To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved

Much as been written about Buzz Williams' "obsessive-compulsive habits." To say he values organization is an understatement. [See here, here, and here.]

According to this article, his office is "meticulous," a "tidy sanctuary" where he keeps dozens of "autobiographies written by famous coaches, New York Times best sellers and his own detailed journal with color-coded entries. He keeps copious notes on books he reads, conversations he has with players' parents and input he gets from assistants. Williams keeps some folded and clipped together in his pocket."

But it's more than organization that's helped Coach Williams guide Marquette to a 23-5 record (the team's fifth loss came last night against No. 2 UConn).

The key has been his ability to build trust with his players. That's come as a result of "his coaching strategies, but more with talks and off-court assignments that had little, if anything, to do with basketball."

"Everything we did in the summer was beneficial for developing a relationship on trust," Williams says.

For example, he gave his players reading assignments and had them share their thoughts about the books they'd read, such as "The Last Lecture."

Says one Marquette player, "We were like, 'Coach, we already have enough work for school.' But getting that in-depth analysis from teammates and their perspective on life … you learn to respect each other."

There's a quote from the poet George MacDonald that has strong relevance for coaches and supports Coach Williams' efforts to foster trust.

"To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved."

Putting down expectations and theories on paper

When it comes to hitting, the SF Giants wrote the book. Literally.

During the offseason, hitting coach Carney Lansford (center with Bruce Bochy at left), working with the team's minor league hitting coaches, developed a 16-chapter "hitting manual" designed to "spell out their expectations for coaches, detail their core theories and make sure knowledge is spread consistently and evenly like black earth on a farm field."

The book, which is part of the franchise's overarching "Giants Way" program, is something many teams use, according to Giants manager Bruce Bochy, who says the book helps ensure consistency throughout the organization.

"It's not so much a specific way to hit as much as making sure we're all doing things the same way from top to bottom: that we're teaching the same things, using the same terminology and using the same drills on every level. It's OK for a coach to have different ideas. We just want to make sure we aren't confusing the player."

Adds Lansford, who played in more than 1,800 Major League games with some 7,100 at-bats in 15 seasons:

"Some of the biggest things we can do are the simplest. If you wait till they get to the big leagues, it's too late. We've got guys in the major leagues who don't know how to hit the ball to right field."

Seeking feedback from players

At the White Sox spring training facility in Arizona, manager Ozzie Guillen had a private meeting with a group of veteran players.

During the meeting, Coach Guillen says he asked what he "needed to change to make the ballclub better, my expectation for them with the ballclub, different ideas."

"I want them to take charge with the ballclub. Last year I was a little [too] involved with [players' problems]. But I have to be open. I wanted to know if [something] bothered them or not. If nothing bothers [those veterans], then I'm not going to [get involved]. You have to be aware of what the players think and what are the expectations for them.

They want me to be me. It was no big deal. Before spring training starts, I always talk to the players about what I have to do to get better, what I have to do to make sure the team is better.

After the meeting, Coach Guillen made it clear who is accountable in the end, saying:

"I'm the leader of this ballclub. I'm the face of this thing.''

Everything we do will be designed around cooperation and cohesiveness

Coaches often use the first team meeting of the season to set the tone and communicate key themes.

NY Mets manager Jerry Manuel (pictured here), who said he thought "all winter along" about "what he would tell the team before the spring's first full-squad workout," focused on the need for "selfless play" in his talk with the players.

According to one Mets player, "It was definitely the best pre-spring-training meeting I’ve ever been part of. Just the confidence, the way he’s trying to get his message across — very believable, very straight to the point, very straightforward. We have one rule here: that’s to win a championship."

Coach Manuel's theme is clear:

"Everything that we do will be designed to bring that cohesiveness, cooperation, altruism, unselfishness. That’s what we do."

A more collaborative coach

Raja Bell was a rookie on Larry Brown's 2001 Sixers team that reached the NBA Finals.

