Pyramid of Success
January 19, 2006 11:21 AM | General
January 19, 2006
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – When you begin any discussion about the history of college basketball, inevitably John Wooden’s name has to come up. Wooden is considered the game’s greatest coach having led UCLA to an unprecedented 10 national championships during a 12-year span from 1964 to 1975.
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| Legendary UCLA coach John Wooden won an amazing 10 NCAA championships in a span of 12 seasons from 1964-75.
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His UCLA teams won 38 straight NCAA tournament games during one stretch, and also won 88 consecutive games before the string was finally broken at Notre Dame during the 1973-74 season.
West Virginia coach John Beilein grew up in upstate New York admiring Wooden’s great UCLA teams, but he was never a big fan of the Bruins.
“I was not a Yankee fan or anybody that won a lot I did not like,” Beilein said earlier this week. “I was always rooting for the underdog. I rooted for them to lose a lot but one of my first clinics was when John Wooden was speaking in either Syracuse or Rochester.”
Beilein vividly recalls Wooden’s simple message.
“I can still remember him talking about balance and footwork and I was saying to myself, ‘Give me something important here. I don’t want to hear about balance and footwork.’ And now we spend much of our preseason talking about balance and footwork,” Beilein laughed. “Back then I wanted plays – I didn’t want to hear about balance and footwork.”
Beilein says he recites some of Wooden’s most famous quotes to his team.
“I used one his quotes the other day: ‘Be quick but don’t be in a hurry.’ His book of quotes I live by,” Beilein said. “It is so much about discipline and so much about being fair to your players but not treating them all the same.
“You’re fair to each guy but you treat them a little differently because they’re like your family: they have different buttons that you have to push. Don’t show up other teams; respect your opponents – things like that,” Beilein said.
The West Virginia coach admits he doesn’t teach the pyramid principles Wooden is famous for developing, mainly because some of the theories are very complicated.
“I’ve used aspects of it, the way it all builds up. But I’m mentally challenged to be able to understand all that stuff,” Beilein joked. “I do understand the individual concepts, though.”
Beilein, whose West Virginia team has won 11 straight games heading into Saturday’s contest against the Bruins, shakes his head when he tries to comprehend winning 88 in a row like Wooden did in the early 1970s.
“He’s the true coach’s coach of all time,” Beilein said. “For him to do that in those days … to get a guy like Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to come all the way from the East coast, to coach Bill Walton who was a bit of a free spirit … he had diverse people coming in there and it didn’t make a difference, they were all the same.”
Beilein says Wooden was able to accomplish so much by being the best teacher of fundamentals the game has ever seen.
“He did it in a time when there wasn’t a lot of scouting and a lot of other things that we have today,” Beilein said. “For him to be that far advanced with fundamentals, he’d just out-fundamental teams.”
The West Virginia coach says it will be an honor coaching at Pauley Pavilion this Saturday on a basketball court renamed after Wooden in 2003.
“As a coach I will have coached in Rupp Arena and Cameron Indoor Stadium. Pauley Pavilion is one of those places,” Beilein said. “I know our kids won’t appreciate it like I will.”
