I wanted young men who wanted to play for UCLA, and not one that I had to talk into playing for UCLA. I always believed that the way to build a great team is to find the kind of people you want to work with and tell them the truth.

He didn’t ask for mistake-free games. He didn’t demand that his players never lose. He asked for full preparation and full effort from them. “Did I win? Did I lose? Those are the wrong questions. The correct question is: Did I make my best effort?” If so, he says, “You may be outscored but <i>you will never lose.</i>

if you do the following three things, you will be successful in major college basketball. If you don’t do them, it will be most difficult.” He didn’t say it would be impossible — typical of John Wooden — but he said it would be difficult. I was scrambling for my pen when he said, “Those three things are fairly simple: Number one, make certain, Dale, you always have better players than anybody you play. Now, with that locked up, make sure you always get the better players to put the team above themselves. And number three — this is very important, Dale Brown,” he said, “don’t try to be some coaching genius, or give the guys too much information, or too much stuff; always practice simplicity with constant repetition.

"Once you join the team, you live at a certain standard that I play the game and I wasn't going to take anything less. When people see this, they gonna say, "He wasn't really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant." Well, that's you, because you never won anything. I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win and be a part of it as well."

When he says, “win,” he’s also referring to a single question, with its apt acronym, that guides what he expects from his players: “What’s important now?

Coach John Wooden [UCLA] taught me that sports wasn’t just about making us better athletes, but about making us better people. Compassion, kindness, and morality were more important than a championship season. Fame wasn’t an accomplishment, it was an opportunity to show our gratitude to the community that we are a part of by changing it for the better.

"If any one premise typifies my teams in all the years I've coached, it is this concept. Often as a player, I'd tell myself, "I may play someone better than I am, but I'll never run against one who is going to be in better condition" And I never played against a man in my life I felt was in better shape, and Lambert often cited me as an example of top conditioning."

That, in my opinion, was his primary leadership asset: his ability to teach people how to think and play at a different and much higher, and, at times, perfect level. He accomplished this in three ways: (1) he had a tremendous knowledge of all aspects of the game and a visionary approach to offense; (2) he brought in a great staff and coaches who knew how to coach, how to complement his own teaching of what we needed to know to rise to his standard of performance; and (3) he taught us to hate mistakes.

A coach yells at the kid he thinks can improve but the coach will not yell at the kid who he/she knows won't.

Excellence must be pursued, it must be wooed with all of one’s might and every bit of effort that we have each day there’s a new encounter, each week is a new challenge. All of the noise and all of the glamour all of the color all of the excitement all of the rings and all of the money. These are the things that linger only in the memory. But the spirit, the will to excel, the will to win, these are the things that endure.” — Vince Lombardi (The winning coach from Super Bowl I and Super Bowl II)

and he learned that when Johnson gave an assignment, no excuses were accepted. “He used to say, ‘I want only can do people.’ That was one of his favorite expressions. ‘I only want can do people around. I don’t want anybody who tells me that they can’t do something.’

school. I never tried to talk a student into coming to UCLA. I tried to show him what was there and what to expect, and I never told him he was going to play; I told him he would have the opportunity to play, and if he was good enough, then he’d be able to. Rosy forecasts during the “courtship” of a player can only lead to disappointment and distrust if anything fails to meet that student’s expectations.

If you were negative or thought something couldn’t be done, you were not invited to the next meeting,” Mueller recalls. “He just wanted people who would make things happen.

The message was that if you want to win championships, you have to let people focus on what they do best while you focus on what you do best. For him, that was rebounding, running the floor, and blocking shots.