In December, Bell was reunited with Coach Brown in CHA, where he says he's seen how his 68-year-old coach has changed over the years.

“More mellow,” Bell said recently. “From the first couple of days (after Bell’s trade from Phoenix to Charlotte), I could see a different guy. When he needs to yell, he will. But in day-to-day demeanor, he’s a different guy.”

According to Bell, "Brown is no less an authority figure. But he’s more collaborative, less strident, less prone to overreact and wear out players with constant criticism."

Coach Brown "insists he hasn’t gone soft (and there’s plenty of evidence at practice that he hasn’t). However, he agrees he’s more flexible these days in his approach with players."

"The biggest thing now is (how you coach) depends on the person you’re dealing with," Brown said. "Kids are all different. I used to treat 1-15 (on a roster) exactly alike. That’s how I was taught" by his mentor, former North Carolina coach Dean Smith. "That way, nobody knew who my favorite was. The important thing is to get each of them better."

[Thanks, Coach Cooley!]

It's hard to play defense when everybody is quiet

On the previous post, Billy Gillispie explained why communication is critical to playing good defense.

In a Q&A yesterday on Hoops Addict with Shawn Marion, Marion expands on the subject:

"It’s a little bit easier when guys are communicating and talking, it’s hard as hell to play defense when everybody is quiet. I think with any good defensive team you can hear them talking about stuff and it makes everybody that much more alert. When you go out there all quiet and stuff it makes playing defense that much more harder. We just gotta’ talk more, that’s the biggest thing because it revs everybody up."

If you don't communicate, you'll never be a great defensive team

Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie talked recently about chemistry and on-court communication:

"People, when they're talking about chemistry with a team, they always talk about offense," Coach Gillispie said. "Do they share the ball? Are guys selfish? Do they shoot shots they shouldn't shoot?

There's as much chemistry that has to be established defensively as there is offensively, maybe even more so, because you're seeing so many moving pieces.

You can have an above-average team, probably, if you don't communicate, but you'll never be a great defensive team if you don't. You have to be constantly talking."

According to this article, "great defensive teams can adjust on the fly. Strong defensive units can compensate when one teammate breaks down during a possession."

"You can't adjust if you're not talking with your teammates. Our young guys -- and it's understandable -- don't talk nearly as much as they need to and nearly as well as they need to," said Coach Gillispie.

"That's why you see really good teams playing on TV and they have the best recruiting classes in the country -- not even close, in everybody's opinion -- and all the all-star freshmen are sitting on the bench in the last five minutes of the game."

The definition of a "player's coach"

Late last month, new Bucs coach Raheem Morris hired former Boston College head football coach Jeff Jagodzinski as the team's new offensive coordinator.

A 25-year coaching veteran, Coach Jagodzinski was asked recently about his coaching style.

Q: As the son of a cop, are you a discipline guy? Are you a screamer? How would you describe your coaching style?

A: "They talk about a players' coach. Let me define what a players' coach is. A players' coach is one that is not an accommodator, but is a communicator. Guys will know exactly where I am coming from."

I love the people in my life who have been hard on me

It's ironic that Kansas State coach Frank Martin, while known for his "intimidating stature" and "The Stare," is also called "Frank" by his players.

According to one KSU player, "Frank is the type coach who likes to be up close and personal with his players. He has an open-door policy and he relates to us really well. But on the floor, his love of the game makes him really intense."

This article contends that the Wildcats "share a reputation with Doc Sadler’s bunch at Nebraska as the hardest-working teams in show business. And Martin is doing it with a relatively young bunch also minus last year’s senior point guard."

"I don’t need people to call me by a certain name to make myself feel empowered," says Coach Martin, whose team has won six straight. "I’m the head basketball coach and I make the decisions. The players do what I ask them to do, they play. If they don’t, they don’t. I love the people in my life who have been hard on me rather than the people who let me get away with what I wanted to do. That’s who I am. I don’t worry about that nonsense because I feel comfortable with our locker room."

