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A GREAT COACH JOHN WOODEN John Wooden had a record-breaking coaching career in basketball at UCLA. Every coach in any sport would be well-advised to study and model his principles for recruiting, teaching, and competing. They apply to any sport. DISTINGUISHING CRITERIA FROM PRINCIPLES It is axiomatic that different genetic gifts are required to excell in different sports. Even within a particular sport like swimming or track, an athlete who loves to swim or run, and who has a genetic disposition for a short distance event, is well-advised to focus on the anaerobic events within that sport. It would be unfair for a track coach to place an athlete in the 100 meter sprint when his muscle biopsy indicates he would excell in the marathon. The recruiting criteria for basketball and boxing are in some ways very similar -- height, reach, quickness, explosiveness, hand-eye coordination, and a strong competitive spirit. A tolerance for getting hit on the chin and in the midsection are not required in basketball. Notwithstanding differences in recruiting criteria for different sports -- even for specific events within different sports -- the principles of recruiting, teaching, and competing are the same for any event or sport. That's why coaches in every sport should study and model great coaches in other sports. QUOTES FROM A GREAT COACH The following are John Wooden quotes from his book, They Call Me Coach. These quotes were scattered throughout his book. I have gathered them together into what I consider to be important subjects for every coach. The first heading is Recruiting, followed by Planning the Workout, Coaching - Teaching, The Workouts, Competing, Coach-Athlete Relationship, Philosophy and Religion, and Athletes. A good boxing coach will be able to paraphrase John Wooden to make the quote apply to boxing. Part of some quotes are in bold for emphasis. RECRUITING "Coach John Wooden enjoyed meeting and talking with prospects, but never liked recruiting. One time, after he had had dinner with a recruit, he asked him point blank, "Well, are you coming or aren't you?" "A basketball team with players who can jump with power and efficiency, regardless of physical height and weight, will generally have a much better chance to win." "We will be short on exerience in comparison with most of our recent teams, but we will not be short on talent, and I would much rather have talent without experience than experience without talent." "No matter how you total success in the coaching profession, it all comes down to a single factor -- talent. There may be a hundred great coaches of whom you never have heard in basketball, football, or any sport who will probably never receive the acclaim they deserve simply because they have not been blessed with the talent. Although not every coach can win consistently with talent, no coach can win without it." "Probably 90 percent, or possibly more, of our time was spent evaluating youngsters right in the Los Angeles area, with the remainder elsewhere in California, the Northwest, and in other states." "A genuinely great performer has such supreme confidence in his own ability that he is not afraid to take that risk." "Without question there is absolutely nothing more important to a basketball coach than the acquiring of talent and, happily, there is more raw talent available today than ever before. But the coach must be able to analyze the talent and recruit for his needs. It must be the right kind of talent, and it must be fitted to the coach's particular style." "There are coaches who can't win with talent, even as there are those who can win with just certain types of talent. And there are those coaches who have the knack of doing well with the talent available to them. But no coach can win consistently without talent. Whoever the coach might be, if he doesn't have the right talent, no amount of skill in the world will produce the desired results." PLANNING THE WORKOUT "I remember how we prepared for those practice sessions. We used to spend more than an hour each morning just to plan that day's practice. We'd evaluate what had happened the day before, and then set down the practice schedule in fine detail -- nothing was left to chance." "I always kept personal notebooks that I updated after every game, or at the end of the season. One was a statistical record of what we had done, another was a coaching book of drills and practices." "All progress comes through change and I felt we were not making as much progress as we should. I decided to make a total analysis, from recruiting to playing, of everything we did over all the years. Failure is not fatal but failure to change might be." COACHING - TEACHING "I have not for one moment regretted retiring from my teaching position at UCLA. I use the word teacher purposely, because I've always considered a coach to be a teacher." "A good teacher who communicates well with his players will always do better than one with much better knowledge who is not a good teacher." "Our emphasis is on teaching the quick and proper execution of the fundamentals." "Basketball instruction is directed to the simple fundamentals of the game. It begins with the position of the feet and maintaining good body balance." "Over the years I have become convinced that every detail is important and that success usually accompanies attention to little details. It is this, in my judgment, that makes for the difference between champion and near-champion." "I'm not a believer in meetings or so-called chalk talks or blackboard drills. I believe in learning by repetition to the point that everything becomes automatic." "The best teacher is repetition day after day, throughout the season. I never gave my teams any kind of a written test. After all, they didn't have time in a game to sit down and write something. It had to be instant recognition and instant reaction." "I was always more of a practice coach than a game coach. A player who practices well, plays well." THE WORKOUTS "As long as the coach gets his players in the best posible physical, mental, and emotional condition; teaches them to not only properly but quickly execute the fundamentals; and has them playing together as a team, they will play to near their potential, regardless of the system of offense and defense. In order to accomplish this, however, the coach must be a good teacher and must maintain dicipline while still being able to communicate with the players." "At no time was any member of the squad simply watching, they were doing: if they weren't in a 3-man drill, then they'd be shooting free throws. Coach repeated time and time again that if you prepared thoroughly in practice, the games would take care of themselves." "It was from Lambert that I first realized the value of a controlled offense with free-lance