Top Coach Bob Knight Quotes On Coaching, Discipline, and Preparation

motivational quotes Dec 17, 2023

The best Bobby Knight quotes:

Coach Bob Knight was a legendary figure in the world of basketball. He is a former college basketball coach who achieved great success throughout his career.

Knight is best known for his time as the head coach of the Indiana Hoosiers from 1971 to 2000.

During his tenure, he led the Hoosiers to three NCAA national championships in 1976, 1981, and 1987.

In addition to his national championships, Knight also guided the Hoosiers to 11 Big Ten Conference championships and made 24 NCAA tournament appearances.

Coach Knight also coached at Army and Texas Tech during his career and he is one of only three coaches in history to have achieved over 900 career wins in Division I men's basketball with 902 total.

Knight's coaching style was characterized by his intense passion for the game and his emphasis on discipline and fundamentals. He was known for his demanding and no-nonsense approach, which earned him the nickname "The General."

He is considered one of the greatest coaches in college basketball history.

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Bob Knight Success, Winning, and Preparation Quotes

"I think that it's perhaps harder to learn from victory than it is from defeat. I think that we don't want defeat. We don't want defeat in sport. We don't want defeat in life. How are we going to be beaten? All right. We have to deal with those things. What's going to cause us to lose the game, whatever the game might be?"

"The key is not the will to win... everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important."

"The will to succeed is important, but what's more important is the will to prepare."

"I'm not sure I've ever been around anybody that wanted to win more or worked harder than Michael Jordan."

"I've never predicted anything. All I have ever said is, that we will do the very best we can."

"There are two real keys to winning. You've got to have good players: no coach won with bad players. You win with good players. That is number one. Number two is, when we are playing, let's say we are playing Michigan, and they had a really good press: we've got to solve that press."

"Defense is the key to winning in any sport, and that's what I believe in."

"I don’t believe in luck, I believe in preparation."

"The biggest difficulty in getting to the top of the ladder is getting through the crowd at the bottom."

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Bob Knight Coaching and Leadership Quotes

"A big part of teaching is being emphatic. Maybe I'm right or wrong, but part of my approach was that when I said something, the kids understood exactly what I meant and what I wanted."

"I'm a teacher. My mother was a teacher. I spent 40 years as a teacher."

"As his team prepares, a coach's entire being must be concentrated on winning games."

"I learned at an early stage that the most important thing I could do for my players was to give them the tools necessary to beat their opponent."

"I’ve never felt my job was to win basketball games – rather, that the essence of my job as a coach was to do everything I could to give my players the background necessary to succeed in life."

"If my primary purpose here at Indiana is to go out and win ballgames, I can probably do that as well as anybody can. I would just cheat, get some money from a lot of people around Indianapolis who want to run the operation that way, and just go out and get the best basketball players I can. Then we'd beat everybody."

"There are times when my passion for basketball led me into confrontations that I could have handled a lot better. I’ve always been too confrontational, especially when I know I’m right."

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Quotes From Knight On Discipline

"All the years I coached, we sent a card to every professor for each kid I had, and I was able to keep track on a daily basis who cut class or who was dropping a grade average. What I did was bring that kid in at 5:00 in the morning, and he would run the stairs from the bottom to the top until I told him to quit."

"If I came in to recruit your son, I would tell you, your wife, and your son, that I will be the most demanding coach your son can play for."

"I said, 'Son, my name isn't Knight to you. It's Coach Knight or it's Mr. Knight. I don't call people by their last name, and neither should you.'"

"Discipline is recognizing what has to be done, doing it as well as you can do it, and doing it that way all the time."

"Your biggest opponent isn't the other guy. It's human nature."

"Do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done the best way it can be done, and do it that way every time."

"It has always been my thought that the most important single ingredient to success in athletics or life is discipline."

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Coach Knight Quotes About Life

"People change over the years, and that changes situations for good and for bad."

"My dad was a very quiet person, and unbelievably tough. But my grandmother gave me my first look at negative thinking to bring about positive results. When I was just a little guy, anytime I came to my grandmother and said I wish for this or that, Grandma would say, 'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.'"

"Mental toughness is to physical as four is to one."

"I have always maintained that in basketball, the importance of the mental to the physical is about four to one."

"I think that we as a people are always prone to think about, well, tomorrow will be a better day. Well, why will it be a better day? And I think the more that we believe in doing things better, doing the right thing rather than hoping that that's going to happen, let's make it happen."

"Everybody hears, but few listen."

"I think there are circumstances that could develop surrounding any human being that would set that human being off in an abnormal way. I think that we all hope that when such a situation would arise that we can control our emotions, or we can react to the circumstances in such a way that doesn’t put either that person or people surrounding them in any kind of a highly embarrassing or difficult situation. But I don’t think that we ever really know."

