John Calipari Quotes

It's not just about working hard, it's about working together. You have to care more about the team than you do about yourself

A successful person never loses...they either win or learn!

You've gotta learn to love the grind. Because life IS the grind.

If I walk in a home and a kid disrespects a woman, his mother or grandmother, then I am out... I wont recruit them

I need people who look at adversity as a challenge and failure as a learning opportunity.

It's not about how far you fall, but how high you rebound.

Practice gotta be harder than the games and it never is unless you want it to be as a player. The coach can't drive that

There's no other state, none, that's as connected to their basketball program as this one. Because those other states have other programs. Michigan has Michigan State, California has UCLA, North Carolina has Duke. It's Kentucky throughout this whole state, and that's what makes us unique.

The only thing I pay attention to with free throws is what a guy does in the final four minutes of a game. If you can improve players' self-esteem and confidence, get them to relax, teach visualization and routine, they will shoot as well, or better, with the pressure on.

I'm playing the guys who are going to fight. If you're not into this, I'm going to someone else

You understand, you do not invent stuff on this team. Guys that invent stuff will not play for me. Make the easy play

The best teams I've had had a little bit of swagger.

When you're trying to build or change a culture, what do you do? I always say to take players from state championship teams because they only know one thing -- winning.

What type of teammates do you want to play with? Be that teammate yourself

You better educate yourself. You don't stand in the front of the line unless you're up there because you know everything that's involved.

If we're going to stay the gold standard, we're going to stay ahead of the curve, well, then, when people try to do the things we're doing, we're trying to do more. We're trying to do something different. We're coming at it a different way. That, for me, to be honest, is the fun part.

What do you do to help us win when you're not scoring baskets?

I'm a teacher, a motivator. That's what I do. And I'm a protector on top of that.

A great defensive effort. The one thing we have to do is make it hard for people to beat us. We're not worried about winning and losing, we just have to make the game hard

The biggest thing is you cannot be afraid to miss the game-winning shot. It's not that you want to make it; it's that you're not afraid to miss it. You're not afraid to make a play and it go wrong. You have to have amnesia. You're not afraid to make a play and it go wrong.

You have to lose yourself in the team and you have to lose yourself in the game

Nothing is given to you. You're going to have to work for it.

The people that are around me that give me ideas that I pass along or we try, the one thing I never do, I never give credit to anybody but myself. So I take all of the ideas. So everybody thinks that all of the ideas are mine.

The biggest day in the history of Kentucky's program.

The hardest thing for a basketball player to do is dribble two really hard dribbles. You are flying, and then pull up and shoot a ball from 15, 17 feet. It's the hardest thing in the game.

You don't have pressure on yourself to have to go nuts.

You'd better make sure that you know you can make a difference, and if it's a difference you want to make, is there another way to do the same thing, and what's the down side? What's the repercussions if I do this? To my career, to my family, whatever else.

The guys that make game winners are the guys that are not afraid to miss them.

The best players I've coached make really hard things look easy. Like you may say, well, that was easy, and then, well, go try it. You think it's so easy, go ahead and do it.

You do things other people cannot do, so just stay in the moment as you improve the other areas.

If my team won a national title and no one got drafted, I'd be disappointed.

You can be the seventh scorer or the first scorer, just be your best version.

Be more concerned with everybody else than yourself.

I would enjoy the fact that I had a team that won a national title, but I would be disappointed that none of the kids got drafted because that's not how it's supposed to work.

I know who I am. I don't see myself as this whoever they see me as.

For our children, you want them to build their own self-esteem and their own self-confidence. For your own child. You don't want it to come from somebody else because, if it does, that same person can take it away. You want them to learn the grind.

When your best players are really good guys, it's the best.

It has to be fun for you when you see somebody at a distance and you take their opinion of what they're going to be like and then you go interview them, and they're totally different. You're like, wow, I didn't expect that.

Generational poverty, most of us don't know what that means.

Everything all of us do is stolen from somebody.

Having a kind heart, you care about everybody else. You don't eat everything. Don't be a big. People in the community, be nice. As coaches, we want to see guys develop those kind of things, take those things with them when they leave our programs.

That's America, competition.

All the teams you have have different personalities, and you kind of want it.

If I ever tell the same story twice, just laugh and roll with it because, when you get older, you start doing that kind of stuff.

We can't have one group that oversees everything and then they define what amateurism is.

We're not moving fast enough with where things are going.

I know I'm not a saint, but I'm not the guy I'm made out to be by others.

You want perfection, go to a bowling alley!

When you're trying to make somebody the best version of themselves, you have to keep defining that over a period of time because sometimes it changes.