aspects. In other words, Lambert believed in building a platform or a base from which the offense would start. He wanted movement by design but not by precise, repeated pattern. "Every day in practice, he might stop you several times and point out that you are going too much to your right or too much to your left. He always had options, as he never wanted to take away a man's initiative; he merely wanted to direct it within the bounds of his attack." "Coach Lambert never gave you a demand route. He might say, "The first two times you hit the center, fake right and go left. The a third time reverse it. You must outthink, outmaneuver, and outcondition your opponent." "We'll beat them because Mr. Dean is too nice a person. He will not work his players hard enough for them to stay with us. We'll wear them down in the first three quarters of the game and beat them in the last quarter. You see, we're prepared to run the whole game, but Indiana isn't." "Often as a player, I'd tell myself, "I may play someone better than I am, but I'll never run against one who is going to be in better condition." and I never played against a man in my life I felt was in better shape, and Lambert often cited me as an example of top conditioning. "He demanded movement and action. I admonish my boys with a different verb -- move, move. I want movement. In the end we both want the same. "Lambert was also a very precise man. Known as a man who thought of everything, he was meticulous, thorough, and well organized. "Almost all of the early practice sessions were devoted to fundamentals, drills, conditioning, and trying to put my philosophy over." "We won many of our games that year and in ensuing years more on condition than we did on ability." "It isn't what you do, but how you do it. No system is any good if the players are not well-grounded in fundamentals. Confidence comes from being prepared." "The good Lord had blesed me, as a player, with tremendous quickness and a desire to be the best conditioned player in basketball. Therefore, it took me quite awhile as a coach to realize that the great majority of players would not pay the price of conditioning unless they were driven. Later on, I came to see that I could make them work if I kept after them and repeated things time and again. But they could never be forced to do anything by brute strength. It was like one of our old mules -- you could hitch him to the wagon or the plow, but you could not make him go. I continually told my teams that the last law of learning -- repetition -- is the most important." "An important ingredient of patience is perseverence. I tried to instill in our players the desire to do everything correctly -- not to give up on something but to persevere until it was mastered." "It wasn't so much so much of what they did but how they did it. They weren't especially gifted physically, and they weren't particularly fast or maneuverable. But by perseverance and dedicated hard work they learned their assignments minutely and made few mistakes." "We work on pressure. The opponent provides that during a game. I try to provide it in practice with drills that recreated game conditions." "When a player constantly works under pressure he will respond automatically to it. What the team does on the weekend in a game relates 100% to what it does during the week." "All the assistants over the years made one important contribution in common. On the bench they were another set of eyes, especially in the many drills we ran every day." "I always contended that coaching was done during the week. There are not too many things that you can change in a game that you haven't prepared for during the week." "Three things are vital to success in basketball -- condition, fundamentals, and working together as a team. I will say that for the rest of my life." "Too much contact work -- five on five -- seems to take away the competitive edge. "I always told my teams that we were going to be in better condition than the other team and we wanted our opponents to need timeouts for a rest." "One of basketball's prime tenets is discipline. You must maintain it. There is no replacement for sound fundamentals and strict discipline. They will reinforce you in the toughest circumstance. The importance of little things cannot be overemphasized -- like double-tying the shoestrings." "I've heard coaches say that you can't do much with a player's shooting ability, his speed, his quickness, or the height he can jump. I agree to a certain extent, but I also believe you can improve these skills." "The work that you do each and every day is the only true way to improve and prepare yourself for what is to come. You cannot change the past and you can influence the future only by what you do today." "I think the coaches job is to prepare players to play and then let them do it. Failure to prepare is preparing to fail. And the preparation process has to take place before the game, with any needed adjustments made during time-outs and at half time." "It was my experience that if my players were physically and emotionally fit and were prepared for the game, they could play good basketball for the entire game." "Physical balance is controlled by the extremities of the body -- the head, feet, and hands. A player must be constantly be alert to keeping his feet just wider than his shoulders. His head must be directly above the midpoint between the two feet." COMPETING "In short, their defense was agressive and they were a fine passing team with tremendous hussle, drive, and determination. I'm certain that thoughts of defeat never entered their minds. Each of the five starters and two backup men were strong-willed and strong-minded athletes." "Lambert constantly urged us not to worry about our opponent -- just play our own game and force him to follow it. His method was to force them out of what they wanted to do, and then they'd break down. It worked all the time." "He believed in speed, and that the team which made the most mistakes would probably win. Now, that statement takes a bit of analyzing. What he was trying to get across was that the doer makes mistakes, but the doer usually wins becausehe gets more shots and controls the game more. "Those tournaments are packed with pressure. It's sudden death, and there's little room for a mistake." "I tried to convince my players that they could never be truly successful or attain peace of mind unless they had the self-satisfaction of knowing they had done their best. Although I wanted them to work to win, I tried to convince them they had always won when they had done their best." "We continually drilled on jumping, rebounding, and timing. Every drill had its purpose. Not only were they devised to improve general condition, but also to improve some basic fundamental of the game." "The proper execution of fundamentals can