takes a village. BBN FOREVER !!! Recent comment from Coach - TopicsExpress

takes a village. BBN FOREVER !!! Recent comment from Coach Cal: I’m taking a final, last few days off before our guys return to campus and we really get this thing cranked back up again. While I was sitting here thinking about some things – and the Big Blue Nation knows I like to think when I have a little free time – it occurred to me that our staff doesn’t get as much credit as it deserves. My staff – everyone from the assistant coaches to our strength and conditioning staff, our trainers, our media relations staff, our managers and so forth – is instrumental in what we do here on a daily basis. It takes a village to do this job right, and without them, we couldn’t do what we do here at Kentucky. The backbone of our program is our players. Without our players, our program is nothing. Everything we do here is for them, their well-being and their future. But, if we are to achieve our goal of a players-first program, our staff has to be the best it can possibly be. If our team sees any crack in our staff, we can never truly be a team on that basketball court. Whoever I hire, my staff must be an unbelievably strong team that works together, and more importantly, works for each other. Just as we tell our players to be their brother’s keeper, each staff member is each other’s PR team. Orlando’s PR machine includes me, John Robic, Kenny Payne, Rod Strickland, Lunetha Pryor, Chris Simmons, Preston Spradlin, Mike Malone, etc. If anyone talks with us about Orlando, we are his PR machine. The same goes for Kenny or anyone else on our staff. Kenny’s PR team includes all of those people and Orlando. When it comes to how we make up our staff, I need positive people around me. I need people who are upbeat and have a positive outlook on things with a “we can do this” mentality. I’m not saying everybody has to be whistling and skipping every day, but they have to look at things with an idea that we can tackle anything together. I need people who look at adversity as a challenge and failure as a learning opportunity. I need people with an attitude that we either win or we learn. Even knowing how difficult it is, I can’t have negative people around our program. It is really important to me that every guy has a certain seat on the bus. In other words, I won’t hire the same type of person five times for five different positions. We need everybody on the bus to do something different – what they’re better at than anyone else on the staff – and to do it well. The only one thing I require all of my staff to be able to do is recruit, which I’ll get into in a moment. As long as there is something that you add to our team, I’m good with you. I’m always trying to hire people who are strong in areas that I am weak in, which is why I have a big staff. I’m an idea guy who enjoys being on the court teaching the game. A lot of the ideas we present on basketball are presented by me, but they may have been someone else’s ideas because we are a team in what we do. Like I said before, the only thing I require everyone on my staff to be able to do is recruiting. Anyone who is helping our program – everyone from Ray Oliver in our strength and conditioning program to Tim Asher in our video department, John Hayden and Deb Moore in media relations, and Linda Carmack and Allie Schick, who help run our office – has to help us recruit. When they come in contact with the kids and their families, I want those people walking away saying, “Wow, what a nice person. That person will care for and look after my son. That’s someone I can talk to.” That part everyone must be able to do. The people who are hired as my on-floor coaches have to, of course, be able to coach. You can’t be a coach here and not be able to coach basketball. I’m not hiring people to get players; I’m hiring coaches who can develop players. If we can develop players who become NBA players, who then become good NBA players, who then become the best NBA players, a la Derrick Rose, an NBA MVP, then we will continue to recruit the best players. That’s how it works in my mind, but at the end of the day, we are out to develop players, so they all have to be able to coach.