“The single most important aspect of coaching is running effective practices”

Perform drills that force your players to think

Good basketball always starts with good defense!

My overall point is that ‘one and dones’ are not healthy for college basketball. I should not have made it personal to Kentucky and its players and I apologize.

Offense is not equal opportunity

At one point, I said to the officials that you guys haven’t called walking for 20 years, now you don’t know what it is. When you call walking, you’re about half right.

If you’re not careful, you can get a grossly over-inflated opinion about your popularity.

Mental toughness is to physical as four is to one.

Practice structure determines success.

The biggest difficulty in getting to the top of the ladder is getting through the crowd at the bottom.

We should not have to push you to work hard, you should work hard because you want to be a great player.

When I first started coaching, one of the worst things that I think I heard was ‘It will be O.K.’ I would wonder, ‘How the hell is it going to be O.K.?’ The worst word in the English language is ‘hope.’

I’ve never felt my job was to win basketball games – rather, that the essence of my job as a coach was to do everything I could to give my players the background necessary to succeed in life.

I’m not sure sports writing is an art.

Basketball is a full court game, so every drill must be done full court.

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.

It has always been my thought that the most important single ingredient to success in athletics or life is discipline. I have many times felt that this word is the most ill-defined in all of our language.

We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.

Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap.

I was the kid growing up who would play with G.I.

Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.

There must be a law if there is to be liberty. Try to play a piano and you will run into laws as fixed as the decrees of the Medes and Persians.

All you needed is what every girl needs, a good friend.

To me, when you got a 20-year-old running back or 21-year-old receiver that’s just coming out of college and you’re out working these guys.

The fact that the same proportionalities rule optimal running,