Our Don Meyer quotes will shine a light on one of the great basketball coaches of all time. He could not only coach, but he also had a way with words.
Best Don Meyer Quotes
Shout praise and whisper criticism.
Every day you teach attitude.
You build your program from the ideas of great coaches.
Recognize and reward players who put the team first, not just the gifted ones.
Sometimes the best recruits are the ones you don’t get.
Good Don Meyer Quotes
If you can do something and not blow your own horn, it sure sounds a lot better.
You build your program from the ideas of great coaches.
Successful basketball coaches are those that subscribe to a system that is based on sound fundamental teachings.
See Understanding Basketball Positions From Point Guard to Stretch 5.
Basketball Quotes by Don Meyer
Discipline and demand without being demeaning.
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.
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.
You aren’t going to win championships unless you make layups and free throws.
You have to learn to play with what you’ve got.
Discover your gift, develop your gift, and then give it away every day.
Play as a team
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.
Winning a postseason 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.
We sure didn’t play great, but we played hard. And I can live with that.
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Ten minutes after you lose that last game, you start working on the next season.
There’s only one thing we can control, and that is how hard we play.
Make practices like games and games like practices.
You have to learn things in every game because you are not going to be able to practice for two-and-a-half to three hours (during the season), so the games have to be the ultimate learning experience.
It is foolish to expect a young man to follow your advice and ignore your example.
Don Meyer Sayings
We have 2,500 students and an 8,000-seat basketball arena. You do the math on how important basketball is in Aberdeen.
If I cover my head with my hands, it means to deny the ball to the opponent’s ball handler.
I tell everyone that I have 25,000 assistant coaches. If I want to know something, I just go to the grocery store.
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Don Meyer’s words of wisdom
We can always do it better.
As a coach, you’re just trying to figure out how to keep a team on edge. You’ve got to find that edge.
Have character, don’t be one.
Go from good to great because good is the enemy of great.
All glory to God.
Discipline and demand without being demeaning.
Simplify the game as much as possible. When you add, you must subtract.
Players who are late are saying that their time is more important than the team.
When you watch the game, be a student of the game.
On Basketball
It is not what you teach but what you emphasize.
Prepare, plan, and practice like you just lost your last game.
If a farmer and his family can get up at 5:30 every morning to milk cows, surely we can get up at that time to practice basketball.
The only thing success should do is make you more humble.
When you get to be my age, you don’t buy green bananas because you may not be around to eat them.
When the legs go, the heart and the head follow quickly behind.
TiP: These Don Meyer quotes can be used for season-ending banquet programs or coaches’ emails to the team.
Don Meyer Quotes on Basketball Coaching
In the end, what your own troops do is more important than who they are marching against.
What you accept in victory, you must accept defeat.
There is a lot of difference at McDonald’s between the guy in the back making the fries and the manager upfront who is running the place.
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.
You have to clean out the pig barn every week because you know your pigs are in there doing their jobs every day.
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.
On Toughness
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.
To those who much has been given, much is expected.
If you are a good team, your offense is born on the defensive end.
We painted a beautiful picture, but we just didn’t finish it. Finishing is the difference between a beautiful picture and a masterpiece.
There is nothing more important than rebounding. Don’t just give it lip service.
Practice shared suffering. If one guy messes up, everyone runs. If one guy does well, everyone benefits.
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 for the rest of the winter.
See the official Don Meyer site
Time doesn’t fly when you are not happy.
By Mike O’Halloran
Mike is a basketball coach, author, and founder of Sports Feel Good Stories.
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