They Call Me Coach

They Call Me Coach is a 1972 sports memoir by John Wooden, a former basketball coach for the men’s collegiate basketball team, the Bruins, of the University of California, Los Angeles. Wooden, renowned as a legendary basketball coach for his twelve-year-long, record-breaking tenure, reflects on the progression of his career, his sources of inspiration, and his perspectives on key players who later joined, and excelled, in the NBA. Wooden portrays basketball as an endless and intense learning exercise for all involved,  extolling the virtues of teamwork, commitment, and hard work. The memoir is one of the best-selling books written by a sports coach in the history of American sports.

Wooden starts his memoir by expressing his views on the purpose of the roles of teacher and coach. He suggests that the main goal of either is to serve as a positive role model for a team, whether in a sports arena or a classroom. He credits his own capacity to teach and lead to his father, who nurtured him and imparted his belief in the importance of education and hard work. Wooden argues that role models are critical in promoting a team’s success. Real success, in his view, cannot be generated from athletic or intellectual prowess alone. It requires a bedrock of positive character attributes, which he calls the “Pyramid of Success.” In Wooden’s model of the Pyramid of Success, a team player’s ultimate destination is a state of self-contentment that follows from the knowledge that he or she did all that was possible to become one’s best self.

Wooden also explores some of the more complex personality attributes that team players and leaders must learn to manage. One such attribute is stubbornness, a trait he sees in the best and the worst players, as well as in himself. He argues that stubbornness can work in the interests of an individual; for example, when one wants to correct a situation where one feels an injustice or miscalculation has been committed. On the other hand, Wooden claims that it is equally important to know when to give in to a situation, allowing others to help determine a course of events. He emphasizes his respect for his players who in the past have leveraged their stubbornness to force him into different ways of thinking. Many of the basketball strategies and lessons about team dynamics for which he became famous were generated by his players, not himself. Wooden suggests that his players developed a mutual respect for their coach because they were so visibly open to seeing each other’s points of view. He believes that this virtue of teamwork stems from a general openness to experience and unconditional love for other people, and allows teams to accomplish feats they could not otherwise conceive of doing. Among the other virtues he discusses are patience, loyalty, faithfulness, and work ethic.



Wooden spends much of his memoir explaining why he initially decided to teach rather than try his hand playing professional basketball. While in college, he told his own coach that he was torn between trying out for a professional basketball team and teaching professional basketball. His coach suggested that he might better utilize his great education by helping others learn how to work together, than by taking his own shot at fame. Wooden followed the advice of his coach and joined the coaching world. At the time of his memoir, he is more than satisfied with his choice, since it kept him exposed to his favorite sport while allowing him to use his education to make a positive impact on young men.

They Call Me Coach is a first-hand, philosophical take on the art of building a great basketball team. Wooden looks back with great fondness on his long career, not for its illustriousness, but for the links he discovered between education, community, and human achievement.