Beyond Basketball Page 7

  From that day at practice with Tommy in 1983, I learned that the things you teach do not necessarily apply to everyone in every situation. And it was a lesson I had learned from an eighteen-year-old freshman point guard! Learning from your students is something a teacher in class may be able to do by asking them questions and allowing them to participate. Interaction between the coach and the player, the teacher and the student, or the parent and the child is the best way for both parties to learn.

  I always remind myself that you learn forever and from everyone. That is why, with everyone I meet, I try to listen with an open mind and the willingness to learn. You never know when or from whom your next great lesson will come!

  Love

  In 1974, when I was twenty-seven, my wife, Mickie, and I took a big chance and gave up the steady income and benefits of my being an Army captain with five years of experience to pursue a career as a basketball coaching family.

  The situation was a difficult one for a young family. With our four-year-old daughter, Debbie, we moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where I become a graduate assistant at Indiana University. In addition to attending classes and studying, a graduate assistant’s duties were the same as a full-time assistant, including going on the road to recruit. As a result, I was away from home literally every weekend. Mickie had a job at a local bank in order to supplement our income and was also working hard raising Debbie. It was difficult for us to find time to spend as a family, and many times we felt very distant from one another.

  One evening when I returned home after a recruiting trip, my wife and I began a discussion about us. “What is going on? What is this about?” she asked, in reference to our current situation. “We are always apart. You don’t spend time with us. Why are we even married? Why are we doing this?” she said. Her questions really bothered me, and, distraught, I put my head in my hands.

  “I don’t know,” I responded. “It must be love.”

  After a slight pause, Mickie burst out with laughter and I burst out with relief. I had given the right answer, the only answer. Then the two of us laughed together. “I think you’re right,” she said.

  For me, that story is a reminder that love does not always make sense, nor is it always convenient. Even when circumstances were seemingly against us, Mickie and I always told ourselves and each other that we had to work hard to keep love strong and to nurture it. We believe that love and marriage is, above all else, about making each other better.

  The two of us have spent thirty-seven years together, and as our family increased to include three daughters, we learned that love grows as our family does. As our girls have grown older, each of them has fallen in love and married. In their choice of spouses, my wife and I have asked them only one question. Do you make each other better? In all three cases, they responded with an enthusiastic “Yes!” And they were right. All three of my sons-in-law have made my daughters better, and in turn, my daughters have made them better, the same way Mickie and I have always done.

  As your family becomes larger, showing love may become less convenient because of the many responsibilities and often conflicting schedules. But we have always sought ways to express our love for one another, whether those means are conventional or out of the ordinary.

  Because Mickie and I have that foundation of love and the love has grown to include our daughters and their families, we are able to extend our love to a larger group, the Duke Basketball family. I love each of my assistants and players, and so do my wife and daughters. With them, just like with my wife and family, we have to work on our relationships and find ways to express our love for one another. When times are difficult, when I experience setbacks, and when I want to ask why I am even doing this, I tell myself it must be love.

  Motivation

  Motivation: the extra push needed to reach a goal.

  You can’t just write out a game plan of how to motivate people, you have to do it by feel. You have to know your people.

  One of the best ways to motivate is to be sure that you have surrounded yourself with great teammates. I think my mom explained it the best. As I was walking out the door of our inner-city Chicago home on my first day of high school, she told me, “Mike, be sure that you get on the right bus.”

  “Mom, I know what bus to take. Damen to Armitage or Division to Grand—”

  “No, that’s not what I mean,” she said. She went on to explain that I was starting high school and that I would meet many people and learn many new things. She wanted me to make sure that I chose the right people to get on my figurative bus. And she did not want me to get on the bus of anyone who would lead me in the wrong direction. In other words, she meant for me to be on great teams.

  I have been lucky to be on some tremendous teams in my life: the United States Army, Duke University, my church, and my family. I have found that great teams serve to motivate me as an individual.

  When you are on a bus with good people, you and those people are mutually motivated simply by being around one another. There is an atmosphere and an attitude conducive to winning.

  Once you feel confident that you are on the right bus, the next step is establishing great relationships with the people around you. For my team, this begins in the recruiting process. We do not over-recruit and are very choosy when offering a scholarship. In fact, in all of my twenty-six seasons at Duke, we have never once utilized our full allotment of scholarships. Sometimes by adding more in terms of quantity, you actually get less in terms of team cohesiveness and the ability to form relationships. We seek young men who have talent, of course, but also those who possess the values and qualities necessary to be part of a team, young men who we believe will share in our vision. Young men of character.