Striking a balance between control and freedom

If you haven't checked the Ivy League standings lately, you might be surprised to see Princeton back on top.

Tigers coach Sydney Johnson, who returned to his alma mater two years ago after working as an assistant under John Thompson III at Georgetown, is rebuilding the program, which has seen its wins drop from 20 in 2003-04, to 15, 12, 11, and, finally, 6, the last four years, respectively.

Former Princeton coach Joe Scott, whom the 34-year-old Coach Johnson replaced following the 2006-07 season, is quick to accept full responsibility for the program's decline.

"I was a bad coach," said Coach Scott, who also played at Princeton and served as an assistant for eight seasons under Pete Carril. "If you want to blame the downfall (on me), then go ahead and do that. That's fine. That's what happens in sports. I did a bad job coaching there for three years. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong person. That's how it goes in life."

Coach Scott, the former head coach at Air Force and now the head coach at Denver, "inherited an Ivy League championship team from John Thompson III, who left for Georgetown, that featured four returning starters in 2004-05. Scott's demanding, militaristic style created friction with players and the team finished with a losing Ivy record for the first time in school history."

According to this article, Coach Johnson's "first order of business was simple: understand his players."

"Some kids respond very well to being pushed hard. Some kids don't. So I don't think you should say across the board, 'I'm going to scream and yell at every guy.' Because some guys are going to pull back. ... So, I took time to figure out who I was coaching and went from there."

The article explains how Coach Johnson "adapted to his players' strengths and struck a balance between control and freedom. He retained the framework of the Princeton offense, but incorporated specific plays to maximize the individual talent of his players."

"All players want some freedom," said junior guard Marcus Schroeder. "Coach Scott wanted the offense to be run more precisely and let the offense get a shot rather than let the players get a shot. Coach Johnson is more improvisational, letting the abilities of the individual players do it."

Little things add up

Just as Mike Singletary did in SFO when he took over as head coach of the 49ers mid-season, new Grizzlies coach Lionel Hollins is focusing on "chemistry, defense and discipline" as the foundation for turning things around in Memphis.

An article in today's Memphis paper describes Coach Hollins' coaching style as "old-school yet flexible" and notes how he's "been a hard taskmaster in practices and a strict disciplinarian off the court."

Coach Hollins "holds players accountable in every aspect of their jobs," asking Darius Miles to remove his earrings before Miles went out for "a pre-game workout." Players must also "wear team-issued practice shorts and tops instead of the random gear that had been acceptable."

"These little things add up," Memphis GM Chris Wallace said. "Lionel is a stickler for practicing hard and having a team in excellent physical condition. He's working diligently on those two fronts. We're practicing hard, and we're practicing longer. There's a payoff on this. Plus, I'll say Lionel has a rare ability to relate to players. You have to be firm but you can't be firm in a high school and military way. You can't be overbearing in your firmness on this level. You have to be firm, but at the same time communicate with your players and have a different relationship off the court. You can't be a robot and a total dictator. He has that rare ability to walk down the middle of the street. He knows when to back off. To me that's the essence of NBA coaching."

According to Wallace, Coach Hollins has had an immediate impact on Rudy Gay, who "is starting to attack the basket more."

"He's like a baseball pitcher who can't just throw fastballs," says Wallce. "He's got to throw knuckleballs, curves and sliders. He's got to show a wide-variety of skills, and he's becoming more efficient. We're making progress as a team and our players are making progress individually."

The fragility of today's players

Good Q&A with Tennessee coach Pat Summitt in Time magazine this week in which she describes how players of today differ from when she started coaching back in the mid-1970s:

"I really think that kids are more fragile now. I don't know why. But they don't seem to have as much toughness. If you call them out, you can just break their spirit. You have one-on-one meetings, go over and just talk to them during practice. It's just that they're sensitive. They're more fragile."

