Courtesy of BasketballsBest.com

• Our mission statement, our strategic plan, our entire approach in a nutshell: Play hard; play smart, play together. Hard meant with effort, determination, and courage; together meant unselfishly, trusting your teammates, and doing everything possible not to let them down; smart meant with good execution and poise, treating each possession as if it were the only one in the game.
• The best way to win is to make it a by-product of the process. In any competition, the participants are better off if they get their minds off the final outcome and onto a ritual. For example, when one of our players went to the foul line late in a close game, I wanted him to be thinking about his ritual, not about the consequences of missing. From the mid-1960s on I asked each player to have a ritual on the foul line. It didn't have to be uniform throughout the team. I encouraged each player to develop his own.
• When our players performed well and lost, I thought it was important to let them know that they'd done many things well. Losing shouldn't override that. It didn't do us any good to lose confidence after losing a well-played game against a good opponent....I was careful about what I said to the players right after a game. I kept my remarks brief if I made any at all. I didn't want to come down hard on the players in the locker room and then have to change my story the next day after I reviewed the tapes.
• Is it easier to teach and learn after a loss? Yes, because losing is such a motivating force. Players want to get back out there and show everyone that they're better than that.
• I came from an era in which coaches raised their voices to correct mistakes, and I certainly raised mine. But I didn't use profanity, nor did I allow it in practices. A violation of the rule resulted in team running, a lot of running.
• Practice was serious business at Carolina. It was where the teaching was done. It was where our standards were established....Practicing was the most important part of our North Carolina program. We, coaches and players, took it very seriously. I didn't want a player in our program who wouldn't work hard in practice.
• I tried to make sure the players got credit for our victories. The losses were on me. That was the way I believed it should work. If the players did what I asked of them and we still lost, then it was my fault.
• The water break lasted two minutes. Seniors drank first, junior next, followed by sophomores, then freshmen.
• At the top of the practice plan was an offensive and defensive Emphasis of the Day, which was basketball-related. It could be something like "Throw the ball inbounds using both hands" and "See man and ball."....we watched carefully to see that it was carried out....if there's an emphasis but it's not enforced, it becomes counterproductive.
• Many of our players said that games were easy compared with practice, and that was the desired result.
• We worked hard on fundamentals in practice....we repeated things until they became habits. I believed that once we introduced something new, we should cover it in practice for several days to make sure the players got it. We hammered it home: repeat, repeat, repeat, until we got it right.
• We didn't make our drills competitive until they were learned. The players would have concentrated on winning instead of learning. Once the drills were learned, we made them competitive.
• Criticism must be clear and specific. It serves no purpose to tell the players: "We need to get out there and hustle. They want it more than we do." They're looking for more leadership than that.
• Our best practices had a distinct rhythm, and I didn't want them disrupted with unnecessary conversation. Too much talk equals not enough concentration. Of course we wanted to hear talking as the players communicated on defense.
• We believed strongly in part-method teaching. For instance, we began our defensive drills by putting two players against two others. Then we moved on to three-on-three, then to four-on-four, before graduating to five-on-five. The more people on the court, the easier defense should become. We did the same on offense: two-on-two, three-on-three, and so forth.
• I probably should have scrimmaged our teams more, but my goal was to teach them the proper way to play. Often players in scrimmages reverted to old habits because of their competitive desire to win.