Who It’s For

Youth Sports Teams

The John R. Wooden Course for Youth Teams

How to coach according to Coach Wooden

Are you the director of a sports club program that wants to distinguish the value of your organization from all the rest?

Develop character, teach life skills, and offer the best coaches. Develop winners in life as well as on the field.

In 2001, at 91-years-old, Coach Wooden gave a TED Talk entitled, “The Difference Between Winning and Succeeding.”

Coach had three rules for his team:

  1. Never be late. “I believe starting on time, and I believe closing on time.”
  2. No profanity. “One word of profanity and you are out of here for the day. If I see it in a game, you’re going to come out and sit on the bench.”
  3. Never criticize a teammate. It’s not the job of the player to criticize a teammate.

Of course, there are many tools and life lessons we can all learn from the greatest coach of all time. For instance, Coach Wooden’s "Two Sets of Threes."

“Never lie, never cheat, never steal.”

and

“Don’t whine, don’t complain, and don’t make excuses.”

The John R. Wooden Course has several tools to help coaches of youth sports teach kids about hard work, integrity, teamwork, commitment, and loyalty. We, as coaches and mentors, cannot let “just winning” overshadow the most important things.

Some Ways to Get Started:

  • Take the Individual Assessment to get a baseline understanding of your coaching behavior as defined on the Pyramid of Success
  • Purchase Clipboard Character Coaching Lessons
  • Purchase Wooden 52-Weekly Emails for Sports Coaches that provides weekly guidance.

Take the individual assessment