Leading with the Heart

The season is so long, we have to create a series of objectives to strive for. It can be a series of games or anything that makes sense. I like to call it an energy cycle. In order to keep a team motivated over an extended interval of time, planned short bursts of energy like this can be very effective. In 1999, for instance, I scheduled our team to play a late-January game against St. John’s University in Madison Square Garden—three days before we played North Carolina, our archrival. I could have left the schedule alone and given the team those three extra days for rest and preparation. But I was thinking ahead to the NCAA tournament. So I told our players that the four-day period that encompassed the St. John’s and North Carolina games would be a simulation of what we might experience in March.