Top 100 Basketball Coaching Quotes
#1. The big time is not a place; it's the state of your heart. It's not something you get; it's something you become.
Frosty Westering
#2. I enjoy basketball. I enjoy coaching basketball. It's the out-of-season stuff I didn't handle well.
Dean Smith
#3. I learned early that if I wanted to achieve anything in life, I'd have to do it myself. I learned that I had to be accountable.
Lenny Wilkens
#4. Sometimes you learn more from losing than winning. Losing forces you to reexamine.
Pat Summitt
#6. Conditioning is essential to success in basketball.
John Wooden
#7. Offense is spacing and spacing is offense.
Chuck Daly
#9. To be a team, you must be a family.
Don Meyer
#10. Offensively, you do what you do best and you do it again and again. Defensively, you attack your opponent's strength.
Vince Lombardi
#11. Coaching is making men do what they don't want, so they can become what they want to be
Tom Landry
#12. The basic premise of my system is to fatigue your opponents with constant pressure defensively and constant movement offensively.
Rick Pitino
#13. Your defense will save you on the nights that your offense isn't working.
Adolph Rupp
#14. I hold it more important to hold the player's confidence than their affection.
Vince Lombardi
#15. Simplify the game as much as possible. When you add, you must subtract.
Don Meyer
#16. When the legs go, the heart and the head follow quickly behind.
Don Meyer
#17. Discipline and demand without being demeaning.
Don Meyer
#18. When it comes to celebrating, act like you've been there before.
Terry Bowden
#19. Don't try to imitate other coaches. Be your own person with your own style and do your own thing.
Hubie Brown
#20. He who controlleth the backboard, controlleth the game.
Adolph Rupp
#21. If you get tough mentally, you can get tough physically and overcome fatigue.
Pat Riley
#23. You must have respect, which is a part of love, for those under your supervision. Then they will do what you ask and more.
John Wooden
#24. Unless you plan to out-rebound and out-shoot everyone you play, then you better learn to handle the ball.
Henry Iba
#25. In planning any type of offense, when a player leaves a spot always replace him with another offensive player.
Hubie Brown
#27. The worst thing we can do is put the (other) team in a one-and-one.
Mike Krzyzewski
#28. If you don't hold your team accountable then you will lose credibility and your team will be spoiled.
John Brady
#29. Your ability to communicate to your young people will determine your success.
Jim Harrick
#30. Most of my learning and philosophy regarding coaching basketball was developed after great frustration.
Dick Bennett
#32. Know what you want to emphasize, then do it daily.
Larry Shyatt
#33. Good sound habits are more important than rules - use concepts.
Mike Krzyzewski
#34. I have been coaching recently. I coached high school basketball in Arizona, and I hope that more opportunities become available.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
#35. The best way to build team chemistry is the way Rupp used to substitute, when they fouled out.
Dean Smith
#36. The key statistic is still to get to the foul line.
Dean Smith
#37. Learning what not to do is sometimes more important than learning what to do.
Rick Pitino
#38. It doesn't matter where you coach, it matters why you coach.
Don Meyer
#39. You never realize the value of coaching until your children play for a coach
Don Meyer
#40. And I would be the first to admit that probably, in a lot of press conferences over the time that I have been in coaching, indulging my own sense of humor at press conferences has not been greatly to my benefit.
Robert Montgomery Knight
#41. What you specifically teach is what your players will do best.
Dick Bennett
#42. Regardless of what you do put in, every game boils down to doing the things you do best and doing them over and over again.
Vince Lombardi
#43. Remember this, the choices you make in life, make you.
John Wooden
#44. The key to coaching is not what you do, but the way you do it. The intangibles, the motivational parts of the game are the most important facets of it.
Rick Pitino
#46. It's not what you tell your players that counts. It's what they hear.
Red Auerbach
#47. Coaches can talk and talk and talk about something, but if you get it on tape and show it to them, it is so much more effective.
Larry Bird
#48. There was nothing magical that the coaching staff did. This is about the players.
Bill Laimbeer
#49. We travel in Duke stuff ... They can have a hat, but it must be a Duke hat.
