A basketball team is like the five fingers on your hand. If you can get them all together, you have a fist. That's how I want you to play.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

Each group and each youngster is different. As a leader or coach, you get to know what they need.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

Everybody wants to take responsibility when you win, but when you fail, all these fingers are pointing.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

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.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

I always won in my imagination. I always hit the game-winning shot, or I hit the free throw. Or if I missed, there was a lane violation, and I was given another one.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

I had a really bad temper, when I was growing up. Sport helped me channel that temper into more positive acts.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

I have a rule on my team: when we talk to one another, we look each other right in the eye, because I think it's tough to lie to somebody. You give respect to somebody.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

I think some parents now look at a youngster failing as the final thing. It's a process, and failure is part of the process. I would like it if the teacher and the parents would connect more. I think that used to be, but we're losing a little bit of that right now.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

I'm fortunate now that I coach at Duke University and we've won a lot. I have some kids who haven't failed that much. But when they get to college, they're going to fail some time. That's a thing that I can help them the most with.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

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.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

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.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

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.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

In high school, in sport, I had a coach who told me I was much better than I thought I was, and would make me do more in a positive sense. He was the first person who taught me not to be afraid of failure.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

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.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

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.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

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.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

That's what I do now: I lead and I teach. If we win basketball games from doing that, then that's great, but I lead and teach. Those are the two things I concentrate on.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

The life expectancy of a team is about eight months. Then the next year, it's a whole new team.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

The person who has inspired me my whole life is my Mom, because she taught me commitment. She sacrificed.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

The thing I loved the most - and still love the most about teaching - is that you can connect with an individual or a group, and see that individual or group exceed their limits.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

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.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

To me, teamwork is the beauty of our sport, where you have five acting as one. You become selfless.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

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.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote

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.
- Mike Krzyzewski Quote