COACHING INFORMATION: Taken from THE CAROLINA WAY by DEAN SMITH (The Penguin Press, New York, 2004).

Courtesy of BasketballsBest.com

• With input from my assistant coaches, I decided what offense, defense, and overall play we would try to use with each particular team. We made adjustments each year, depending on our personnel, and an annual goal was to disguise our team's weaknesses and accentuate its strengths.
• When your goal is to put your players in the best position possible for them to be successful, there's a time to be stubborn and a time to be flexible.
• In teaching our players, I tried to concentrate on the process rather than the result. I think it's the best way to teach. If a coach starts out on the first day of practice talking about winning, that approach can actually get in the way of winning.
• We went to great lengths to reward unselfish behavior, and we profusely praised those acts that we wanted to see repeated.
• False praise as a weapon to build confidence? I didn't believe in it. Certainly I wasn't going to tell a poor rebounder that he was doing a good job rebounding.
• A person isn't going to wake up one morning and suddenly become confident. It's not that easy. Words aren't going to do the trick. Confidence must be earned. It takes time, work, dedication--on the part of the teacher and the pupil.
• Confidence can be as fragile as an eggshell. Coaches can't talk players into being confident, although praising players when praise is deserved can help them become more confident. But they can do the reverse if they tear players down with criticism.
• Thorough preparation does wonders for anyone's confidence. We tried to put our players through every situation in practice that they might experience in a game. For instance, we would give our second team a fifteen-point lead with five minutes on the clock to see if our starters could go to their "hurry-up" offense and overcome it. The first team pressed and gambled on defense, shot three-pointers on offense, and if it missed, it fouled the defensive rebounder. (A team's best rebounders usually are not its best foul shooters.)
• Hard work that results in success equals confidence. That's the only formula I have. I know of no other way.
• My staff and I worked hard to give the players their best chance to succeed. The by-product of this is loyalty, which early on became a cornerstone of our program. Players and coaches, managers and secretaries. We all looked out for one another ...The feeling of not wanting to let your teammate down is a powerful one. It's an important part of building a team.
• We were greatly concerned about how we would play and much less concerned about what our opponent would do. If we did what we were supposed to do, the end result usually pleased us.
• If the president of the United States had asked permission to visit with us in our locker room before the game or at halftime, I would have denied it. The North Carolina locker room was for the players. They were the most important people in our program, no exceptions.
• A leader should take the blame for the losses and give the players credit for victories. I strongly believe that.
• We didn't care how many points an opposing player scored as long as his shooting percentage was low.
• Our coaches graded every possession of each game. It was tedious work and took more than five hours to grade game tapes. We rewarded unselfish acts that helped the team: good defense, setting effective screens, diving on the floor in pursuit of the ball, assists, blocked shots, deflected passes.
• I learned from my players too. I never penciled in a starting lineup during our planning work in the summer. That would have been unfair to players who had worked hard in the off-season and improved. It's amazing how much some young people can improve from one year to the next.
• If you asked me to define my coaching and leadership style, I'd describe myself as an open-minded dictator. My basketball philosophy boils down to six words: Play hard; play together; play smart.