When observers kept logs of the training sessions of the two greatest coaches in American collegiate basketball—for men, UCLA’s John Wooden, and for women, Tennessee’s Pat Summitt—half their utterances were instructions, such as “do some dribbling between shots.”25 More than 10 percent of Coach Wooden’s actions involved demonstrations of the correct or incorrect movement or both—showing the player the right way to do something. Training sessions were fundamentally about instruction for the UCLA coach: “I felt running a practice session was almost like teaching an English class. I knew a
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