Quotes & Sayings About Basketball Coaches

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 have never 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. — John Wooden

True basketball coaches are great teachers and you do not humiliate, you do not physically go after, you do not push or shove, you do not berate, if you are a true coach. If you humiliate or curse them, that won't do it. Coaches like that are not coaches. — Morgan Wootten

Now tell me this. What would you consider the greatest spectator sport in the country today? Would you say it was baseball, basketball, football? ... It's politics. That's right, politics. Millions and millions of people following it every day in the newspapers, over the TV and the radio. Now mind you, they wouldn't get mixed up in this themselves for all the tea in China, but they know the names and numbers of all the players. And what they can't tell the coaches about strategy. Oh, you should see some of the letters I get. — Frank Nugent

Alvin's the coach. We must be the Clippers. And I must be Olowokandi. Nooooo! — Shaquille O'Neal

All really successful coaches have a system. — Jim Valvano

Being involved in competition is a privilege and an opportunity. Seek to make the most of that opportunity by pushing yourself to the limit of your abilities. When it is over, you will have earned the respect of your opponents, your coaches, and yourself. — Tony La Russa

Coaches win practices, players win games — Pete Carril

Sometimes the coaches tell me to be selfish, but my game won't let me be selfish. — LeBron James

Coaches can talk and talk and talk about something, but if you get it on tape and show it to them, it is so much more effective. — Larry Bird

I don't hire good coaches, I hire good people. If they turn out to be good coaches, too, that's a plus. — Geno Auriemma

I don't think coaches should have to wear mic's. It is an invasion of privacy. We are trying to accomplish things, and wearing microphones may hinder development by straining the nature of relationships coaches and players have. — Steve Nash

I'm a lot better coach when I have really good players — Chuck Daly

Don't try to imitate other coaches. Be your own person with your own style and do your own thing. — Hubie Brown

As I've said, basketball has been, I think, a real cooperative venture. There have been a lot of people that have been involved in it: coaches, administrators - not recently - fans and nobody, nobody any more so than students over the years. — Bobby Knight

Successful basketball coaches are those that subscribe to a system that is based on sound fundamental teachings. — Don Meyer

I never let our players get satisfied, I never let our Coaches get satisfied, I was never satisfied. We can always do it better. — John Wooden

I tell everyone that I have 25,000 assistant coaches. If I want to know something, I just go to the grocery store.' — Don Meyer

What excites me the most is when a coach calls a timeout and chews out his forward because I just dunked on his head. — Karl Malone

I disobeyed a basic basketball rule and never boxed out. I figured that if I had the inside position I had enough of an advantage to just go get the ball. And coaches left me alone because I got it. — Dolph Schayes

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. — Janet Pilcher

You don't win games as a coach during games. You win games as a coach before games. Players win during games, not coaches — Red Auerbach

A lot of guys go through their whole careers and don't win a championship, but are still great coaches. — Chuck Daly

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

As coaches we talk about two things: offense and defense. There is a third phase we neglect, which is more important. It's conversion from offense to defense and defense to offense. — Bobby Knight

Many of the most successful coaches and managers have come from players who never reached the highest level. The one exception seems to be basketball, where many of the greatest stars at least tried to coach a team. — George Vecsey

But people don't know if I can teach the game. I know I can. My experience in Oklahoma was positive. It opened my eyes to how the game is played - the interaction among players, fans and media, how all that works. You have to know about the business of the game and how the actions of players and coaches affect the business. I think I have it down now. — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

On good teams coaches hold players accountable, on great teams players hold players accountable — Joe Dumars

I don't think you can explain why all these other sports and college basketball have a fair representation of African American coaches, but college football doesn't. You can dig and scramble and scratch, but at the end of the day I think it's just pure, old-fashioned racism. — Frank Deford

You build your program from the ideas of great coaches. — Don Meyer

College coaches want to power the ball inside, they want (their post players) to power the ball up, but no one can shoot from that 15-foot area anymore. — Oscar Robertson

A good coach improves your game. A great coach improves your life. — Michael Josephson

Now I'm a free agent, literally and figuratively. I've reached that enviable state in life in which I can do pretty much what I want. And what I want is to continue to play basketball. I still love the game, and I still have something to offer. My coaches and teammates recognize that. At the same time, I want to be genuine and authentic and truthful. — Jason Collins

It always amazes me that spectators want to coach, coaches want to officiate, and officials just want to watch the game — Lou Holtz

I think no one has written a history of the great coaches who were around 30 to 40 years ago who taught the fundamentals. — Oscar Robertson

Winning coaches look for opportunities to praise. Anything that reflects a commitment to the team is praiseworthy — Bill Parcells

The fact is that everybody around a college basketball game - the coaches, the announcers, even the referees at a lower level - calculates when the game is really over. They calculate it with intuition and guesswork. — Bill James

Confrontation simply means meeting the truth head-on. — Mike Krzyzewski

In recent generations, women's sports have been a blessing. Some of us can remember the bad old days in the '50s, when we would discover in casual schoolyard play that a girl could outrun most of us or hold her own in basketball or hit a softball - but there were no teams, no coaches, for girls. — George Vecsey

You learn from everybody. You learn from the players. You learn from great coaches. You learn from great teams — Tom Thibodeau

We have to move the meter in sports in Africa, especially basketball. With the growth of the NBA globally, we have to figure out more ways to develop facilities, coaching, leagues, and youth development in Africa. The talent is incredible. Especially physically. How do we get the youth to start playing at an early age just like in soccer? The future is bright. We now have an NBA office in Africa, we have legends and Hall of Famers, we have African assistant coaches, front office members, and some prominent African players over the last 10 years. So we must plan well for the next 10. — Masai Ujiri

In all the research you do as a coach, studying other coaches and championship-type situations, you find that all those teams combined talent with great defense. You've got to stop other teams to win. — Pat Riley

Pat Riley is the best coach I've ever had. — Shaquille O'Neal

He looks like a woman coach sometimes. I guess he's just trying to get into certain people's heads, but it won't work with me. Like a woman who coaches and cries all the time. He can't get in my head. He's a crybaby. — Shaquille O'Neal

I could run 200 yards at a stretch, I could duck between players, I felt free to make plays that suited me best. It wasn't like football then and basketball today, where coaches tell you what foot to put down. — Jim Brown

I think coaches sometimes foul their own players out of game by benching them too long when in foul trouble — Jeff Van Gundy