The Middle Class sacrifices growth for safety — the World Class sacrifices safety for growth. 8. The Middle Class operates out of fear and scarcity — the World Class operates from love and abundance. 9. The Middle Class focuses on having — the World Class focuses on being. 10. The Middle Class sees themselves as victims — the World Class sees themselves as responsible. 11. The Middle Class slows down — the World Class calms down. 12. The Middle Class is frustrated — the World Class is grateful. 13. The Middle Class has pipedreams — the World Class has vision. 14. The Middle Class is ego-driven — the World Class is spirit driven. 15. The Middle Class is problem oriented — the World Class is solution oriented. 16. The Middle Class thinks they know enough — the World Class is eager to learn. 17. The Middle Class chooses fear — the World Class chooses growth. 18. The Middle Class is boastful — the World Class is humble. 19. The Middle Class trades time for money — the World Class trades ideas for money. 20. The Middle Class denies their intuition — the World Class embraces their intuition. 21. The Middle Class seeks riches — the World Class seeks wealth. 22. The Middle Class believes their vision only when they see it — the World Class knows they will see their vision when they believe it. 23. The Middle Class coaches through logic — the World Class coaches through emotion. 24. The Middle Class speaks the language of fear — the World Class speaks the language of love. 25. The Middle Class believes problem solving stems from knowledge — the Wold Class believes problem solving stems from will.

When someone sees the world differently, they show up differently, and they create results that looked impossible a moment before. That is a miracle.

always want to be the person who demonstrates what other people merely promise.

Pushkala’s team knew that top-down approaches like those used by Lou Gerstner and Steve Jobs would backfire in this company as, unlike IBM and Apple, AstraZeneca wasn’t in crisis—although revenue and profits fell between 2011 and 2016. AstraZeneca is also a decentralized company, in which local leaders have substantial authority to accept, modify, or ignore orders from on high. So, rather than telling people what to do, Pushkala’s team took “a player-coach” approach. They implemented some key companywide efforts, but believed their success hinged on the cumulative impact of small systemwide and local changes. Most employees would join the effort because they wanted to, not because they had to. And the team believed that many of the best solutions would be tailored for tackling distinct local problems. As Pushkala put it, “Let us not solve world hunger; let us start eating the elephant in small chunks.

When he died, much was made of how singular Steve Jobs had been. For comparisons, observers needed to reach back to the mythic inventors and showmen of earlier eras, particularly Thomas Edison and Walt Disney. Jobs was singular, to be sure. But he also was of a type. He was what psychotherapist and business coach Michael Maccoby called a “productive narcissist.” In 2000, Maccoby published an insightful article in the Harvard Business Review that applies Freudian terminology to three categories of executives Maccoby had observed in corporate life. “Erotics” feel a need to be loved, value consensus, and as a result are not natural leaders. These are the people to whom a manager should assign tasks—and then heap praise for a job well done. “Obsessives” are by-the-books tacticians with a knack for making the trains run on time. An efficient head of logistics or bottom-line-oriented spreadsheet jockey is the classic obsessive. The greats of business history, however, are “productive narcissists,” visionary risk takers with a burning desire to “change the world.” Corporate narcissists are charismatic leaders willing to do whatever it takes to win and who couldn’t give a fig about being liked. Steve Jobs was the textbook example of a productive narcissist. An unimpressed Jobs was famous for calling other companies “bozos.” His own executives endured their rides on what one called the “bozo/hero rollercoaster,” often within the same marathon meeting.

Absolutely, says Steve Maxwell. And with the little device in his pocket, he can prove it. Steve is a former world champion Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighter and now a strength-and-conditioning coach who specializes in recovering lost innovations. “The old-timers knew what was up with fascia long before we even had a word for it,” he explains. “You’ll always be safe if you go back to the mighty men of old, the guys before the 1950s. Look at the old gyms, with their Indian clubs and medicine balls. What’s that all about if not balance, range of motion, being fluid, using elastic recoil?

I thought I heard Billy sniffling and I asked him what was wrong. He said, "Mal, you haven't heard, have you?" "Heard what?" "Coach Bryant died this morning." I don't remember saying another word. I don't remember hanging up the telephone or even leaving the phone booth. It was the saddest moment of my career. I just leaned up against the aging brick wall of the coffee shop and cried.

In my talks with Coach Fran, I did tell him, "Fran, the worst thing you can do is take the job and then leave in two years, if we go on probation." he told me I had nothing to worry about, that he was in it for the long haul.

The fact is that often coaches figure out what works in training and then the scientists come in later and explain why it works.

The president and Colson were in the middle of their conversation about Henry Kissinger when assistant Steve Bull entered the Oval Office to report that Coach Allen of the Redskins had finally arrived. Bull also informed the president of the news, just filtering in, that baseball star Roberto Clemente was on a plane that had crashed after taking off from the San Juan International Airport late the night before. “Was he killed?” Nixon asked. “They don’t have confirmation yet,” Bull replied.1 Clemente, the popular outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates, had boarded a rickety four-engine DC-7 plane that was overloaded with relief supplies for the victims of a massive earthquake in Nicaragua. The earthquake was believed to have resulted in the deaths of more than seven thousand people. Most of the deaths had occurred in the capital city of Managua, which had taken the brunt of the 6.2 magnitude shock at midday on Saturday, December 23.2 The city was leveled. The lumbering plane that Clemente was on nose-dived into heavy seas shortly after takeoff from San Juan. Clemente was thirty-eight years old and had been a perennial All-Star, four-time winner of the National League batting championship, defensive genius, and MVP in 1966. He led the Pirates to two world championships, one in 1960 and the other a decade later in 1971. “Mr. Clemente was the leader of Puerto Rican efforts to aid the Nicaraguan victims and was aboard the plane because he suspected that relief supplies were falling into the hands of profiteers,” the New York Times reported after his death was presumed.3 Clemente was scheduled to meet Anastasio Somoza, the military dictator of Nicaragua, at the airport, one of the very grafters he was attempting to circumvent with his personal mission. Clemente’s body was never recovered. It was a bad omen for the start of 1973.

Amateurs practice until they get something right. Professionals, however, practice until they absolutely can not get it wrong.” — Steve Pinocchio, Merced College Baseball Coach

Once again I marveled at Steve’s instincts. He knew that this particular snake would be okay for me to pick up. He never hesitated, he never yelled at me or coached me--until I asked for help. Then he simply told me what to do.