  The development of these relationships takes time. There is time spent working on the fundamentals of basketball and teaching them our team offensive and defensive concepts, but there is also time spent talking to one another, goofing with one another, and sharing moments off the court. People tell you things in different ways and a leader’s job is to learn that where one individual may sit down and say, “Coach, I am really down right now,” another may say it with a facial expression, their body language, or merely with their eyes. There are countless different ways of communicating. And I have to learn to respond to each. One of the most fascinating things about leading is figuring out how different people communicate their emotions. My goal is to learn, for each kid and for the team as a whole, how to recognize what they are attempting to communicate. I get better as a coach as I learn to respond in a quicker and more effective manner.

  Once you come to know and understand the people on your bus as individuals, you will also come to realize that everyone needs to be motivated differently. There is no specific formula. I motivate by feel. There are times for patting on the back, times for hugging, and times for yelling. I don’t give my teams an inspirational Braveheart-like speech in the locker room before every single game. Sometimes you can look in their eyes and see that they are already prepared to play. In other words, motivating people must be a flexible and versatile process. And you have to know the people on your bus well enough to see which tactics to apply at what times. I follow my heart in these situations. I instinctively react to the needs of the individual or the team.

  Even as a coach and a leader, I will not always drive the bus. At times, I have to let others take the wheel. Maybe there is nothing I can say to my team before a game that will get them in the right frame of mind, but there may be something that Steve Wojciechowski can say as an assistant coach, or something that Chris Duhon can say as a team captain. No one person can be the sole source of a team’s motivation. Everybody on the bus feeds off one another’s excitement, belief, and commitment to the team.

  Over the years I have been motivated by what a player says or the look on his face. In the locker room before a game, I might be nervous as I walk in to talk to my team. When I see David, Billy, Tommy, Danny, Tony, Trajan, Chris, and countless othe
rs sitting at the edge of their chairs in great anticipation of competing, it always motivates me to be a better leader. When we motivate each other, our bus usually ends up at a great destination.

  Next Play

  In basketball and in life, I have always maintained the philosophy of “next play.” Essentially, what it means is that whatever you have just done is not nearly as important as what you are doing right now.

  The “next play” philosophy emphasizes the fact that the most important play of the game or life moment on which you should always focus is the next one. It is not about the turnover I committed last time down the court, it’s not even about the three-pointer I hit to tie the game, it is about what’s next. To waste time lamenting a mistake or celebrating a success is distracting and can leave you and your team unprepared for what you are about to face. It robs you of the ability to do your best at that moment and to give your full concentration. It’s why I love basketball. Plays happen with rapidity and there may be no stop-action. Basketball is a game that favors the quick thinker and the person who can go on to the next play the fastest.

  It is the same in life. If one of my daughters brought home a bad grade on a report card, of course my wife and I would be concerned and feel compelled to take action. However, it is fruitless to continue to harp on what she should have done last semester to raise her grade. That is all in the past. The grade is what it is and will remain as such. However, it becomes imperative to focus on what’s next: the next homework assignment, the next study session she can attend, the next test. These upcoming events grant the opportunity for improvement, that the next report card could show an A. If we work together to focus on this next play, we will all feel good that we have addressed the problem and not merely bemoaned what we should or could have done in the past.

  In our basketball season, the ultimate moment for “next play” is March Madness, tournament time. At this point, I always tell my team, “Okay, as of right now, we are 0–0,” meaning all of our wins and losses, any praise or criticism we have received, all individual performances and honors mean nothing now. All that matters is the journey on which we are about to embark.

  This past 2006 season, before the Atlantic Coast Conference and NCAA tournaments, my staff and I needed to find an impactful way to emphasize our collective need to move on to the next play. We had a great regular season and ended up 27–3, we were No. 3 in the national polls, and were the ACC regular season champs. Additionally, two of our players, J.J. Redick and Shelden Williams, had tremendous seasons in which they broke numerous individual records and were given constant media attention as two of the best players in the country. However, we had just come off two of the worst weeks of basketball that we had played all year, with back-to-back conference losses against Florida State and North Carolina. We were very distracted.

  The first part of our plan was to change venues, to get out of the locker room and the gym and meet somewhere comfortable, intimate, and, most importantly, different. We scheduled our team meal and meeting in one of the banquet rooms at the nearby Washington Duke Inn. After our meal, we conducted a thorough analysis of the tape of our last game against UNC. We got out a chalkboard and created two columns: good plays and bad plays. The motivation behind this was that we wanted to get a really good look at who we were as a team at that particular time. Once we finished reviewing the tape, our managers brought out two large cardboard boxes, one labeled “Preseason NIT,” and the other “Regular Season.”