Turning timeouts over to the players

During some timeouts this season, UC-Irvine men's volleyball coach John Speraw, who guided the Anteaters to a national title two years ago and won a gold medal in Beijing this past summer, has "started saying less and asking more questions, instead of telling them what to do."

According to Coach Speraw, his objective is to "teach these guys to be responsible, independent young men, and part of that lesson needs to start on the volleyball court with how they strategize and how they communicate with one another. I wanted [the players] to talk among themselves. I’ve done that periodically and with some good results. I like it."

As for his players, they say it helps give them ownership:

"I think it empowers us a lot. And because we’re being so vocal with each other, we can understand it and put it into terms better for other guys on the team, especially the younger guys, who don’t have as much experience," senior Taylor Wilson said.

"We talk a lot about being a self-sufficient team. We talk a lot about what’s going on and what the other team is doing and we try to figure out ways to score points on the other team. [Coach Speraw] really promotes that a lot. He likes to have the staff sit down. They say a few things here or there, but he really enjoys when we can try to figure out how to try and stop a team."

Communicating authentically

What do you say to your team before the biggest game of the season?

What would you tell your guys before they headed out of the locker room?

For PIT coach Mike Tomlin, whatever he says, it won't be rehearsed.

"I make a conscious effort to wing it. I think that's real. I think our guys relate to that," he said. "It's that way that I deal with them, for the most part. This week has been tougher than most in terms of trying to keep those thoughts out of my mind because there's a lot to say. But at the same time, I'm intent on doing that (winging it). I'm going to just walk in and communicate with them like I always do. I never prepare for the night-before-the-game speech."

What Coach Tomlin is describing is his value for "authentic communication," which has been defined as "speaking from your heart from the highest regions of the mind and from the depths of the soul."

As this author writes:

"Communicating authentically is not an easy task. At times, authentic communication feels like risk and takes courage. It reflects your experience, not an absolute reality."

If you are going to lead, you try to lead with a servant's heart

At one point this season, Steelers RB Willie Parker became unhappy that the team wasn't giving him more carries.

PIT coach Mike Tomlin had a quick response:

“Every day when I walk into our practice facility,” said the head coach, “I walk past five Lombardi Trophies. I don’t walk past five rushing titles.”

Coach Tomlin describes his first coaching job, as the 23-year-old receivers coach at VMI, as "pure."

“I didn’t have anything else going on in my life, truth be known. I was single, I was broke, I didn’t have cable or long distance calling, and so there was nothing else to do other than immerse yourself in the game. I was with a bunch of guys who were like-minded, and we had a great time.”

Looking back on what he's learned over the last 13 years, from VMI to the Super Bowl, Coach Tomlin says he's thankful for his mentors:

“I’ve been blessed that I have worked with some great people, people who took a stake in my development,” he said this week. “And really, I pull from all of it on a day-to-day basis – lessons learned from leadership. It’s about people. It’s about taking care of the troops. It’s about putting them first. I’ve learned that if you are going to lead, you try to lead with a servant’s heart. I try to do that – try to take care of my men and give them what they need to be great.”

There is a problem, let's fix it

Four interesting points from the book "Hard Facts," a book from the Harvard Business School Press:

~~~~~~~~~~

Talent or ability... depends on what happens to people and how they are coached, not just their innate skill or motivation.

A study by Lawrence Kahn examined the effect of baseball managers on team and player performance. Kahn measured player ability by the average of their performance over their entire carers, a reliable indicator of player talent.

He found that some managers inspired players to perform above their ability, and other managers stymied players, consistently driving players to perform below their ability.

Ability or talent did not explain all of a player's performance in a given year. How the player was managed or coached mattered, too.

~~~~~~~~~~

What is true for individuals is also true for organizations, groups, and teams. Exceptional performance depends heavily on experience and effort. No matter how gifted (or ordinary) team members are to start out, the more experience they have working together, the better their teams do.

Think of the U.S. women's national soccer team, which has won numerous championships, including two of the four women's World Cups and two of the three Olympic women's tournaments held to date.

