Don Nelson Quotes

To be a top-class athlete, you have to train hard, you have to eat right, you have to get enough rest. I feel the way golf is going nowadays, you have to treat yourself as an athlete.

High school coaches sometimes are better coaches than I am.

It is very easy to make athletes, and it is very difficult to make rugby players with that rugby instinct. I would like to think I have got a bit of rugby instinct and have become more of a rugby athlete along the way.

Women's tennis is getting faster and the girls are getting more athletic, so I need to push myself to become a better athlete. I think 2013 showed me, like a few other years how important being healthy is and how I must listen to my body. During this off season I have been a little smarter on how I train and how I treat my body.

The young athlete who aspires to greatness, generally speaking, learns a number of things from several different coaches. The first one taught him the fundamentals; the second one instilled discipline in him and taught him more of the techniques that must be mastered to excel.

I just coach and get my guys ready.

I coach at Rutgers University and help out there as a part-time assistant coach. I feel like the coach is kind of in me, and it would also be great exposure, so I'd be down for it, for sure.

A coach was managing the Newbury team, and he wanted me to play for his local team, and from there, I did it at district level, and then I got picked for Southampton.

The coaches that I have have done an incredible job with me, obviously the stuff we work on on the court.

I'm training at Phase 1 Sports in Las Vegas, and it's a very high-end training facility for a lot of top-level athletes. I have been able to add a lot of power and the endurance to keep that power going. I've always been powerful, but the muscle conditioning I've been able to add has been a tremendous amount of help.

I think a player should be evaluated for what he does on the playing field.

It was very important for me to play winter ball. It was very important for me, my arm, and my whole body.

I've coached grassroots for eight years, I coached middle school, and I coached high school.

I've always had coaching in my blood. My dad was a college coach at West Chester and Ursinus so I had a feeling all along that I would coach.

Being able to block as a receiver, that was something I tried to make a point to the other receivers at Stanford, that you have to take that to a huge level of importance.

My dad coached 41 years, and I was always around coaches.

I have a saying 'train, don't strain.' The Americans have the saying 'no pain, no gain' and that's why they have no distance running champions. They get down to the track with a stopwatch and flog their guts out thinking that it'll make them a champion, but they'll never make a champion that way.

If you're training for a fight, you're going to be pretty much, there's going to be days where you're hurting.

There's so much that goes into being a pro athlete that people have no idea about.

I understand what it feels like to be tired in a game because I was tired in practice, and I understand what my body can go through and how I can push my body mentally and physically, and that's something I really relate to.

I didn't know what it meant or what it took to be healthy and be prepared for 82-plus games... Injuries come with sports. I know that. But you can be prepared, get your body as prepared as it can be through practice and weights.

A player needs recovery time, and it isn't possible to recover from one race in an hour.

The triathlon can be a very hard sport to train for. You see all the time when people try to improve - like their swim, for example: they train really hard for two to three weeks, and then when they go back to normal training, the swim goes back to where it was before.

The beauty of growing up in a coaching family, particularly one that isn't at the very highest level, is that you get to be in the gym - that's where you grow up.

By relying on my experience as a player, I hope to one day perform as a coach.