Beyond Basketball: Coach K's Keywords for Success

If you Coach this is a must read. I am a fan of K and work with Kids as a travel soccer coach. This helped me communicate better with my kids.

As a Duke Grad (Fuqua '90) and a huge Coach K fan, I waited with great anticipation to read another one of Coach K's wonderful books. When his book was announced I pre-ordered it on Amazon and was visibly happy when it finally arrived. I saved the reading the book for a week or two until I had a long airline flight. My flight to the West Coast finally arrived, I got upgraded to first class and all I had to do was enjoy a glass of wine and read the book. Everything was working according to plan. I opened the book, took a sip of wine and began reading at the foreword. Boy, was I under whelmed. Sure it was a good book with nice anecdotes about some of the players and teams I knew and loved. Sure, there was the insider view of what goes on behind the curtain on both a professional and personal level. Sure, the title holds true and the lessons of Coach K go far behind basketball. The problem was that it was BORING. There is no flow. I could not string together the chapters and get on a roil. The book takes one word at a time, defines its, has a narrative and expository delineation of the definition and then a nice story. This template repeats itself over and over and over. Scores big points for parallel structure but none for holding the reader's attention. With no over arching theme, other than the title, it was as if I was reading a random set of stories rather than a series of tiles that combine to form a unified mosaic. This book pales in comparison to Coach YK's other books and to his in-person presentations. While it is not bad (and is definitely better than Dean Smith's "Leading with the Nose") it hardly lives up to the bar K has set with this other books or with any other domain of his life. I hate to say it but the template structure Coach K has chosen relegates this book to the top of the pile of bathroom reading but towards the bottom for good reading or inspirational work.

Read wooden then read this book, and you'll see the similarities in their style of coaching and some of their personality traits. For me this is a lighter read than wooden but then it has alot of useful ideas about personal and team development that you'll probably love to look at. The zenith of the book is to realise that father and daugther co-authored the book and getting to know Coach K's father had to change his name to Kross to get a low-class job to get going in the US in the '40's while the name "Krzyzewski" was good enough to become a hall of famer in the new Millenum. Perhaps you might say the "American dream". I should be giving the book 5 stars but then I have some cultural issues with some of the views he held in this book which to the average American will not make any sense that I'm uncomfortable with such views, never mind it's a global village and this Amazon(supposedly the biggest online market (wild forest) in the Universe).

Coach K does a great job of teaching leadership skills through telling stories. He highlights some really key moments in his life and career.

Here a UK fan is reading about a Duke coach. Uugg! Well written by his daughter tells actual stories about how he broke down his coaching methods using words. Easy to read, very instructive. I’ve read three of his books like this one the best. Thanks