The team certainly has had enormously talented players. Yet every team member will tell you that the most important factors in their success were the communication, mutual understanding, respect, and ability to work together tha tdeveloped in the dozen or so years that the stable core group played together.

Quantitative research on team effectiveness has demonstrated the power of such joint experience in every setting examined, including string quartets, surgical teams, student groups, top management teams, and airplane cockpit crews.

Experienced teams perform better because over time members come to trust each other more, communicate more effectively, and learn to blend each other's diverse skills, strengths, and weaknesses.

~~~~~~~~~~

The "talent mind-set" is dangerous because it treats talent as something fixed. This mind-set causes people to believe that it just isn't worth trying hard because they -- or the people they lead -- are naturally smart or not, and therer is little if anything anyone can do about it.

A seires of studies by Columbia University's Carol Dweck shows that when people believe their IQ is unchangeable, "they become too focused on being smart and looking smart rather than on challenging themselves, stretching and expanding their skills, becoming smarter."

Dweck concludes that:

When people believe they are born with natural and unchangeable smarts, it causes them to learn less over time. They don't bother learning new things and improving old skills.

~~~~~~~~~~

Given all the evidence on the importance of systems, why do so many companies place so much emphasis on getting and keeping great people [or players] and so little on building and sustaining great systems?

A big part of that is Western countries, like the United States, glorify rugged individualism so much that we make a cognitive error. We forget that history, organizational goals, rewards are potent causes of what people and organizations do. We give too much credit to individual heroes when organizations [or teams] do things right and too much blame on individual scapegoats when things go wrong.

[In successful organizations] managers consciously fought their natural tendency to focus on who deserved credit and blame, and instead worked on strengthening the system.

A supervisor explained:

"There are two theories. One says 'there is a problem, let's fix it.' The other says 'we've got a problem, someone is screwing up, let's go beat them up.' To make improvement, we could no longer embrace the second theory. We had to use the first."

Your message should be constant

Went back through Nick Saban's 2005 book "How Good Do You Want to Be" last night and came across this passage:

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Let me let you in on a little secret about football coaches: Very few of us have the skill, experience, and education necessary to motivate a group of eighty men merely with a pregame speech. Contrary to what you have seen on television or in the movies or read in books, Knute Rockne was doing something out of the ordinary in rallying the troops with a few words before kickoff.

The truth is, if you have been sending the message all week, then two minutes before kickoff doesn't matter much.

At our level, if your players are not ready to play on their own, then there's something wrong. Of course, all coaches and leaders like to give a few reminders and will occasionally play to the emotion of the game, but sometimes saying little or nothing can be as powerful as saying a lot. It's the repetitive motivating message given daily over the course of the week that has a real effect -- not a few words before kickoff.

Parents will get their message about the dangers of underaged drinking through to their children better with constant reminders than with a speech the night before prom.

Your message should be constant. A well-developed message is more effective than one motivational talk.

The challenge of coaching on an interim basis

When Johnny Davis (pictured here) was named interim head coach of the Memphis Grizzlies late last week, he described his role this way:

"You just try to keep the team focused. Obviously, we're in transition, and there's uncertainty surrounding the team right now. The former coach is gone. The new head coach has not arrived. There's trepidation there, angst, there's uncertainty. All I'm trying to do is hold things together."

Last month, Spurs beat writer Mike Monroe wrote that "nothing in sports is more difficult than turning around the mentality that infests losing situations that have become chronic. Little wonder that few interim coaches end up getting the job on a permanent basis."

As quarterback father-son duo Archie and Peyton Manning write in their book "Manning," "interim coaches are the equivalent of substitute teachers, unlikely to get the allegiance they deserve." [Interestingly, between 1960-December 2004, interim NFL coaches were 16-43 in their debut games.]

According to Alvin Gentry, who served as interim head coach in Miami and Detroit:

"It's a tough life. Interims are coaching teams that failed to live up to expectations. They have only a limited amount of time to audition for the permanent job, fully flesh out their own philosophy and make changes in strategy and style. Interims can also face authority and communication issues, since players don't expect them to be around long-term."

