Dick Vitale Quotes

A manager gets in the Hall of Fame by what his players have done for him.

Louis van Gaal trusted me; I played a lot of games.

As a coach, you're like a teacher. You don't give the players their talent. God gives them talent, but you can give them knowledge, and you can give them information.

Welcome to the world we live in as coaches. You've got to figure out what you can do best and better to get these kids a chance to be successful. I think that comes through a lot of things - confidence, improvement, recruiting.

I believe in order to coach, you've got to start at the ground level. The same way I learned how to play basketball.

At Real Madrid, we have many good players that the team can learn from.

Even the greatest players accept coaching and value the need for discipline and the order that it brings to the team

My bench never heard me mention winning. My whole emphasis was for each one of my players to try to learn to execute the fundamentals to the best of their ability. Not to try to be better than somebody else, but to learn from others, and never cease trying to be the best they could be; that's what I emphasized more than anything else.

I think my father is probably the best coach ever because, if we talk about numbers, he's got a lot and he's only had two players.

You shouldn't get into coaching unless you care about the people you're leading.

I adapt my idea of football to my players, not adapt my players in my idea of football. It's important because there are others players that must play. The players are the most important things in football. I adapt my idea within my players.

I've been with some great head coaches, but also some great assistant coaches, too.

I wanted to give back to football what it's given me. So, I decided, 'I'm going to be a coach.'

In the early days, when I first got into the WI team, when the Ws were playing, I would sit and watch. When you could learn from watching players like that, it was a great joy to watch them play.

What you realize is when you have an environment and an atmosphere like we had at Marist, where guys cared about each other, the coaches were great teachers and communicators, whether it's high school, college or pro, I think coaching is coaching.

The trainer I learned most from about the field of play was Van Gaal, even though he's the one I've had the most confrontations with - well, disagreements. He's got an obsession with work ethic, the way he plans.

How do you recruit a player if you don't really know what it is that you are trying to do? How do you convince a player of the way you want to play if you don't have clarity yourself over why you want to do it?

I have been very fortunate to coach a lot of very good secondary players through the years.

I've been very fortunate to be with Coach Saban this long, learned a lot of football from him. It's been kind of the key to my personal success out of the places that I've coached.

I've had a lot of great coaches. I think Guus Hiddink and Vicente del Bosque are the ones closest to my style. I'm more friendly with the players than a 'formal' coach. I'm not a professor. I'm Roberto Carlos and I want to win with my players and I want them to help me by doing their job well.

The important thing is to be around people who will make you a better player. Otherwise, you can remain average.

The No. 1 job is to help a player reach their highest potential, and that's not possible without being able to relate with them. That's been helpful, and as far as my knowledge base is concerned, that stems from being around great coaches willing to share.

You get different philosophies in coaching, usually depending on what position the coach himself played.

I've always tried to grow people rather than cricketers.

I always say that if you stay with a good coach, the relationship between him and his team becomes like a family: he becomes a father with his children.