• The best teachers I have known are intolerant people, because they want to get the students to be better than the students ever thought they could be. I have always said that players will accept and be satisfied with whatever the coach tolerates.
• I have one training rule: If you do anything in any way, whenever or wherever, that I think is detrimental to the good of this basketball team, to the school, or to yourself, I’ll handle it as I see fit.
• I’d like to be respected as a coach, but I’m not concerned about being liked. If you worry about whether people like you or not, you can never make tough decisions correctly.
• Be enthusiastically critical. You can do something wrong enthusiastically and it can turn out right.
• You can’t stay with big wins. You can’t be thinking of the last game when the next game is coming up. Get away from games you win and into the next game right away.
• Winning is basically eliminating why you lose. You can make all kinds of great plays and still get beat if you don’t eliminate the ways you could lose.
• The team that’s willing to prepare to win is going to be the team that wins. Most everybody plans to win, but preparing to win is the most important thing in successful play.
• Basketball is a game that can be played many different ways. There are a wide variety of approached to defense and all kinds of things a coach can choose to do on the offensive end of the floor. However, there are two things that really stand out, in my mind, as essential for a coach to get his team to do if it is going to be successful over the long haul of the season. These two ingredients are getting players to play as hard as they can, each possession of the game at both ends of the floor, and doing it as intelligently as possible. I simply try to tell our players that they have to play hard and they have to play smart if we’re going to win. I also tell them that my definition of playing hard carries with it a much higher standard then their own definitions would have. Getting players to match my definition of playing hard, as a coach, is probably the single most difficult skill there is in teaching the game of basketball. With today’s athlete, I think being able to demand their best in thought and performance is more important than ever.
• There are three phases of the game where playing hard or not doing so is most noticeable. They are rebounding at both ends of the floor, playing defense, and running the floor to the offensive as well as the defensive end. I always felt that, left on their own, players want to play the game as comfortably as they possibly can. That is why, to be successful, a coach must have much higher standards in regard to playing hard than the players may think is possible. Playing hard seems to be a very simple thing, but it is not and that goes back to the comfort level that the players themselves basically want throughout the game.
• Do what’s right and do what you think you have to do, and don’t worry about what somebody says. That would be about as simply put as my philosophy could be.
