Jim Valvano Quotes

To have harmony on a team, you need a coach who can get inside the head of every player and get them all pulling in one direction.

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

Our coach was absolutely out of his head. He must have read Bear Bryant's book. We had 78 players out. The first day 35 quit. Twenty quit the second day. We ended with 17 players. It was depressing.

Niko Kovac had to understand the system inside Bayern, to realise that this is a very different club to Eintracht Frankfurt, where he was before.

The best coaches have strong charisma to motivate the whole team while managing the relationship with the media, which can be tense.

Under Pep Guardiola, it's hard work. For me, Guardiola is one of the best coaches I've ever met. He's incredibly clever and tactically really good, and he knows how to speak to us, how to motivate us, and that's what it is like.

Popovich is always talking about team.

We had a really good club at Everton who gave me the opportunity to do the job the way I felt it needed to be done.

It's part of my game to occasionally send a message, one that may be unpopular to the outside world, but can be important for the team.

We want stuff done right. As long as it's my team, I'll voice my opinion. Yep, it's my team. You media guys might give it to him, like you've given him everything else his whole lifetime, but this is the Diesel's ship. And if we're not right, I'm going to go out there and try to get it right... Just ask Karl and Garywhy they wanted to come here. It was because of one person, not two. One.

You'd like to see your team reasonably happy, but that's not your job. Gain their respect and get them to accept their roles

My last year with the Spurs, I was late to practice one time.

All 14 guys on the team have sacrificed something to get to this point.

I don't really want to go into my problems with the team at the time except to say that no one's ever had to pay me to play basketball.

You must learn how to hold a team together. You must lift some men up, calm others down, until finally they've got one heartbeat. Then you've got yourself a team.

Coaching is salesmanship. Coaching is winning players over and convincing them they have to play together. It takes a team conviction to play together to make things work.

The greatest ally you have to get things working well and the players performing as a team is the bench. Don't be afraid to use it, either for the star player or anyone else.

He doesn't need advice on how to play his position, but he needs advice on how to play team ball... If it's going to be my team, I'll voice my opinion. If he don't like it, he can opt out.

I'm a leader. I'm the leader of this team, and they look for me at any point in the game, and that's not just scoring-wise, I do other things.

As a leader you set the tone for your entire team. Communicate your vision.

No one is bigger than the team. If you can't do things our way, you're not getting time here and we don't care who you are

Why would I want to help them (the T -Wolves) win a title? They're not doing anything for me. I'm at risk. I have a lot of risk here. I got my family to feed.

There will be internal discipline, but I can envisage both of them playing for Newcastle again. They're top-class players and they don't come along very often.

One of the greatest joys of leadership is assembling and knitting together teams of fantastic people.

I consider myself a leader of this football team, along with a lot of other guys.