As this article points out, one challenge is that "an interim coach doesn't have much time to implement his own philosophy and style. The players are accustomed to the system of the previous coach, who used training camp, preseason and regular season games to establish his own approach. It's hard to make radical changes during the season, with a tight game schedule and few opportunities to practice. What an interim coach can do is attempt to communicate with and motivate the players."

Says DEN coach George Karl:

"The toughest thing is you'd like to try to make some changes and try to do some different things. Time just won't allow you to do that. I don't think you ever get your system in place until the next year. You move in that direction, but you don't philosophically get your stuff completely in until your training camp next year."

The Cowboys played the 49ers about a month after SF had promoted Mike Singletary to interim head coach. Before the game, Cowboys head coach Wade Phillips talked about how "for interim coaches, motivating players is the basic challenge."

"It's a tough situation when you go in as an interim, because a lot of things are already in place. First off - and this is really important - you have to get the players to play for you," Phillips said. "That's a lot harder than it sounds. There are some technical things you can do to get better. But once (a team) has put in all the hours of training camp and all the things that are done in the offseason, there isn't a whole lot of impact that you can make."

In 1998, June Jones stepped into the interim role as head coach of the Chargers, going 3-7 with the team.

"It's always hard for whoever is named (interim head coach) because his loyalty has been to that person who was just fired so sometimes it's hard to step in," said Jones, who now coaches at SMU after nine seasons at Hawaii. "We changed practice times and started practicing in the morning and did some things like that differently. You can change up the routine but the main thing is you try to find different ways to put the players in more of a leadership role, to try to get them to take ownership of the team."

Players want to be coached and they want to get better

The Cleveland paper had a good Q&A with former Bucks GM and current Warriors assistant Larry Harris recently.

Among the questions he was asked was how being on the bench differs from working in management for 20 years:

"[As an assistant] you get a chance to see [the players] from a different viewpoint -- from the coaching side. It's really helped me in my evaluation. Sometimes when you sit upstairs or are observing from a distance, you don't get some of the nuances of what's going on within the team. It really becomes a lot clearer for me now that I've been on the floor.

Being in management, the biggest thing is patience. One thing is, the players do want to be coached, the players do want to get better. Our job is, more than anything else, whether you're in management or coaching, it's all about communication. If we can find out what their roles are, we can eventually get them to maximize their effort on the floor which gives us a chance to win every game."

The media has a job to do, just like you

A few years ago, a friend emailed me a story from the Cincinnati paper about Bengals coach Marvin Lewis' relationship with the news media.

The writer described the different approaches various coaches have in working with the press:

Some coaches play the media like a Gibson Les Paul. (See: Kelly, Brian.) Some coaches use their media sessions like couch trips. (See: Huggins, Bob, and Piniella, Lou.) Some use them to send messages to their players. Jack McKeon did that. Marvin Lewis considers dealing with the media en masse a waste of time, like trying to teach Spanish to an English muffin. Fair enough. But dealing with us dull-normal media dopes is part of the job description. Why not make the best of it?

Clearly, the relationship between coaches and the sports media has evolved over the years. In his book "You're Missin' a Great Game," Whitey Herzog, who played in the '50s and '60s, described his former manager Casey Stengel's philosophy on working with reporters:

"He would say 'Give 'em your own story, 'cause if you don't, they're just gonna go ahead and make up their own, and what good'll that do ya?' Then he'd reel off some more whoppers. Then there was his other motto for dealing with the press: 'When they ask you a question,' he said, 'answer it and just keep on talkin'. That way they can't ask you another one.'"

In his 46 years as an NBA player and coach, Warriors coach Don Nelson has seen the evolution first hand.

