“Build your empire on the firm foundation of the fundamentals.” -Lou Holtz
John Wooden was born in the small town of Hall, Indiana in 1910. Just before his 22nd birthday he began his basketball coaching career at Dayton High School in Kentucky. They finished 6-11 on the year. This was Coach Wooden’s only season in which his team had a losing record. After two years at Dayton, he returned to Indiana where he took a job at South Bend Central High School as an English teacher and coach of the basketball, baseball, and tennis teams. Coach left South Bend Central after 9 years to serves as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during World War II. During his 11 years coaching High School basketball, coach had an impressive 218-42 record. Following the war in 1946, Coach took a job at Indiana State University as the athletic director as well as the basketball and baseball coach. Under coach Wooden, Indiana State won conference championships in 1946 and 1947 and finished as runner up in the 1947 NAIA tournament.
Shortly after the NAIA tournament, Wooden received a number of coaching offers at larger schools. One of the offers came from UCLA. Coach wrote, “Immediately after accepting the position, I arranged to take a week off from Indiana State to go to Los Angeles to conduct spring basketball practice which was then permitted. On my previous visit I had been all over the campus, visited various administrators and officials, but had not met a one of the basketball players. When I went up on the floor for the first time in the spring of 1948 and put them through that first practice, I was very disappointed. I felt my Indiana State team could have named the score against them. I was shattered. Had I known how to abort the agreement in an honorable manner, I would have done so. . . However, that would be contrary to my creed. I don’t believe in quitting, so I resolved to work hard [and] try to develop the talent on hand. . . After the close of school at Indian State, I moved my family to Los Angeles, realizing that I had a tremendous job ahead to turn things around. By the time regular practice started, the press had already tabbed us to finish last in the old Pacific Coast Conference. The year before UCLA won 12 and lost 13, and as far as I could determine the three best players . . . were gone. It was like starting from scratch. Almost all of the early practice sessions were devoted to fundamentals, drills, conditioning, and trying to put my philosophy over. Within a few weeks things didn’t look quite as dark. . . We turned things around . . . and won the Southern Division title with a 10 and 2 record. In all, we won 22 and lost 7 for the full season—the most wins any UCLA team had ever compiled in history.”1
This was the beginning of many accomplishments at UCLA for Coach Wooden; however, it took time to develop a national championship team. John Wooden wrote, “It takes time to create excellence. If it could be done quickly more people would do it.”2 After Coach Wooden’s arrival at UCLA, it was 16 years before they won their first national championship. Over the final 12 years of Wooden’s coaching career, UCLA won 10 national championships. So what was Coach Wooden’s secret to success. Coach taught, “Little things done well is probably the greatest secret to success. . . If you do enough small things right, big things can happen.”3
Coach Wooden focused on teaching and practicing the fundamentals. He wrote, “I believe in the basics: attention to, and perfection of, tiny details that might commonly be overlooked. They may seem trivial, perhaps even laughable to those who don’t understand, but they aren’t. They are fundamental to your progress in basketball, business and life. They are the difference between champions and near-champions. . . There are little details in everything you do, and if you get away from any one of the little details, you’re not teaching the things as a whole. For it is the little things, which, taken together, make the whole. . . . Little things make the big things happen. In fact . . . there are no big things, only a logical accumulation of little things done at a very high standard of performance.”4 Wooden said that there were many who laughed at his repeated focus on and perfection of the small, simple, and basic fundamentals. He wrote “But I wasn’t laughing. I knew very well [they] were the foundation for UCLA’s success.”5
Bill Walton wrote, “Coach Wooden broke it down so the players could master the fundamentals and therefore could play up to their full potential. That’s the thing I remember about UCLA basketball. The practices were more important to me than the games . . . I remember those simple fundamentals. . . and everything else would take care of itself.”6 “[Gail] Goodrich, who played on UCLA’s 30-0 national championship team in 1964, said that he knew he wanted to be a Bruin after he saw his first UCLA practice while still in high school. “I had never seen anything so organized and precise in my life.”7 Carroll Adams said of Coach’s practices, “He just drilled you on the strict fundamentals, and when that situation came up in a ball game you handled it because it had become second nature to you.”8 George Stanich recalls that at UCLA, “The practices were the most important thing. Doing the little things.”9
