Bear Bryant Quotes about Basketball

The old lessons (work, self-discipline, sacrifice, teamwork, fighting to achieve) aren't being taught by many people other than football coaches these days. The football coach has a captive audience and can teach these lessons because the communication lines between himself and his players are more wide open than between kids and parents. We better teach these lessons or else the country's future population will be made up of a majority of crooks, drug addicts, or people on relief.

There's a lot of blood, sweat, and guts between dreams and success.

Set goals - high goals for you and your organization. When your organization has a goal to shoot for, you create teamwork, people working for a common good.

I'll never give up on a player regardless of his ability as long as he never gives up on himself. In time he will develop.

If they don't have a winning attitude, I don't want them.

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.

You take those little rascals, talk to them good, pat them on the back, let them think they are good, and they will go out and beat the biguns.

Sacrifice. Work. Self-discipline. I teach these things, and my boys don't forget them when they leave.

I'm no miracle man. I guarantee nothing but hard work.

But there's one thing about quitters you have to guard against - they are contagious. If one boy goes, the chances are he'll take somebody with him, and you don't want that. So when they would start acting that way, I used to pack them up and get them out, or embarrass them, or do something to turn them around.

People who are in it for their own good are individualists. They don't share the same heartbeat that makes a team so great. A great unit, whether it be football or any organization, shares the same heartbeat.

If you want to coach you have three rules to follow to win. One, surround yourself with people who can't live without football. I've had a lot of them. Two, be able to recognize winners. They come in all forms. And, three, have a plan for everything. A plan for practice, a plan for the game. A plan for being ahead, and a plan for being behind 20-0 at half, with your quarterback hurt and the phones dead, with it raining cats and dogs and no rain gear because the equipment man left it at home.

The biggest mistake coaches make is taking borderline cases and trying to save them. I'm not talking about grades now, I'm talking about character. I want to know before a boy enrolls about his home life, and what his parents want him to be.

If there is one thing that has helped me as a coach, it's my ability to recognize winners, or good people who can become winners by paying the price.

I always want my players to show class, knock'em down, pat on the back, and run back to the huddle.

Mama wanted me to be a preacher. I told her coachin' and preachin' were a lot alike.

We can't have two standards, one set for the dedicated young men who want to do something ambitious and one set for those who don't.

There is no sin in not liking to play; it's a mistake for a boy to be there if he doesn't want to.

I'm no innovator. If anything I'm a stealer, or borrower. I've stolen or borrowed from more people than you can shake a stick at.

Don't talk too much. Don't pop off. Don't talk after the game until you cool off.

The idea of molding men means a lot to me.

I tell young players who want to be coaches, who think they can put up with all the headaches and heartaches, can you live without it? If you can live without it, don't get in it.

I told them my system was based on the "ant plan," that I'd gotten the idea watching a colony of ants in Africa during the war. A whole bunch of ants working toward a common goal.

If you whoop and holler all the time, the players just get used to it.

My approach to the game has been the same at all the places I've been. Vanilla. The sure way. That means, first of all, to win physically. If you got eleven on a field, and they beat the other eleven physically, they'll win. They will start forcing mistakes. They'll win in the fourth quarter.