Shout praise and whisper criticism.
Don Meyer
In practice, don’t just run basketball drills, teach the players how to play basketball.
Don Meyer
A coach who is not teaching leads to the worst thing in a program — players not learning.
Don Meyer
Administrators are like pigs; don’t wrestle with a pig because you both get dirty and the pig likes it.
Don Meyer
Anytime you get an award as a coach, you’ve got to be the ultimate fool to think it wasn’t your assistant coaches and all the players responsible for the award.
Don Meyer
As a coach, you’re just trying to figure out how to keep a team on edge. You’ve got to find that edge.
Don Meyer
Be what ya is, ’cause if ya be what you ain’t, ya ain’t what ya is.
Don Meyer
Can your player make a curl cut and score in the lane? If so, he is the cutter.
Don Meyer
Coach like the coach you want to be ten years from now.
Don Meyer
Coaching is the vehicle we use to reach/ help people.
Don Meyer
Complacency is the forerunner of mediocrity. You can never work too hard on attitudes, effort and technique.
Don Meyer
Defense involves three things: courage, energy, intelligence.
Don Meyer
Discipline and demand without being demeaning.
Don Meyer
Discover your gift, develop your gift and then give it away every day.
Don Meyer
Don’t be in a hurry to change during the season.
Don Meyer
Every coach should be recording games to watch…use your VCR.
Don Meyer
Every day you teach attitude.
Don Meyer
Go from good to great because good is the enemy of great.
Don Meyer
Good shooters take the shots; best shooters take most of the shots.
Don Meyer
Habits are critical for players. They cannot think and play well at the same time.
Don Meyer
Have character, don’t be one.
Don Meyer
I have learned that peace is not the absence of trial, trouble, or torment but the presence of calm in the midst of them.
Don Meyer
I tell everyone that I have 25,000 assistant coaches. If I want to know something, I just go to the grocery store.
Don Meyer
If a farmer and his family can get up at 5:30 every morning to milk cows, surly we can get up at that time to practice basketball.
Don Meyer
If I cover my head with my hands, it means deny the ball to the opponent’s ball handler.
Don Meyer
If it comes down to you or the program that decision was made long ago.
Don Meyer
If you are a good team, your offense is born on the defensive end.
Don Meyer
If you can do something and not blow your own horn, it sure sounds a lot better.
Don Meyer
If you have to ‘try hard’ to ‘try hard, you are already beaten.
Don Meyer
If you want to thank me, go do something for somebody else.
Don Meyer
In the end, what your own troops do is more important than who they are marching against.
Don Meyer
It doesn’t cost nothing to be nice to people
Don Meyer
It doesn’t matter where you coach, it matters why you coach.
Don Meyer
It is foolish to expect a young man to follow your advice and to ignore your example.
Don Meyer
It is not what you teach, but what you emphasize.
Don Meyer
Let your players know that you love them.
Don Meyer
Make the practices like games and the games like practices.
Don Meyer
Nobody travels better than Northern State fans and nobody knows the game better than Northern State fans. If I’d die and went to heaven and I was coaching, it would be at Wachs Arena.
Don Meyer
Only run special plays for special players; find plays that fit your players.
Don Meyer
Our goal as a team is to keep playing as a group for as long as we can because you will never have that team again. It is like a dying limb, you have to prune it off and let another one grow in its place. That is the way you have to do it, but it still hurts losing these guys and that team because they and you have put so much effort into building a team. Even if you win that last game (and a national championship), it hurts badly because the players know they will never have that same special group of guys together on the same team again. Somebody always goes and somebody new always comes in.
Don Meyer
Parents would rather have their son get all-state than his team win the state championship.
Don Meyer
Play off your great player… great teams have a go-to player and they play off of him.
Don Meyer
Players must do what you want them to do in pressure situations.
Don Meyer
Players who are late say that their time is more important than the team.
Don Meyer
Plays are not as important as players, and players are not as important as teammates.
Don Meyer
Positioning, anticipation and technique create quickness. Therefore, you can always get quicker.
Don Meyer
Practice shared suffering. If one guy messes up, everyone runs. If one guy does well, everyone benefits.
Don Meyer
Proper prior planning prevents pitiful poor performance.
