John Wooden,

A detailed Summary of John Wooden,

I would like to start out by mentioning that this book is nothing at all what I expected when I began reading it. I was expecting a book on the philosophy and style of the greatest basketball coach of all time. I expected this book to teach me about his philosophy and how he handled coaching situations. Although he did this, it was in the form of stories and as a reader you had to pick up on these story's and think about what he did with the situation there was no clear cut explanation for most of them. I learned a lot about the background of John Wooden and the path he used to become a college basketball coach. He is obviously most proud of his first NCAA championship at UCLA since a lot of the book is about this period in his coaching career. I will admit I expected to learn a lot more about certain coaching situations I was intrigued with his story's and got a lot out of them.

The book started out with a story during his first championship. He had a player on his team that played a vital role in getting them to the championship game. He had started every game and was the #1 post player on the team. During the first part of the championship game this player was pla

ying poorly and Wooden made the decision to pull him from the game and put in the reserve. The reserve played very well so he decided to play him the rest of the game and the starter sat on the bench. They ended up winning the game and coach had a hard time celebrating the win. Walking back to the locker room he felt bad about how this player had played the entire season but didn't contribute in the last game. Walking into the locker this player stopped him and said coach had made the right decision and told him he had no hard feeling toward anybody. After his player told him that he said he could enjoy the championship win. I learned something about Wooden during that first chapter that foreshadowed what the rest of the book would deal with. Coach Wooden was a player coach, he cared about there feelings and respected them until no end. There are a couple different approaches to coaching the yell and not worry about the feelings about most of the players. (I would tend to think of a Bobby Knight style) or there is the Wooden style more calm and player friendly. This doesn't mean that he let his players do what ever they wanted. He talked about later in the book that his players and to buy into his philosophy and style and they would do well for him. This point came up when he talked about a player that was somewhat of a hotdog when he brought him to UCLA but changed and had success under Wooden. As soon as he went back to his fancy stuff Coach benched him. As long as played his style this player fit the mold of perfectly and got a lot of several minutes.

The next point is how to use timeout's. I know this a small thing but I think a lot of coaches don't use them vary wisely. He talked about how he always tried to save his timeouts for the end of the game and thought of them as a precious tool you will need. He told a couple of stories about how he did use them at the beginning of a game to get his team going but usually tried to save them. The point is there is a time and a place use them and you need think about the situation your in.

There are a couple of points that caught my attention and stuck in my head when I finished this book. The first one is how he handled skill correction and praise. Several times in the book he talked about

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Approximate Word count = 1538
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English