Wooden's Complete Guide to Leadership by John Wooden & Steve Jamison

Author:John Wooden & Steve Jamison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw Hill LLC
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

HOW NOT TO WIN 94 STRAIGHT GAMES

A sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times wrote an article on the Bruins at one point speculating that if the Bruins would win two more games that season and all 30 games in each of the next two seasons, UCLA would have a winning steak of 94, thus surpassing the national collegiate record of 60 in a row set in 1954–55–56 by Bill Russell and K. C. Jones’s University of San Francisco team.

This article illustrates just how out of control expectations had become: Pundits were predicting perfect season after perfect season—looking years ahead—and those prognostications were making their way into the national media.

Against that backdrop, the greatest task I faced was to stay focused on the job of teaching the team how to improve a little each day and forgetting about scoreboards, predictions, and the assumptions of others. This job is difficult enough, but I also faced the greater challenge of getting those I coached to do the same—to ignore all the external “noise” that had the potential to derail the team’s focus during the season.

The lesson I learned was inescapable: The surest way not to win 94 games in a row (or even two games in a row) is to start thinking about it—to be looking up at that scoreboard and out into the future.

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