The Carolina Way: Leadership Lessons from a Life in Coaching FROM THE PUBLISHER
The most successful coach in college basketball history, and among the most beloved, offers his comprehensive program for building and maintaining winning teams in sports, business, and life.
For almost forty years, Dean Smith coached the University of North Carolina basketball team with unsurpassed success, both in victories won and in shaping the lives of the players he led. Well known are the Michael Jordans, Kenny Smiths, and George Karls, but overall more than 96 percent of Dean Smith's players earned their undergraduate degrees, and more than 33 percent earned graduate or professional degrees. Now, in The Carolina Way, Coach Smith fully explains his entire coaching philosophy and shows readers how to apply it to the leadership and team-building challenges in their own lives.
In his wry, sensible, wise way, Coach Smith takes us through every aspect of his program, illustrating his insights with vivid stories. Accompanying each major point is a "Player Perspective" from a former North Carolina basketball star and an in-depth "Business Perspective" developing some of the wider applications of Smith's precepts from Gerald D. Bell, a world-renowned leadership consultant and a professor at UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School.
Each year Coach Smith gave his team the same three goals:
PLAY HARD: Insist on consistent effort. The final result is often outside your control. Create a system that demands effort, rewards it, and punishes its absence.
PLAY SMART: Execute properly. Understand and consistently execute the fundamentals. Reward their execution and punish their absence.
PLAY TOGETHER: Play unselfishly. Don't focus on individual statistics. Recruit unselfish players, reward unselfish play, and punish selfish play and showboating.
Coach Smith taught all his teams that if they kept their focus on these three goals, winning would take care of itself. And more times than any other coach in history, he was right.
FROM THE CRITICS
He's a better coach of basketball than anyone else. (John Wooden)
Author Bio&58;Dean Smith became head coach of the University of North Carolina's basketball team at age thirty, and in thirty-six years in that position, he established coaching records that will likely long remain unbroken. His 879 victories are the most by any coach in college basketball history. In 2000, an ESPN panel of experts named him one of the seven greatest coaches of the twentieth century in any sport. Smith also coached the 1976 U.S. Olympic basketball team, which won the gold medal. He is the author of A Coach's Life.
Library Journal
Using Smith's approach to playing basketball, Bell's management applications, and Kilgo's presentation of player perspectives on their experiences at North Carolina under basketball coach Smith, this audiobook shows the real working-world application of Smith's coaching theory and practice. It proves that the common experience at Carolina indeed created a basketball "family" among coaches and players and shows the extraordinary humanity of Smith himself. Smith crafted a system that won four NCAA national championships, winning 75 percent of their games while graduating 96 percent of their basketball scholar athletes. The solid tips in this program concerning careful staff recruiting and the creation of the proper workplace atmosphere should allow managers to form and nurture a working team as effective as the Carolina "family." Straightforward, practical, and thought-provoking; a sports book that will make ordinary managers into Smith fans. Very highly recommended for sports management collections.-Cliff Glaviano, Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
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