Coach Wooden's Greatest Secret: The Power of a Lot of Little Things Done Well by Williams Pat

Author:Williams, Pat [Williams, Pat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SEL021000
ISBN: 9781441212603
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2014-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

The Consistency of French Fries

Consistency was always very important to Coach Wooden. In Wooden on Leadership, he wrote:

I am very leery of excess in most things—language, dress, hair cuts, and much else. But I especially dislike emotional excess because it produces inconsistency. . . . The hallmark of successful leadership is consistently maximum performance. Emotionalism opens a leader to inconsistency. Seek intensity coupled with emotional discipline. Display those behaviors and then demand them from those you lead. A leader with a volatile temperament is vulnerable. And so is the team he or she leads.2

One of the most intense rivalries in the NFL is between the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts. Tony Dungy, who coached the Colts from 2002 until his retirement in 2008, wrote about one key game in that rivalry, a Monday night duel in Massachusetts on November 7, 2005, against the defending Super Bowl champion Patriots. Though the Colts were undefeated (7–0) thus far, the Colts’ quarterback, Peyton Manning, was winless (0–7) against New England in Foxboro. Going into that game, Dungy knew the key to winning was consistency.

“I kept preaching to our guys,” Dungy recalled, “that we shouldn’t think about it being New England. We just needed to focus on the Colts. We needed to think about what it took for us to play well and not worry about anything else.”

The team got the message. Manning kept the Patriots defense on their heels all night, finishing the game with a record 28 out of 37 completions for 321 yards and three touchdowns. Running back Edgerrin James gained 104 yards on 34 carries. Receivers Marvin Harrison and Reggie Wayne both had 100-yard receiving games.

“We won, 40–21,” Dungy wrote. Now the Colts were 8–0, but Coach Dungy knew there was a danger in that victory over New England. “I started to get concerned about how the media would react to this win. After [we had beaten] the defending champs in their stadium, I was sure [the media] would be ready to anoint us the new kings. . . . I wanted to make sure we didn’t fall into that trap.”

After the game, Coach Dungy stood before the team and delivered a talk designed to put that victory into perspective. He began with a verse from Scripture, Proverbs 16:18: “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” Then he told his team, “We won big today, but let’s not forget how we did it. We worked hard. This was only one game, and now it’s over. We need to continue to do what we do.”

In other words, the Indianapolis Colts needed to be consistent. They couldn’t afford to be one team against the Super Bowl champion Patriots one week and a different team against the 0-7 Houston Texans the following week. Coach Dungy worried that all the adulation in the press would give them prideful egos and a haughty spirit—which would lead to a fall. As he stood before his team, groping for a way to

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