Bobby Knight Thinking Quotations

I think that it's perhaps harder to learn from victory than it is from defeat. I think that we don't want defeat. We don't want defeat in sport. We don't want defeat in life. How are we going to be beaten? All right. We have to deal with those things. What's going to cause us to lose the game, whatever the game might be?

I think that we as a people are always prone to think about, well, tomorrow will be a better day. Well, why will it be a better day? And I think the more that we believe in doing things better, doing the right thing rather than hoping that that's going to happen, let's make it happen.

When I first started coaching, one of the worst things that I think I heard was 'It will be O.K.' I would wonder, 'How the hell is it going to be O.K.?' The worst word in the English language is 'hope.'

I don't think I have ever been out of control.

Well, I think it's pretty much established that I just didn't have any interest in coaching in the pros.

Perform drills that force your players to think

We talk in coaching about "winners" - kids, and I've had a lot of them, who just will not allow themselves or their team to lose. Coaches call that a will to win. I don't. I think that puts the emphasis in the wrong place. Everybody has a will to win. What's far more important is having the will to prepare to win.

I'm not sure that an athlete is prepared to be a role model. He has a lot of attention paid to him that he shouldn't have, and then the athletes tend to think of themselves as better than they are.

A quick way for any player to make himself better is to think about what he himself doesn't like to play against