Mike Krzyzewski
#50. You can easily separate 'team guys' from 'me guys' by how they accept coaching. The guys that accept it are about winning
Bill Parcells
#51. Don't do anything as an individual that will make you stand out from your teammates.
Mike Krzyzewski
#53. You build your program from the ideas of great coaches.
Don Meyer
#54. When people ask me now if I miss coaching UCLA basketball games, the national championships, the attention, the trophies, and everything that goes with them, I tell them this: I miss the practices.
John Wooden
#55. Promise yourself to make all your friends know there is something in them that is special and that you value.
John Wooden
#56. Quickness more than anything else should determine your amount of pressure on the ball.
Don Meyer
#57. For us to be successful on defense, we must get back and stop the basketball, eliminate easy baskets, keep the ball out of the lane, and bother the shooters.
Dick Bennett
#59. Even the greatest players accept coaching and value the need for discipline and the order that it brings to the team
Jack Ramsay
#60. Coach now the way you want to coach 10 years from now.
Jerry Krause
#61. The team is an extension of the coach.
Don Meyer
#62. As a leader, you will receive a large amount of praise and criticism and you should not unduly affected by either.
John Wooden
#63. Players must do what you want them to do in pressure situations.
Don Meyer
#64. I have a plan of action, but the game is a game of adjustments.
Mike Krzyzewski
#65. What does this program/team need this week?
Dick Bennett
#67. Only praise behavior that you want to be repeated. Never use false praise.
Dean Smith
#68. We teach offense 5-0/5-5 (whole method) and defense by part (1-1/3-3).
Dick Bennett
#69. I'm a Christian first. I'm a family guy second. As much as I like coaching, as much as I like basketball, it's third, fourth, or fifth down the line.
Steve Alford
#70. I am not a strategic coach; I am a practice coach.
John Wooden
#71. The worst day coaching is better than the best day doing anything else
Don Meyer
#72. All really successful coaches have a system.
Jim Valvano
#73. Nobody travels better than Northern State fans and nobody knows the game better than Northern State fans. If I'd die and went to heaven and I was coaching, it would be at Wachs Arena.
Don Meyer
#74. You can't defer if you're the person who's in the leadership position.
Mike Krzyzewski
#75. The man above has given me some unbelievable abilities to play the game of basketball. I just try to take advantage of it every night. I got the trust of my teammates and my coaching staff to go in there and let it go.
LeBron James
#76. It's not what you teach, it's what you emphasize.
John Wooden
#77. If you want to be in the game you better shoot 75% from the line.
Pat Summitt
#78. I only use statistics to reinforce what I already think, or if it's something unusual.
Dean Smith
#79. I don't look at myself as a basketball coach. I look at myself as a leader who happens to coach basketball.
Mike Krzyzewski
#80. The mismatch is not what gets you beat. What gets you beat is giving up the uncontested, open shot.
Rick Majerus
#81. Criticize on defense and encourage on offense.
John Brady
#82. Defense can't guard two things in a row.
Chuck Daly
#83. I've always believed in quickness over strength and size.
Dean Smith
#84. Good players can take coaching; great players can take coaching and learn.
John Wooden
#85. Defense doesn't break down on the help, it breaks down on the recovery.
Chuck Daly
#88. When you watch the game, be a student of the game.
Don Meyer
#90. It's what you get from games you lose that is extremely important.
Pat Riley
#91. Good people are happy when something good happens to someone else.
Dean Smith
#92. I didn't get into teaching and coaching for the number of wins or the money. It was a passion for trying to help young people
Bo Ryan
#93. Help your players to control their emotions - do this through example.
Norm Sloan
#94. Teamwork doesn't come naturally. It must be taught.
Pat Summitt
#95. It is not what you teach, but what you emphasize.
Don Meyer
#96. Do passing drills that come from your offense.
John Wooden
#97. When you're a coach you've got to go up the ladder, you've got to be ready to travel. That's the nature of coaching
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
#98. Good shooters take the shots; best shooters take most of the shots.
Don Meyer
#99. Your program must have an overriding purpose which is clearly visible and which teaches lessons beyond winning.
Don Meyer
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