A biography for Mike Krzyzewskihasn’t been written yet.
“I've been so fortunate in my life that my family has never been jealous of my success. They have shown true love and commitment to me by being supportive. They shared in it.”
“With me and basketball, it became part of me.”
“I've tried to handle winning well, so that maybe we'll win again, but I've also tried to handle failure well. If those serve as good examples for teachers and kids, then I hope that would be a contribution I have made to sport. Not just basketball, but to sport.”
“That's another thing, we made up games. We didn't have equipment. When it snowed, we would play slow motion tackle football. We would play hockey, but we wouldn't skate. We just made things up. I loved doing that.”
“Each group and each youngster is different. As a leader or coach, you get to know what they need.”
“The other thing I knew I had was a high level of competitiveness.”
“It is the ultimate honor for a coach to be his country's coach.”
“The life expectancy of a team is about eight months. Then the next year, it's a whole new team.”
“There are kids don't want to do something because they're afraid of looking stupid to their peers. There comes a time when they start protecting themselves, instead of extending. I want to make sure that they're always trying to extend themselves.”
“First of all, what happens is, when you're good at something, you spend a lot of time with it. People identify you with that sport, so it becomes part of your identity.”
“That's what I do now: I lead and I teach. If we win basketball games from doing that, then that's great, but I lead and teach. Those are the two things I concentrate on.”
“You can see and you can listen, but you have to have moments in which you feel.”
“Fun is to experience things you would not have been able to experience in any other setting.”
“It's always an honor to be ranked high, but whatever is said about you, you take it and then take a realistic look at yourself and who you are.”
“When I was in sixth grade, I wanted to become a priest.”
“Imagination has a great deal to do with winning.”
“Basketball was not my main sport in grade school, or even the first year of high school.”
“Even though we want huge individual egos, our collective ego is unbelievable.”
“Once you win a National Championship, how do you do that again? How do you get the passion to do that again? We won it again right away, the next year. A lot of it had to do with the fact that I didn't give myself an opportunity to enjoy the first one.”
“When you win, sometimes it overshadows a poor performance.”