Quotes About Basketball Coaches

#1. True basketball coaches are great teachers and you do not humiliate, you do not physically go after, you do not push or shove, you do not berate, if you are a true coach. If you humiliate or curse them, that won't do it. Coaches like that are not coaches.

Morgan Wootten

#2. Teenage boys fall in love with girls who have blond hair and blue eyes. Basketball coaches fall in love with players who have a cerebral court sense and a great jump shot.

John Feinstein

#3. Successful basketball coaches are those that subscribe to a system that is based on sound fundamental teachings.

Don Meyer

#4. Alvin's the coach. We must be the Clippers. And I must be Olowokandi. Nooooo!

Shaquille O'Neal

#5. Confrontation simply means meeting the truth head-on.

Mike Krzyzewski

#6. A lot of guys go through their whole careers and don't win a championship, but are still great coaches.

Chuck Daly

#7. You learn from everybody. You learn from the players. You learn from great coaches. You learn from great teams

Tom Thibodeau

#8. I disobeyed a basic basketball rule and never boxed out. I figured that if I had the inside position I had enough of an advantage to just go get the ball. And coaches left me alone because I got it.

Dolph Schayes

#9. Pat Riley is the best coach I've ever had.

Shaquille O'Neal

#10. 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

#11. I could run 200 yards at a stretch, I could duck between players, I felt free to make plays that suited me best. It wasn't like football then and basketball today, where coaches tell you what foot to put down.

Jim Brown

#12. A good coach improves your game. A great coach improves your life.

Michael Josephson

#13. Being involved in competition is a privilege and an opportunity. Seek to make the most of that opportunity by pushing yourself to the limit of your abilities. When it is over, you will have earned the respect of your opponents, your coaches, and yourself.

Tony La Russa

#14. I think no one has written a history of the great coaches who were around 30 to 40 years ago who taught the fundamentals.

Oscar Robertson

#15. I don't think coaches should have to wear mic's. It is an invasion of privacy. We are trying to accomplish things, and wearing microphones may hinder development by straining the nature of relationships coaches and players have.

Steve Nash

#16. I tell everyone that I have 25,000 assistant coaches. If I want to know something, I just go to the grocery store.'

Don Meyer

#17. Winning coaches look for opportunities to praise. Anything that reflects a commitment to the team is praiseworthy

Bill Parcells

#18. I don't hire good coaches, I hire good people. If they turn out to be good coaches, too, that's a plus.

Geno Auriemma

#19. Many of the most successful coaches and managers have come from players who never reached the highest level. The one exception seems to be basketball, where many of the greatest stars at least tried to coach a team.

George Vecsey

#20. What excites me the most is when a coach calls a timeout and chews out his forward because I just dunked on his head.

Karl Malone

#21. I never let our players get satisfied, I never let our Coaches get satisfied, I was never satisfied. We can always do it better.

John Wooden

#22. It always amazes me that spectators want to coach, coaches want to officiate, and officials just want to watch the game

Lou Holtz

#23. All really successful coaches have a system.

Jim Valvano

#24. In recent generations, women's sports have been a blessing. Some of us can remember the bad old days in the '50s, when we would discover in casual schoolyard play that a girl could outrun most of us or hold her own in basketball or hit a softball - but there were no teams, no coaches, for girls.

George Vecsey

#25. I think coaches sometimes foul their own players out of game by benching them too long when in foul trouble

Jeff Van Gundy

#26. I don't think you can explain why all these other sports and college basketball have a fair representation of African American coaches, but college football doesn't. You can dig and scramble and scratch, but at the end of the day I think it's just pure, old-fashioned racism.

Frank Deford

#27. The fact is that everybody around a college basketball game - the coaches, the announcers, even the referees at a lower level - calculates when the game is really over. They calculate it with intuition and guesswork.

Bill James

#28. You build your program from the ideas of great coaches.

Don Meyer

#29. On good teams coaches hold players accountable, on great teams players hold players accountable

Joe Dumars

#30. He looks like a woman coach sometimes. I guess he's just trying to get into certain people's heads, but it won't work with me. Like a woman who coaches and cries all the time. He can't get in my head. He's a crybaby.

Shaquille O'Neal

#31. College coaches want to power the ball inside, they want (their post players) to power the ball up, but no one can shoot from that 15-foot area anymore.

Oscar Robertson

#32. I'm a lot better coach when I have really good players

Chuck Daly

#33. In all the research you do as a coach, studying other coaches and championship-type situations, you find that all those teams combined talent with great defense. You've got to stop other teams to win.

Pat Riley

#34. Coaches win practices, players win games

Pete Carril

#35. Don't try to imitate other coaches. Be your own person with your own style and do your own thing.

Hubie Brown

#36. Sometimes the coaches tell me to be selfish, but my game won't let me be selfish.

LeBron James

#37. As I've said, basketball has been, I think, a real cooperative venture. There have been a lot of people that have been involved in it: coaches, administrators - not recently - fans and nobody, nobody any more so than students over the years.

Bobby Knight

#38. As coaches we talk about two things: offense and defense. There is a third phase we neglect, which is more important. It's conversion from offense to defense and defense to offense.

Bobby Knight

#39. You don't win games as a coach during games. You win games as a coach before games. Players win during games, not coaches

Red Auerbach