Wooden on Leadership

One of the wonderful by-products of persuing my masters at the University of San Francisco is the exposure to books and literature that I might not have uncovered otherwise. Currently as part of a Leadership and Criticism course, I am reading "Wooden on Leadership" written by highly respected UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden. I strongly recommend it for athletes, business leaders and anyone interested in how Coach Wooden wove together a strategy for teaching and coaching his teams infusing values, morals and his knowledge of basketball.

If you are an athlete and specifically a triathlete, you are likely focused working on the fundamentals of your sport at this early time in 2008. Whether that be honing your spin and pedaling technique on the bike, your run form/cadence or developing/refining your swim stroke, I thought you might appreciate the excerpt from Wooden's book. Gail Goodrich (UCLA Varsity 1963-1965, 2 National Championships) writes about Coach Wooden and his approach...

"He believed that winning is a result of the process, and he was a master of the process, of getting us to focus on what we were doing rather than the final score. One drill he has was to run a play over and over at full speed, but he wouldn't let us shoot the ball. He made us concentrate on what happened before the shot was taken, what happened to make it possible. He made us focus on execution."

Hypercat Racing athletes are familiar with the mantra of focus on the process (or process goals) and not the results (those come if you focused on the process). In running, cycling and multisport, it is easy to focus on place, time, qualifiying for X etc. However, it is the process involved in getting to those ends that require your focus. The rest takes care of itself.

So...when you are doing isolated leg drills on the bike, swim drills in the pool or high knees, butt kicks, skips etc for the run, think of Gail's comments about what made him and the UCLA team successful under Coach Wooden. Trust in the process.

Back to working on class work,
Rachel