become instinctive if taught properly, just like breathing or walking. The crutial factor in basketball is that most of them must be done at full speed running. When they become instinctive under these circumstances, you're tough. That's what became second nature to most of the NCAA champions." "Coach Lambert was one of the first men I knew who stressed how important the right mental attitude is to the success of a player on a team. This emphasis was part of his three fundamentals: (1) conditioning -- getting a team in the best possible physical and mental shape to play; (2) quick and skilled execution of the fundamentals in an uncomplicated series of offensive and defensive plays; and (3) the development of strong team spirit that included consideration at all times for one's fellow players." "It always seemed to me that more games are lost than are won. We seldom changed our attack -- we seldom introduced new patterns -- but we tried never to lock ourselves into doing the same thing in the same situation. We were not too concerned about opponents knowing what we were gong to do as long as they didn't know when." "Neither did it with any tricks, fancy stuff, or brilliant talent. Patience, perseverance, and desire made them major contributors. They truly made the most of the ability they possessed. Who can do more?" "While these were trying times for everyone's emotions, I had a firm policy never to charge up my team on an emotional level. I believe that for every artificial peak you may create there is a valley, and I don't like valleys. Games can be lost in valleys. The ideal is an ever-mounting graph line that peaks with your final performance." "Only one man could make the decisions, but I wanted all the evidence and information possible before making them. I continually reminded myself that I had to be open to the various ideas, not bull-headed and stubborn. Each decision had to be made through reason, not emotion. A leader is interested in finding the best way -- not in having his own way." "Being in better condition pays dividends if you can put the pressure on an opponent and keep it on, both offensively and defensively. A tight pressure defense may serve the same purpose providing, of course, that you are constantly and continuously applying offensive pressure also." "The team that makes the most mistakes will probably win. There is much truth in that statement if you analyze it properly. The doer makes mistakes, and I want doers on my team -- players who make things happen." "When two teams are evenly matched, the better conditioned team will usually execute better when fatigue sets in, and will probably win." "Pressure defense first takes its toll mentally. It finally does so physically as well. And that is what we always sought to do -- to keep the pressure on, never letting up and always staying aware that pressure comes not only from the zone press defense but from every other thing we did. That's why I was so reluctant to call that initial time-out, or, for that matter, almost any time out." "Coach Lambert emphasizes keeping the game simple. A present-day example is Bobby Knight. He holds to a simple game plan. You always know the style of offense and defensive that will be used by his teams -- his plays are simple to read. But they will be executed beautifully, and although you may know what, you won't know when. Bobby Knight keeps the game simple, and yet he is an outstanding success." COACH-ATHLETE RELATIONSHIP "Remembering these two incidents, along with many others that occurred during my many years as a teacher and coach, has caused me to realize just how great the so-called father-son relationship is between a coach and his players." "I tried to understand the young men who stood up to me. That's why I listened to their side, and why I almost always took back a boy who had walked off the team. While we look upon college players today as young men because of their size, they are really still boys in maturity. You have to bend. They have to bend." "One of his coaching concepts I never could accept was trying to fire up a team emotionally for a game. I never believed in it, and I still don't." "Coaches become extremely attached to their players. Because they work with these students under conditions of severe emotional and mental stress, as well as physical, it is understandable that they establish close relationships." RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY "There is only one kind of a life that truly wins, and that is the one that places faith in the hands of the Savior. Until that is done, we are on an aimless course that runs in circles and goes nowhere. Material possessions, winning scores, and great reputations are meaningless in the eyes of the Lord, because He knows what we really are and that is all that matters." "In my profession, I mustn't be deeply concerned with God's believe in me and be truly interested in the welfare of my fellow-man. No coach should be trusted with the tremendous responsibility of handling young men under the great mental, emotional, and physical strain to which they are subjected unless he is spiritually strong. If he does possess this inner strength, it is only because he has faith and truly loves his fellow-man. He must set the proper example by work and by deed. It is not easy." "There are many things that are essential to arriving at true peace of mind, and one of the most important is faith which cannot be acquired without prayer." "Webster partially defines faith as an unquestioning belief in God with complete trust, confidence, and reliance. Faith is not just waiting, hoping and wanting things to happen. Rather it is working hard to make things happen and realizing that there are no failures -- just disappointments -- when you have done your best. As someone once said, "If you do your best, angels can do no better." "Talent is God-given; be humble. Fame is man-given; be thankful. Conceit is self-given; be careful." "Too much money in almost any area can be a problem just as too little can." ATHLETES "And their center, Wee Willie Smith, was the toughest, meanest basketball player I ever faced. He wasn't dirty, just tough and mean. We met again years later at the basketball Hall of Fame. I always contended that Willie could have whipped Joe Louis, who was heavyweight champion then, if he had been a boxer. He weighed about 220, had a beautiful build, was quick, with lightening reflexes, had great balance, and was truly a superb athlete." "The importance of that so-called sixth man cannot be overestimated. The kind of man I'm talking about is almost always a highly emotional individual who gets instant adrenalin flowing as soon as you call his name." "Less than 1 percent of college basketball players ever have a successful pro career." |
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