Don Meyer Quotes

Successful programs consist of people working hard, working together, while never worrying about who gets the credit.

Complacency is the forerunner of mediocrity. You can never work too hard on attitudes, effort and technique.

You build your program from the ideas of great coaches.

Recognize and reward players who put the team first, not just the gifted ones.

When you watch the game, be a student of the game.

Positioning, anticipation and technique create quickness. Therefore, you can always get quicker

If you can do something and not blow your own horn, it sure sounds a lot better.

Discover your gift, develop your gift and then give it away every day.

Tough minded enough to do the necessary things--this is the epitome of what a team is.

It is foolish to expect a young man to follow your advice and to ignore your example.

Coach like the coach you want to be ten years from now.

Players who are late say that their time is more important than the team.

Your program must have an overriding purpose which is clearly visible and which teaches lessons beyond winning.

Be what ya is, 'cause if ya be what you ain't, ya ain't what ya is.

Shout praise and whisper criticism.

Winning a postseason game is like winning five regular season games. There is just no feeling like it. Everything is magnified. Every free throw, turnover, shot and play.

If you are a good team, your offense is born on the defensive end.

Defense involves three things: courage, energy, intelligence.

It doesn't cost nothing to be nice to people

You aren't going to win championships unless you make layups and free throws.

You can pick captains, but you can't pick leaders. Whoever controls the locker room controls the team

There is nothing more important than rebounding... don't just give it lip service.

To be a team, you must be a family.

To those who much has been given, much is expected.

Discipline and demand without being demeaning.

When I go in for heart surgery, I want a full-time surgeon. I don't want some guy who just does it part-time between rounds of golf. You want a guy who is doing it all the time and is always reading and learning about the most recent techniques.

Our goal as a team is to keep playing as a group for as long as we can because you will never have that team again. It is like a dying limb, you have to prune it off and let another one grow in its place. That is the way you have to do it, but it still hurts losing these guys and that team because they and you have put so much effort into building a team. Even if you win that last game (and a national championship), it hurts badly because the players know they will never have that same special group of guys together on the same team again. Somebody always goes and somebody new always comes in.

Plays are not as important as players, and players are not as important as teammates

If it comes down to you or the program that decision was made long ago.

Have character, don't be one.

Simplify the game as much as possible. When you add, you must subtract.

Good shooters take the shots; best shooters take most of the shots.

If a farmer and his family can get up at 5:30 every morning to milk cows, surly we can get up at that time to practice basketball.

You never realize the value of coaching until your children play for a coach

Proper prior planning prevents pitiful poor performance.

It is not what you teach, but what you emphasize.

The worst day coaching is better than the best day doing anything else

Shared suffering: one guy messes up and everyone runs. One guy does well and everyone benefits.

When the legs go, the heart and the head follow quickly behind.

Players must do what you want them to do in pressure situations.

Administrators are like pigs; don't wrestle with a pig because you both get dirty and the pig likes it.

The team is an extension of the coach.

When you get to be my age, you don't buy green bananas because you may not be around to eat them.

To win it all, winners have to be obsessive about the fundamentals and doing the little things right.

There's only one thing we can control, and that is how hard we play.

I have learned that peace is not the absence of trial, trouble, or torment but the presence of calm in the midst of them

Quickness more than anything else should determine your amount of pressure on the ball.

We can always do it better.

Play off your great player... great teams have a go-to player and they play off of him.

Only run special plays for special players; find plays that fit your players.