  I told my team that we were going to fill the boxes with everything that had come before this moment in time. At the beginning of the season, our team had won the NIT championship. So in that box we put the trophy from that tournament, all-tournament team and MVP plaques of our individual players, and the tapes of the games. In the “Regular Season” box we did the same, filling it with scouting reports and game tapes from our regular season games. I then asked each member of the team to write down on a piece of paper anything that they wanted to include: memories and frustrations from the season to that point, individual honors they had received, anything that they felt should be included relating to their personal experiences in our season. The personal statements were sealed in envelopes marked with each player’s name and placed in the box.

  “Okay,” I said, “when we close these boxes, we are 0–0. We have had a great season to this point and have many things to be proud of. But that is not for right now. At the end of our season, we will open these boxes, return your envelopes to each of you, and collectively remember and recognize all that we have done together. But for right now, it’s on to the next play.”

  We won the ACC Tournament, another outstanding team accomplishment, especially considering that only five teams in the past twenty years have won both the outright regular season championship and the ACC Tournament championship. They have all been Duke teams. Again, something to celebrate. But not now. After we returned to Durham and the brackets for the NCAA tournament were revealed, our staff brought out another box labeled “ACC Tournament.” We filled that box, sealed it, and put it away.

  Bringing out a final empty box, this one labeled “NCAA Tournament,” I asked my team to imagine the things that we could put into this box. The next day, we would begin preparing for our first NCAA tournament game against Southern University. Next play.

  Ownership

  Whatever we have, let’s take care of it.

  My mom was a person of modest means. But everything she had, she valued. One day, getting off of a city bus in Chicago, she was attacked by three young men who tried to take her purse away from her. They knocked her down and pulled at her purse but she never surrendered it. The young men, seeing other people approaching, ran away. Afterward, my brother and I asked my mom, “Why didn’t you just give them the purse? They could have hurt you.” Her only response was, “It’s my purse. It didn’t belong to them.”

  I learned about ownership from both my mom and the neighborhood in which I grew up. It was not affluent or ritzy, but it was a great place to grow up because everyone took the time and effort to take care of it. Every day, I would see people planting flowers or sweeping the sidewalks, doing whatever they could to improve the community because they felt ownership of it. Watching the adults around me care for our neighborhood established a great foundation for me. I learned that if something belongs to me, I should take good care of it.

  At Duke, my staff and I try to create a climate where everyone believes it is theirs. When our players, managers, and staff feel ownership they feel empowered and proud. But, most importantly, they feel inspired to take care of the program, uphold its standards, and defend its beliefs.

  Often a leader feels as if he has to be in control of everything taking place on his or her team. I want my philosophy of leadership to create a much greater sense of ownership among all members of the team.

  Picture your team as a wagon wheel and you, the leader, as its hub. The spokes of the wheel run from the people on the outer rim to the leader at the center, representing the relationships that the leader forms with each member of the team. If this is how your team is modeled, imagine what happens to the wheel when the hub is removed. Without the leader, the entire team will collapse.

  Because I believe in making my teams stronger than any one individual, including myself as the leader, I have learned to operate in a different and much more effective way. Instead of having all relationships run directly to me, I have placed an emphasis on forming bonds among all members of the team. Now the spokes do not merely run from player to head coach but rather from player to player, assistant to player, manager to assistant, and so on. These relationships will sustain the wheel even if its hub is removed. The wheel is sustained by mutual ownership, not by a single individual serving as the wheel’s hub. We all do a better job of taking care of what’s ours when we feel as if the ownership is distributed equally.

  The team belongs to all of us and it is the responsibility of all of us to sustain it and to defen
d its values, purely because they are ours.

  OWNERSHIP IN ACTION

  One of my favorite cheers performed by our students and the rest of the “Cameron Crazies” in our home arena, Cameron Indoor Stadium, is a simple chant in which they merely repeat, “Our house . . . our house . . . our house!!!” Many students even have T-shirts that state this simple message.

  Our students actually feel like they are part of the team. They are not entertained by the team, they are on the team, it’s theirs. They are truly our “sixth man.” The message, “Our House,” is that we need to protect what is ours. Our players, our staff, and our students have an obligation to Duke University to do whatever we do with the utmost pride and intensity. The chant is a reminder that in our house, under our collective roof, we need to defend what belongs to us.

  I want to create an atmosphere in which everyone feels a part of the team and knows that they are important. They are! When everyone has this feeling of ownership, our wheel will never collapse.

  Passion

  When I have speaking engagements, I often tell my audience how lucky I am to have never had a job. After some confused laughter, I explain that, because I have always done what I love to do, I have never considered my work a job. I have merely been pursuing my passion and loving every minute of it.

  I define passion as extreme emotion. When you are passionate, you always have your destination in sight and you are not distracted by obstacles. Because you love what you are pursuing, things like rejection and setbacks will not hinder you in your pursuit. You believe that nothing can stop you!