Don Meyer
Put your two best players away from the ball and bring it back to them.
Don Meyer
Quickness more than anything else should determine your amount of pressure on the ball.
Don Meyer
Recognize and reward players who put the team first, not just the gifted ones.
Don Meyer
Shared suffering makes a team a team.
Don Meyer
Shared suffering: one guy messes up and everyone runs. One guy does well and everyone benefits.
Don Meyer
Shout praise and whisper criticism.
Don Meyer
Simplify the game as much as possible. When you add, you must subtract.
Don Meyer
Some parents would rather have their son get all-state than his team win the state championship.
Don Meyer
Sometimes the best recruits are the ones you don’t get.
Don Meyer
Study people who can teach you how to deal with people.
Don Meyer
Successful basketball coaches are those that subscribe to a system that is based on sound fundamental teachings.
Don Meyer
Successful programs consist of people working hard, working together, while never worrying about who gets the credit.
Don Meyer
Ten minutes after you lose that last game, you start working on next season.
Don Meyer
The ability to rebound is in inverse proportion to the distance your house is from the nearest railroad tracks.
Don Meyer
The key to success is to do the next right thing right.
Don Meyer
The only thing success should do is make you more humble.
Don Meyer
The team is an extension of the coach.
Don Meyer
The worst day coaching is better than the best day doing anything else.
Don Meyer
There is nothing more important than rebounding… don’t just give it lip service.
Don Meyer
There’s only one thing we can control, and that is how hard we play.
Don Meyer
Time doesn’t fly when you are not happy.
Don Meyer
To be a team, you must be a family.
Don Meyer
To those who much has been given, much is expected.
Don Meyer
To win it all, winners have to be obsessive about the fundamentals and doing the little things right.
Don Meyer
Tough minded enough to do the necessary things–this is the epitome of what a team is.
Don Meyer
We always need to be prepared and work hard in practice so we can be just like the farmer who has put that fourth cutting of hay in the barn. After he does that, he can feel good about what is going to happen the rest of the winter.
Don Meyer
We can always do it better.
Don Meyer
We had 10 turnovers tonight. Each one gets worse as you go. It is like prior arrests: the 10th one may not have been that bad, but when you have had nine prior ones, it looks pretty bad.
Don Meyer
We have 2,500 students and an 8,000-seat basketball arena. You do the math on how important basketball is in Aberdeen.
Don Meyer
We have to get a lot tougher. If you get involved in a street fight, you can’t lay down in the street and act like you’re dead because they will kill you for sure. You might as well get up and fight.
Don Meyer
We painted a beautiful picture, but we just didn’t finish it. Finishing is the difference between a beautiful picture and a masterpiece.
Don Meyer
We sure didn’t play great, but we played hard. And I can live with that.
Don Meyer
What you accept in victory, you must accept in defeat.
Don Meyer
When I go in for heart surgery, I want a full-time surgeon. I don’t want some guy who just does it part-time between rounds of golf. You want a guy who is doing it all the time and is always reading and learning about the most recent techniques.
Don Meyer
When the legs go, the heart and the head follow quickly behind.
Don Meyer
When you get to be my age, you don’t buy green bananas because you may not be around to eat them.
Don Meyer
When you watch the game, be a student of the game.
Don Meyer
Winning a post-season game is like winning five regular season games. There is just no feeling like it. Everything is magnified. Every free throw, turnover, shot and play.
Don Meyer
You aren’t going to win championships unless you make layups and free throws.
Don Meyer
You build your program from the ideas of great coaches.
Don Meyer
You can have discipline and be demanding without being demeaning.
Don Meyer
You can pick captains, but you can’t pick leaders. Whoever controls the locker room controls the team.
Don Meyer
You have to clean out the pig barn every week because you know your pigs are in there doing their jobs every day.
Don Meyer
You have to learn things in every game because you are not going to be able to practice two-and-a-half to three hours (during the season), so the games have to be the ultimate learning experience.
Don Meyer
You have to learn to play with what you’ve got.
Don Meyer
You never realize the value of coaching until your children play for a coach.
Don Meyer
Your program must have an overriding purpose which is clearly visible and which teaches lessons beyond winning.
Don Meyer
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