Recently, he voiced his disappointment about not being able to be as candid when talking to reporters as he was in the past:

"I tell you what's been disappointing. That I can't be myself anymore. That I have to be careful what I say because everybody reads so much into whatever it is I try to be honest about that I can't even talk about things that I used to. I used to be very free with the media. Very open, free and honest, and I'm not allowed to do that anymore. That's probably the worst thing that's happened."

Legendary college baseball coach Gordie Gillespie, who's led teams to four NAIA National Championships, has a healthy perspective on dealing with the press, one that I agree with:

"The media has a job to do, just like you. Try to make their job easier by your cooperation."

At last year's Super Bowl, when asked about his approach to interacting with reporters, Patriots coach Bill Belichick said he tries "to answer the questions in a forthright way."

In the mid-1990s, the American Football Coaches Association published a book titled "Football Coaching Strategies." In it is a section on "the coach and public relations."

"When dealing with the press, [the coach] should tell the truth, or say nothing. To mislead the press is neither ethical nor sensible. Most [reporters] are interested in sports and want to portray sports in a positive sense, and very often a coach can give them information that can help them do this. On the other hand, the coach has no right to expect [reporters] to write exactly as the coach sees it."

I've always admired Phil Jackson's relationship with the news media. As this article from 2007 describes, "[Coach] Jackson has a penchant for brutal honesty and a zest for tweaking his players through the news media."

He has derided Lakers center Kwame Brown for having “butterfingers,” dubbed forward Vladimir Radmanovic “a space cadet” and generally bemoaned his players’ lack of interest in reading by suggesting they would rather “play video games and watch porn movies.”

Said Coach Jackson: “I think the best policy is honesty. When you’re not honest, I think you run into Bush-itis."

I've read where former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer does seminars for coaches and players on dealing with the press. As Fleischer puts it:

"The sports press has become just as aggressive as the political press. My job is to help the coaches and the players use mental discipline, think through and to answer those questions accurately and honestly, but you don't have to stir the pot."

Rick Pitino wrote in his book, "Success is a Choice," that dealing with the press is "one of the most difficult parts" of his job. Sometimes, on the occasion when a reporter has written something "wrong or unfair" about him or his team, Coach Pitino will call the writer.

"Maybe there's some sense of truth [to the story]. Maybe it's the result of some sort of misunderstanding. But the only way to find out is to communicate with that person. Otherwise it all gets complicated. You see so much of that: He said this, she said that, then he said something else. Around and around it goes; and where it ends, nobody knows. Only that it's never good. The way to correct this? Pick up the phone. Communicate."

The late George Young (pictured above), the former GM for the NY Giants and 5-time NFL Executive of the Year, wrote extensively about dealing with the media in the book "Football: Rising to the Challenge."

Young's audience for the passage was college players moving to the pros, but his advice has relevance for coaches, as well.

Here's an excerpt from the book:

For a professional athlete, preparation is a crucial element of successful performance in any activity. Dealing with the press is no exception. Players should recognize that dealing with the media is part of being a professional athlete, and knowing how to react to the media before actually being hit with questions would serve them well.

Rule number one is to never criticize another player in the league, your coach, your team, or your teammates. The secret to avoid these mistakes is not to let the media to put you in a position where it would be easy to make inappropriate comments.

A player has to develop the ability to say, "No, I don't want to answer that question." You should be polite. You should be fairly accessible, but you don't have to answer every question. Remember to take your time. Think -- and answer only the questions you feel comfortable answering.

You can talk about yourself. Talk about your performance. Focus on your job, but don't be critical of other people publicly. You can be accessible, but don't let them get you into issues that are internal to the team. Your dealings with the media should center on your job and only your job. Once something is in print, you can't take it back.

There are a whole host of things that I decided firmly in advance to never discuss with the media. When they'd ask me about these issues, I'd laugh and say, "You know I won't answer that." Most of the time, the media would say they were just testing me or that they at least had to try to ask the question.

Follow this strategy and, after awhile, the media will understand you and your limits, and know what they can ask you and what they can't. Once you get to that point, your relationship with the media should be fine.