COACH K ON THE USE OF EMOTION TO COACH AND TEACH

Here are a few excerpts of an article written by Barry Jacobs for the New-Observer who does a good job of speaking to wide range of emotions a coach goes through and they can actually be used to mold a team.  He pinpoints Coach Mike Krzyzewski on his thoughts.  The article is well written and can be in its entirety here.

These are a few of my take aways:

Anger can be as much a part of a coach’s repertoire as the ability to reconfigure an offense to exploit the capabilities of different collections of players. But Mike Krzyzewski is the rare coach who explicitly cites the volatile emotion as a preferred tool in leading his teams. The attribute is part of a mix that’s fueled a Hall of Fame career, helped his Duke program maintain its heading in choppy waters while players come and go in waves, and, to be honest, earned him a reputation for snarling on the sidelines.

“I’ve been blessed over the years to have passion, anger and adrenaline,” a pleased Krzyzewski enumerated after the Blue Devils defeated Pittsburgh. “All three of those things kind of kick in; I’ll see how I handle it now after this.”

Adrenaline and passion are easy traits to understand in a competitor who’s won more games (1,071) than any man in major-college history. Anger, however, is more difficult to see as a constant. Not in Krzyzewski’s firmament. “If you’re a competitor, I think you have to be angry at times,” Krzyzewski noted last week during a break from his duties as head man at the K Academy, his five-day, Duke-based basketball fantasy camp for adult men. For him, those angry times may be episodic, but they are also routine.

He concedes there’s a “fine line” between passionate and angry, and that anger may not be exactly the word he wants. But it’s the word he uses, the word that fits.

“I think anger is emotion,” the former U.S. Military Academy cadet and army artillery captain says in an otherwise quiet coaches’ meeting room at Cameron Indoor Stadium. “If anger is used to destroy bad things, anger is huge. We’ve won wars with anger.”

“I can get angry at selfishness, stupidity, like if it’s repeated stupidity,” he says, perhaps attested by the gray finally tinging the edges of his black hair. “Just something that goes below your standards, whether it be how the locker room looks or how we dress.”