Be a Better Asker ... And Listener

As coach Sherri Coale, head women's basketball coach at OU, explains below, we are 'telling' our kids everything that we know and what to do instead of 'asking' them what they know or see on the court.  She talks about the power of 'questions' and how effective asking them questions can be on their learning process.  I really took away the part where she mentioned how to 'gradually teach your kids to be convicted about they do' through questions and their answers.

What is Your Measurement Going To Be?

What's Your Monster and How Do You Feed It?

When you start winning games as a coach, the feeling of success can create a monster where you allow winning to become your benchmark or measurement of success.  Whenever you tie your satisfaction solely to wins and losses, it's dangerous because it's really easy to start basing all of your decisions on how if affects your winning instead of doing what's best for the kids you lead and their overall growth and development as people.

It's important for a coach to make sure winning isn't the main measurement for success in your program, and that you have your own definition of success that drives your work everyday.  Below, OU women's head coach Sherri Coale talks about what she uses as her measurement of success.

John Wooden has famoulsy coined his own definition of success.  Below are two quotes and a short poem from Coach Wooden:

"Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming."

- John Wooden

“Never try to be better than anyone else, but never stop trying to be the best you can be.”
- John Wooden

At God's footstool to confess,
A poor soul knelt and bowed his head.
“I failed,” he cried. The Master said,
“Thou didst thy best, that is success.”

- John Wooden

The Wooden Effect | The Influence Of Coach Wooden's Presence

Success Magazine just released its December issue, and John Wooden graces the cover.  Don Yeager wrote the cover story, using interviews of a few of the many athletes and coaches that Wooden influenced throughout his life.  Below, Dick Enberg talks about how powerful Coach Wooden’s influence was on anybody in his presence.

You look at his eyes and see how he could be a tough disciplinarian even though he was a man of God," sportscaster Dick Enberg, a longtime friend, recalls.  "We see a lot of his photos from later in his life where he had that sheepish, sweet smile and innocence all over his face, but if you go back to his coaching days, his players knew what he meant when he burned a hole through them with those eyes of, at times, toughness.  If you stayed around him enough you learned an awful lot about life and yourself and how to be good.  You felt a responsibility to conduct yourself the way Coach would want you to behave if you were wearing one of those jerseys sitting on his bench, so you checked your behavior each day that you were around him.  Now that's power.  That's influence in all the right ways.

A lot of strong personalities and strong leaders feel that in order to really fulfill that role, they have to change everyone around them and make them like themselves, but Coach wasn't like that.  I mean he had his plan and you lived within the plan, which was of course teamwork and love for one another and the team being more important than the individual, and winning (not necessarily the score) defining your success in life.  But Coach didn't impose his religion, his philosophy, his lifestyle on others.  He allowed each of us to be an individual."

The Wooden Effect | Coach Wooden's Influence on Dick Vitale

Dick Vitale shares a story on how he reached out to several coaches when he was still a young high school coach and the advice and assistance John Wooden provided for Vitale and his career.  This story appeared in Success Magazine’s December issue in which Coach Wooden is the cover story, and is written by DonYaeger.

The coach was also an active mentor, advocating on behalf of people and seeking out younger coaches he felt demonstrated a commitment to building character as much as constructing winning teams.  “When I was just starting out as a high school coach, I started reaching out to people I admired to find out a moment of their success with a young guy aspiring to be a coach on a collegiate level,” says National Collegiate Basketball Hall of fame member Dick Vitale.  “A lot of people, of course, never wrote back, but I was absolutely in awe when I opened the mail and realized I had received a response from the Wizard of Westwood [one of Wooden’s nicknames] – to me, a nobody.  His advice: Be organized, make things simple, and have within you that enthusiasm to set the tone.”

A few years later, Wooden happened to be announcing game that Vitale was coaching and was impressed by Vitale’s enthusiasm:  Wooden recommended him to a producer at a new network called ESPN as someone who might be good as an on-air commentator.  Vitale has been synonymous with college basketball ever since.  “Coach Wooden’s legacy is winner, winner, winner, in every way of life,” Vitale explains.  “Not just winning basketball games, but building men and building character.  He did it far beyond just his own team roster, though.  He did it for a nobody high school coach who wrote to him for advice, and who he later figured deserved a shot at sharing his enthusiasm for the game in a new way.”