Mike Krzyzewski
Mike Krzyzewski
Michael William Krzyzewskiis an American college basketball coach and former player. Since 1980, he has served as the head men's basketball coach at Duke University. At Duke, Krzyzewski has led the Blue Devils to five NCAA Championships, 12 Final Fours, 12 ACC regular season titles, and 13 ACC Tournament championships. Krzyzewski is also the coach of the United States men's national basketball team, whom he led to two gold medals at the 2008 Summer Olympics and 2012 Summer Olympics. He...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth13 February 1947
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
Basketball was not my main sport in grade school, or even the first year of high school.
I had a really bad temper, when I was growing up. Sport helped me channel that temper into more positive acts.
I'm still not a great reader, but my wife is and my daughters are, and I envy them. I think I got into a bad habit of trying to do something all the time, instead of trying to sit down and take my time a little bit.
When I was growing up, there weren't any Little Leagues in the city. Parents worked all the time. They didn't have time to take their kids out to play baseball and football.
When I went to high school, an all-boys' school, a Catholic school, I tried out for football, and I didn't make it. It was the first time, athletically, that I was knocked down.
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.
The best teams are team in any sport that lose themselves in the team. The individuals lose their identity. And their identities come about as a result of being in the team first.
If you win a National Championship, or you win two, people think you have not only seen the Holy Grail, but you've embraced it. Basically, I do what a lot of people do, but I've been able to win.
My parents didn't really understand too much about sport. At that time, we were in a Polish community in the inner city of Chicago, and I was the youngest of a bunch of cousins. Polish families are real big, with cousins and aunts and uncles.
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.
Playing sport was somewhat frivolous, but I liked it. I rebelled a little bit, and wouldn't go to music lessons and things like that, but I would go and play ball. My parents learned to love it because they saw how much I got out of it.
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.
A common mistake among those who work in sport is spending a disproportional amount of time on "x's and o's" as compared to time spent learning about people.
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.