Mike Krzyzewski Quotes

A leader is someone who puts their people in position to be successful all the time

Champions play as they practice. Create a consistency of excellence in all your habits.

A basketball team is like the five fingers on your hand. If you can get them all together, you have a fist. That's how I want you to play.

You don't just be a team. You become a team. Through tough games you find that you need each other

Imagination has a great deal to do with winning.

If you win a National Championship, or you win two, people think you have not only seen the Holy Grail, but you've embraced it. Basically, I do what a lot of people do, but I've been able to win.

My hunger is not for success, it is for excellence. Because when you attain excellence, success just naturally follows.

The thing I loved the most - and still love the most about teaching - is that you can connect with an individual or a group, and see that individual or group exceed their limits.

I'm looking for players who make their teammates better. You do that with enthusiasm and passion.

Effective teamwork begins and ends with communication

You develop a team to achieve what one person cannot accomplish alone. All of us alone are weaker, by far, than if all of us are together.

To me, teamwork is the beauty of our sport, where you have five acting as one. You become selfless.

Never let a person's weakness get in the way of their strength.

The only way you're going to grow is to be in difficult situations.

Footwork is one of the primary prerequisites to becoming a great player

With accomplishments comes confidence and with confidence comes belief. It has to be in that order.

It takes courage not only to make decisions, but to live with those decisions afterward

In leadership, there are no words more important than trust. In any organization, trust must be developed among every member of the team if success is going to be achieved

People want to be on a team. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves. They want to be in a situation where they feel that they are doing something for the greater good.

Sometimes in a defeat, you can set the stage for future victory.

The truth is that many people set rules to keep from making decisions.

I don't look at myself as a basketball coach. I look at myself as a leader who happens to coach basketball.

Our goal is not to win. It's to play together and play hard. Then, winning takes care of itself.

If you have talent with teamwork, you've got a chance to be a championship team.

Communication does not always occur naturally, even among a tight-knit group of individuals. Communication must be taught and practiced in order to bring everyone together as one

You can't defer if you're the person who's in the leadership position.

Goals should be realistic, attainable, and shared among all members of the team

During critical periods, a leader is not allowed to feel sorry for himself, to be down, to be angry, or to be weak. Leaders must beat back these emotions

There are always those times when you're going to be down. It's how you step through it that makes you the person you are.

The other thing I knew I had was a high level of competitiveness.

The life expectancy of a team is about eight months. Then the next year, it's a whole new team.

It's funny what happens when you become a grandparent. You start to act all goofy and do things you never thought you'd do. It's terrific.

Confrontation simply means meeting the truth head-on.

I have a rule on my team: when we talk to one another, we look each other right in the eye, because I think it's tough to lie to somebody. You give respect to somebody.

My ambition in high school was to be a high school coach and teacher, and that's still what I do: teach.

Don't worry about losing. Think about winning.

Leaders should be reliable without being predictable. They should be consistent without being anticipated

It’s simply doing what you’re supposed to do as well as you can when you’re supposed to do it.

Play and practice like you are trying to make the team.

That's what I do now: I lead and I teach. If we win basketball games from doing that, then that's great, but I lead and teach. Those are the two things I concentrate on.

I always won in my imagination. I always hit the game-winning shot, or I hit the free throw. Or if I missed, there was a lane violation, and I was given another one.

I had a really bad temper, when I was growing up. Sport helped me channel that temper into more positive acts.

Every season is a journey. Every journey is a lifetime.

When I went to high school, an all-boys' school, a Catholic school, I tried out for football, and I didn't make it. It was the first time, athletically, that I was knocked down.

The best teams are team in any sport that lose themselves in the team. The individuals lose their identity. And their identities come about as a result of being in the team first.

You start developing a championship attitude by, first of all, telling kids that they are really good and that they have the potential to become better.

I believe a big part of leadership is about winning the moment.

Parents can really help, but they can also really hinder the development of their youngsters.

Actually, the Kentucky moment was better than winning the two National Championships, because it was the epitome of what I try to get from a team in a crisis situation.

Even though we want huge individual egos, our collective ego is unbelievable.