A Coach's Diary

“The first step on the ladder of success is always failure. Prepare for failure. You are going to fail. We all fail. Figure it out. No one will feel sorry for you.” - Kelvin Sampson How well do you handle failure? Kelvin Sampson is an elite basketball coach who has taken multiple teams to Final Fours. He once said, “The first step on the ladder of success is always failure. Prepare for failure. You are going to fail. We all fail. Figure it out. No one will feel sorry for you.” Nobody wants to mess up or fail, but failing is a part of the process. You don’t become successful instead of failing — you become successful because you learn to fail, adjust, and keep going. Very few people start great. Growth begins when things don’t work. Failure isn’t unusual or personal. It’s normal and expected. The people who succeed aren’t the ones who avoid failure—they’re the ones who know how to respond to it. What matters isn't failure — it’s what you do next, and your response to failure is what...

“No one ever loses at anything as long as you don’t quit.” - Kevin Sampson When you fall behind, what do you do? Do you quit or keep going? In a Final Four game against Duke, Houston had less than a 10% chance of winning the game with less than 5 minutes left. In this situation, a lot of people would just go through the motions until the final buzzer, but Houston didn’t. They never quit, and they ended up winning. When asked to describe the resiliency of his team down the stretch, Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said, “No one ever loses at anything as long as you don’t quit.” But how? How do you keep going and pushing when it doesn’t look like you are going to win? Coach Sampson said it’s all about the work they put in and the trust they have with each other. He said, “They trust their work, and they trust their teammates.” If you put in the right work with the right people, you will always have a chance. Every day, you are either making deposits or withdrawals. Deposits are the w...