“From time to time, other coaches or sportswriters would say that UCLA’s basketball teams were much too predictable. . . Everyone knew what they were going to try to do, but they did it so well that no one could stop them anyway! . . . When he was told that others call his offense ‘predictable,’ Coach simply said, ‘I am not a strategy coach. I’m a practice coach’. . . Coach drilled the fundamentals into his players.”10 John Green, an All-American at UCLA, said, “Coach used the same plays year after year. Everybody knew what we were going to do, but very few could stop us. That’s because Coach had us do things over and over again until we did them right.”11
“Ex-UCLA basketball coach Jim Harrick said, ‘John Wooden . . . emphasized that basketball is a very simple game . . . You learn to win games from 3:00 – 5:30 everyday at practice, certainly not the night of the game. Coach agrees: ‘What I taught was as simple as one, two, three.’”12
In 1975, during coach Wooden’s final season, Myron Finkbeiner recalls watching the Bruins practice during the Final Four, “It was amazing to watch them, because Coach put them through the same drills he had used on the first day of practice at the beginning of the season. They ran through simple passing drills, pivoting moves, blocking-out routines. John Wooden was redoing the fundamentals all over again.”13 UCLA went on to win its 10th national championship. After 40 years of coaching, Wooden’s continued to focus on, teach, and practice the simple fundamentals for they were the source of his success. Coach lived his words, “Do the basics right, and do as well as you can with what God gave you, and you will be surprised at how far you can get in life. . . Little things make big things happen.”14
Special Offer
Since publishing “Does Your Bag Have Holes?” in 2007, I have had numerous requests from both corporations and business book clubs to publish a book shorter in length and written to a general audience. From this request came the birth of my latest book, “8 Attributes of Great Achievers,” published by Tremendous Life Books.
It has already sold over 10,000 copies, and I have had several people ask about case orders so we have added an option on our website to order a case of 20 books for only $99 with free shipping. That is only $4.95 per book.
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Upcoming Books
I am working with the publisher on the cover design right now for my next book Twelve Paradoxes of the Gospel which is currently scheduled for release in July. I will be in the recording studio all next week reading 8 Attributes of Great Achievers and Twelve Paradoxes of the Gospel for unabridged audio books which will also be released sometime this summer. I will keep you posted.
Notes
1. John Wooden, Jack Tobin, They Call Me Coach (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2004) p. 76-78.
2. John Wooden, Steve Jamison, Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 1997) p. 191.
3. John Wooden, Steve Jamison, My Personal Best (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2004) p. 106.
4. John Wooden, Steve Jamison, Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 1997) p. 60; Swen Nater, Ronald Gallimore, You Haven’t Taught Until They Have Learned: John Wooden’s Teaching Principles and Practices (Fitness Info Tech, 2005) p. 91; John Wooden, Steve Jamison, Wooden on Leadership (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2005) p. 135.
5. John Wooden, Steve Jamison, Wooden on Leadership (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2005) p. 136.
6. Pat Williams, David Winbish, How to Be Like Coach Wooden (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 2006) p. 72.
7. Pat Williams, David Winbish, How to Be Like Coach Wooden (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 2006) p. 80.
8. Pat Williams, David Winbish, How to Be Like Coach Wooden (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 2006) p. 154.
9. Pat Williams, David Winbish, How to Be Like Coach Wooden (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 2006) p. 195.
10. Pat Williams, David Winbish, How to Be Like Coach Wooden (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 2006) p. 72.
11. Pat Williams, David Winbish, How to Be Like Coach Wooden (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 2006) p. 151
12. Pat Williams, David Winbish, How to Be Like Coach Wooden (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 2006) p. 73.
13. Pat Williams, David Winbish, How to Be Like Coach Wooden (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 2006) p. 153-154.
14. Neville L. Johnson, The John Wooden Pyramid of Success (Los Angeles: Cool Titles, 2003) p. 331, 191.
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