John Wooden – Master Teacher

Coaching is teaching and no one epitomizes that more than John Wooden. He was a teacher of basketball and life; his classroom was the basketball court. It is no coincidence that many of his ideas about coaching were forged in the classroom as a high school English teacher. He was not a complexifier, he kept things basic and fundamental. The emphasis was on repetition and mastery of basics. He carefully planed his practices down to the minute, spending up to two hours a day planning the training sessions. In a study done on his coaching by two psychologists, Ronald Gallimore & Roland Tharp originally done in 1975 and updated in 2004 (read more) they observed 2,636 acts of coaching: 6.9% were compliments, 6.6% were expressions of discipline, and most importantly 75% was pure information! The comments were short, punctuated, numerous and rarely longer that 20 seconds – no lectures! John Wooden was Twitter coach before Twitter. Coach like John Wooden coached, know your message, communicate the message and do it in 140 characters maximum.