A coach describes calling an elite player repeatedly and hanging up until he affirmed ambitious goals like ACC Player of the Year and national championship. The coach argues that reaching elite talent requires pushing players out of their comfort zone and rewiring their self-belief, not just changing habits.
Chapters
He. I know it'll be hard for you guys to believe this. As good as he was, he didn't think he was as good as he was. Coach, he tells us this story about how he was interning in Chicago. Yeah, yeah. You'd call him and you hung up on it, you know, a couple times. Yeah, tell us about it. Yeah. No, because we had a great team and we lost almost the whole team, and he. He was going to be the next great player. He was already a starter and a good player, and I needed him to be thinking of being the ACC Player of the Year and all that, so I'd call him and Shane Bassett. So when you went to bed last night, did you look in the mirror and say, I'm going to be ACC Player of the Year? He said, no, and I hung up on him. And I call him another next day and asked him something similar, you know, about winning national championship. And I hung up on him. And then the third day I called him and he said, coach, don't hang up on me. And I said, listen, I will stop hanging up on you when you stop hanging up on you. Oh, that's cool. You should be a plant that's not put in a case. It should just grow. And you're putting yourself in this box, and it's a good box. I mean, you're a really good player, but you got a chance to be the best player. And that's why I enjoyed coaching, like elite talent, because he was and still is elite talent. But how can they maximize? How can you get and to be best friends with that best player? I was always hardest on my best players because they could take us to places that good players could not take you to. But if you had your best player, the good players became better.
