Wooden Quotes

“Whenever the story of John Wooden’s life gets told, his years at UCLA before he started winning championships are usually characterized as a period of struggle. Wooden didn’t view them that way. He was a diligent, persistent man. He enjoyed developing his craft, one small lesson plan at a time. “Little things add up, and they become big things. That’s what I tried to teach my players in practice,” he said. “You’re not going to make a great improvement today. Maybe you’ll make a little bit. But tomorrow it’s a little more, and the next day a little more.”
― Seth Davis, Wooden: A Coach's Life

“There was, however, one aspect to teaching that bothered him—the parents.”
― Seth Davis, Wooden: A Coach's Life

“The worst fault of a beginning coach is he expects too much and doesn’t have enough patience.”
― Seth Davis, Wooden: A Coach's Life

“The coach who continually tells his players they are rotten is sure to make them so.”
― Seth Davis, Wooden: A Coach's Life

“In the face of all this evidence, Wooden continued to insist that whatever violations had occurred on his watch were minor. “There’s as much crookedness as you want to find,” Wooden said. “There was something Abraham Lincoln said—he’d rather trust too much than distrust and be miserable all the time. Maybe I trusted too much.”
― Seth Davis, Wooden: A Coach's Life

“Wooden often said a coach only made four or five real decisions during a game. “It disgusts me to see all these cartoons of raving maniac coaches,” he said. “There is far more overcoaching than undercoaching in basketball. It’s a great game, an intricate game, but we should not make it complicated.”
― Seth Davis, Wooden: A Coach's Life

“Wooden was a very good fundamental coach. He was very good at planning practices. He was very good at the relationships with the players,” Norman said. “But he didn’t have much in the way of strategy. His whole attitude was you play the way you practice.”
― Seth Davis, Wooden: A Coach's Life

“It would not be easy to whip the hoops program into shape. UCLA had posted a winning record just twice in the previous seventeen seasons and at one point had lost thirty-nine consecutive games to its crosstown rival, the University of Southern California.”
― Seth Davis, Wooden: A Coach's Life

“He was, in short, a hard-to-please, detail-obsessed, hyper-organized taskmaster and control freak—which made it all the more jarring when he adopted a hands-off approach during games. Wooden believed it was his job to prepare his team to play. Once the game began, it was their job to show what they had learned. Don’t look over at the bench when the game starts, he told them. Just do what you’ve been taught to do. “Practice was Mr. Wooden’s domain. The game was the players’ domain,”
― Seth Davis, Wooden: A Coach's Life