What’s the common thread for being highly successful as a college basketball coach?
Being able to recruit the best players that will be able to perform and fit in with the chemistry of the program is certainly an important characterisitic of winning coaches.
Being able to get players to play a role, as a super star or as supporting member of the team.
Having great assistants that will be able to execute a practice plan, a game plan, and understand their roles.
Supportive administration.
The following items are imo, not essential but certainly helpful:
Favorable media coverage
Student fan base… making your home court a true advantage
Athletes that understand the importance of pursuing academic goals
Courage to do what is right instead of doing what is easy
Thinking future but tending to the present
I’ll preface this post by saying I live in Connecticut, and UCONN basketball has dominated the nations top seats for collegiate basketball for many many years.
**Geno Auriemma ** (women’s) and Jim Calhoun (Mens) are known across the country as some of the finest collegiate basketball coaches. See more here . Both set records for winning the championship together in the same year for the top division 1 college basketball team. Very impressive.
As a prof. in a neighboring school I will say this about Jim Calhoun. He is known the the colligiate community for being respectful to his players, working them to the bone, and being very, VERY selective with his players. His scouts are notoriously knowledgeable about picking top players from highschools, and coaches tactics for player behviour are known across campus…i.e. he put’s up with nothing. If you do not give 100% he is on your ass.
In all Calhoun is a great coach because he know’s the game of basketball like most people know the face of their maternal mother. Plain and simple: to put in the words of Larry Bird - if I coached half as good as Jim Calhoun I’d have a team that win’s as much as his does…
I think jacksen9 has it right for a college basketball coach in this day in age. It would have been quite different back in the 1950s (dominated by Adolph Rupp) and 1960s (dominated by John Wooden).
Rupp and Wooden were quite different characters. Rupp was able to get the top talent in the country to come to Kentucky through a variety of reasons, and not all of them were on the up and up. But he was, and still is, beloved in Kentucky because he won. Rupp was eventually brought down to earth when his resistance to recruiting black players finally caught up to him.
Wooden was a man who had toiled for many years as a good, but not great coach at Indiana State and UCLA until the early 1960s when he managed to get his team to the Final Four, where they lost to Cincinnati. In 1964 Wooden was able to utilize a team that had no true big man to win a championship (which he repeated the next season.)
From this Wooden was able to attract great stars and Lew Alcindor and then later Bill Walton showed up and the rest was history.
Both Rupp and Wooden worked their players hard and both would tell you that practices were important than games. Wooden was fanatical in his preparation of practices. He didn’t get too caught up in game situations and hated calling the first timeout of a game.
Wooden’s UCLA teams were not without their sins, but Wooden generally turned a blind eye to what UCLA boosters did for his players (read up about Sam Gilbert sometime).
Ultimately, history will look more favorably on Wooden than Rupp because Wooden won wore championships, lived longer, had the reputation of being a nice guy, and did not really care what the skin color of his players was.
I can’t say for all college coaches, but I think there is a type of successful college coach typified in Coach Krzyzewski and his mentor Bobby Knight: they provide the leadership for their teams, rather than look for the players be they Captains or “Superstar’s” to provide the leadership role — this is a matter of degree of course every does this some what, I am saying they do it more so than many less successful coaches.
That is why with their teams no single superstar or player is dominant over a season – or at least it is very rare that this happens. They emphasize unselfish play, but it is more than that. They find players who will play within their system, accept the coaches way and then build the team. These two coaches again and again emphasize buying into the system, not selling out to critics and expect 100% commitment - and give it yourself. All that, plus they say : Losing is the worst thing that can possibly happen.
It is not a formula all coaches have followed, for these two and others like them it has worked