Bobby Knight Quotes - Page 2

If you're not careful, you can get a grossly over-inflated opinion about your popularity.

I think that we as a people are always prone to think about, well, tomorrow will be a better day. Well, why will it be a better day? And I think the more that we believe in doing things better, doing the right thing rather than hoping that that's going to happen, let's make it happen.

Good planning avoids the need for fixing up a project that plowed ahead without thought... about potential pitfalls.

Practice structure determines success.

Your biggest opponent isn't the other guy. It's human nature.

All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.

Perform drills that force your players to think

So when I hear a guy after a game-winning home run say or gesture that God was on his side, I think to myself, 'He's saying God screwed the pitcher.

When we're playing a good scoring center, we tell our team that it is not our defensive man's job to stop the center. It's the responsibility of our perimeter people to stop the ball from going inside.

We talk in coaching about "winners" - kids, and I've had a lot of them, who just will not allow themselves or their team to lose. Coaches call that a will to win. I don't. I think that puts the emphasis in the wrong place. Everybody has a will to win. What's far more important is having the will to prepare to win.

To be as good as it can be, a team has to buy into what you as the coach are doing. They have to feel you're a part of them and they're a part of you.

Defense is all about helping. No one can guard a good dribbler, You have to walk kids through how to help and then how to help the helper

Mental toughness is to physical as four is to one.

Passing is your best weapon against man to man. Dribble penetration is your best weapon against zone.

The red I wear is Indiana's red, not Moscow's red. Indiana was here long before communism.

I think the ability to motivate might be interpreted as the ability to lead, or to show people their goals or, perhaps more important, what their potential is - as a person as well as a player. You've got to show players that being part of a team will carry over to the experience of becoming part of society.

The single most important aspect of coaching is running effective practices

Learn to do things right and then do them right every time.

Players must be able to carry out simple instructions from the bench to the court. If they can't, then they can't play

I think that it's perhaps harder to learn from victory than it is from defeat. I think that we don't want defeat. We don't want defeat in sport. We don't want defeat in life. How are we going to be beaten? All right. We have to deal with those things. What's going to cause us to lose the game, whatever the game might be?

Victory favors the team making the fewest mistakes.

I recognize that I have a problem with my temper. For those times it has ever caused me to do anything that gave anyone understandable and justifiable reason to be upset, I am sincerely sorry.

I think that to stop an offense, you must go to the heart of that offense. If it is a particular move, a screen, the break, an outstanding scorer, whatever it is that they like to do and rely on, you have to work in your plans on taking that completely or as much as possible away from them.

All the years I coached, we sent a card to every professor for each kid I had, and I was able to keep track on a daily basis who cut class or who was dropping a grade average. What I did was bring that kid in at 5:00 in the morning, and he would run the stairs from the bottom to the top until I told him to quit.

Al McGuire talked to me I don't know how many times about dealing with the press: "You've got to be a con man." I tried that for a day or so, but it never really worked for me.