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12 Memorable Quotes From Bob Knight's Book, The Power of Negative Thinking

1. "Early failure is usually better than early success, because the lesson in humility lasts a long time and makes you more effective over the long term."

2. "You can always turn no into yes, and usually make people happy, but it's a lot harder – sometimes too late - to change yes to no."

3. "Before you can inspire your players to win, you have to show them how not to lose."

4. "One game is not a season. Pleasure, enjoyment, success are not short-term. Success is a grind. It’s perseverance; it is operating at a high level of performance on a constant basis."

5. "That’s the true mark of a champion—forgetting the last victory and preparing for the next one. And that one comment should be on every coach’s wall: 'The first job that we have today is putting yesterday aside to be remembered later.' (Tony LaRussa)"

6. "What vulnerabilities do we have and what can we do to minimize them, to get around them, to survive them—and give ourselves a better chance to win?"

7. "Wanting alone doesn’t get anything done."

8. "A coach should never forget to compliment his players on a well-played victory, but shouldn’t hesitate to tell them when they’ve played poorly—in a loss or a win."

9. "Coaching is leadership, and leadership is leadership, whether in a gym, an office, a classroom, or a family."

10. "The mark of success, or failure, in handling victory is what happens the next time out."

11. "You have to develop enough common sense to know what you can’t do and focus on what you can. Know your limits. If you can’t do it, don’t, and say so."

12. "There isn’t always an absolute right way and a wrong way to do things, but there usually is a better way, a high-percentage way. The positive thinker generally feels that his way will be the right way and nothing will go wrong, if he just believes. The negative thinker disbelieves. He takes every precaution to prevent the wrong thing from happening, and in doing so has a much better chance of things turning out right in the end."

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Bobby Knight Quotes About Basketball

"I want to say to you Indiana people that I owe you a big, big debt of gratitude because nowhere in the world is a sporting group followed more than this state follows basketball. And I just want to thank you for the opportunity that I had to coach in this state - it will always be something that I will cherish."

"When somebody asks about the greatest players in history, I start with Bill Russell. More than the best player is the MVP, and the MVP in the history of team sports is Bill Russell."

"If I were involved with the NBA, I wouldn't want a 19-year-old or a 20-year-old kid to bring into all the travel and all the problems that exist in the NBA. I would want a much more mature kid. I would want a kid that maybe I've been watching on another team, and now he's 21, 22 years old instead of 18 or 19, and I might trade for that kid."

"Well, I think it's pretty much established that I just didn't have any interest in coaching in the pros."

"You don't play against opponents, you play against the game of basketball."

"I really don't like it. It's like if you hit a homerun 450 feet, you ought to get two runs for it, or you throw a 40-yard touchdown pass and you get nine points. I don't really like anything that you come up, you stop, you shoot it. I don't think it fits into what my concept of the game is."

"Pat has been instrumental in what we've done here so far and the most selfish thing for me is that I want to see what we've done placed in the hands of the most competent person, and that's Pat. No one would come close to being able to continue to build on what we've done here so far like he will."

"There is a third phase we neglect, which is more important. It's conversion from offense to defense and defense to offense."

"Passing is your best weapon against man to man. Dribble penetration is your best weapon against zone."

"It is better to anticipate than to react."

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Other Funny Bob Knight Quotes

"When my time on earth is gone, and my activities here are passed, I want they bury me upside down, and my critics can kiss my a**!"

"I don't have to wait until the next morning to regret something I did that was kinda dumb."

"Why talk now when so many things have been said without ever giving me a chance to talk?"

"I've always felt that, you know, the Almighty has a lot of things to do other than help my basketball team."

"I enjoyed needling the press. If I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't have done it. Writers have rarely played, so as a coach, you have antagonistic feelings about some guy writing up the story of the game who's never even attempted to play it."

"Coaching is a great thing, because you're working for four months then you go fish for eight."

"How many times I got to tell you? Don't fight the rabbits. Because, boys, if you fight the rabbits, the elephants are going to kill you."

"If the NBA was on channel 5 and a bunch of frogs making love were on channel 4, I'd watch the frogs, even if they were coming in fuzzy."

"People want national championship banners. People want to talk about Indiana being competitive. How do we get there? We don't get there with milk and cookies."

"All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things."

"You remember when you were a kid growing up, and believed in Santa Claus? There's not much difference between Santa Claus and me today, you know. We're two overweight lovable guys that kids really enjoy."

"And I would be the first to admit that probably, in a lot of press conferences over the time that I have been in coaching, indulging my own sense of humor at press conferences has not been greatly to my benefit."

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